How to make your next PR email campaign accessible for everyone

This is a guest post from Elliot Ross, Email Evangelist at Taxi for Email – a SparkPost company.

Did you know that for every five people who receive your email four won’t even open it?

That’s the reality of email open rates, but it’s not all bad news. Getting consumers to actually open emails has always been a challenge for email marketers, but there are two ways of looking at it: On the flip side, given that there are around 15 trillion commercial emails sent each year, there are still a lot of emails which are being read.

The big question for marketers is inevitably: How can open rates be improved?

The answer is by ensuring emails are accessible for everyone.

Why do consumers ignore emails?

There are many reasons why branded emails remain untouched – after all, the average person receives over 100 emails a day, and that’s not even counting work emails. For some though, the reason the email has been left unopened is not because they didn’t want to read it, but rather that they can’t actually read or understand the email in the first place.

As email marketers,we need to ensure that our messages can be read by anyone who wants to access them. According to the World Health Organisation, 2.2 billion people globally have a near or distance-based vision impairment. In addition, have you considered the 3.6 billion internet users across the planet for whom English is not their primary language?

Emails need to be easy to read and understandable for everyone, regardless of disability or language. That is why accessibility considerations should be central to the entire email creation process.

Adhering to basic accessibility guidelines for the creation of email also has the added benefit of ensuring that the marketing messages don’t end up being overly complex. Which in turn could also have a positive impact on open and interaction rates.

Meanwhile creating emails in different languages should also not be seen as a nice-to-have for marketers. If you are a brand with a global footprint or global ambitions, multi-language emails are a must!

Developing an accessibility mindset

This process is about marrying company branding guidelines with a set of basic rules to deliver accessible and effective emails.

In some instances it might mean tweaking design elements but in my opinion the benefits of higher open rates significantly outweigh the cons of potentially slightly diverting from brand design rules.

Take point size, for example. It could be that your business has an established type point size which it may have stuck with for decades. However, if that point size is less than 14 pt when it comes to email marketing you may have a problem.

Text needs to be large enough so that everyone can read it. If your readers are squinting, zooming in or – even worse – popping off to get reading glasses, you may have already lost their attention and any chance of any interaction will be gone. So stick to a font size of at least 14pt, and think about line height so readers have enough space between lines to read clearly.

Ask yourself too, is your company typeface easy to read? Before you send out emails, test the font to see what it looks like and how legible it is on different screen sizes and devices (find out, for example, what percentage of your target audience reads your emails on mobile and, if appropriate, optimise emails for smaller screens). Simple, classic fonts work best. There is a reason why some typefaces are more widely used than others…

The dangers of embedded images

For many marketers the jury is out on the effectiveness of embedding GIFs and videos into email newsletters.

From an accessibility perspective there is a very good case for not using GIFs at all. Firstly, not all your readers will see them, as background images and GIFs aren’t fully supported in Outlook. Further, a flashy GIF with fast-moving frames will not only annoy some of your readers, but it can actually trigger seizures in people who suffer from photosensitivity.

If you are insistent that including GIFs will raise engagement levels then make sure you include ALT text to provide context. This helps readers with visual impairments understand the message of the image or GIF.

Other things to bear in mind include ensuring that links are clear and underlined – if you just colour them they could be overlooked by people with colour blindness or low-vision – and breaking up text with clear, bold subheads. If you have specific title, header, and subheader elements in your template screen readers can identify these are different areas of the email and treat them so rather than adding it all into a text field.

Offering multi-language emails

Creating email newsletters in different languages is something that many marketers should be aspiring to. Once you have optimised a newsletter to the point that it works effectively in one language, if you are a global company, explore localisation next.

By offering multi-language emails, people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to read newsletters can receive and engage with them. At the same time, even people who speak English as a second language would have to make less effort to read their emails which might make them more inclined to open the email in the first place.

There are simple ways to translate content using online tools like Google Translate. Yet these are only partially effective and may end up creating content that is confusing to readers and possibly damaging to your brand.

At the other end of the scale you could invest in local translators, though this may create cost and efficiency issues. Employing 20 different staff to translate a newspaper into their local language is both expensive and time consuming.

Images need to be optimised so that they work in local markets. An obvious short-cut is to make the images of people you use as diverse as possible with different ages, ethnicities and genders, etc. That said, nothing beats offering bespoke images on a market-by-market basis. Visuals should reflect the real world and therefore help to make the newsletter as customer-centric as possible.

Email continues to be the leading customer communication tool for marketers

No other platform can compete with email’s direct, dynamic, interactive approach. Ensuring emails are accessible to as many people as possible is not only vital from a social perspective, but if it can also help improve overall read rates then it’s a win-win solution.

Savvy marketers and PRs are all too aware their customers receive a lot of emails and only have a limited amount of time each day to consume content, and so the pressure is on to work as hard as possible to make their branded emails stand out, for everyone.

For more on effective email strategies from Taxi for Email’s Elliot Ross, check out this previous guest post How to build strong foundations for a successful email campaign. 

Want to find the right audience for your next email campaign? Book a demo of the Vuelio Media Database – more information here.