How Email Design Can Actively Influence the Ecommerce Customer Journey

Email design plays a crucial role in persuading customers to click and convert, extending beyond just copywriting.

While discussions about persuasion in email messages often focus on copywriting, it’s important to recognize that email design can also play a significant role in encouraging customers to take action.

Consider the last time you tried to convince a friend or family member to do something. Chances are, you didn’t rely solely on a written note with logical arguments. Instead, you might have adjusted your tone, waited for the right moment, or set the stage differently. Similarly, effective email design can complement your copywriting efforts and enhance conversion rates.

The conventional advice emphasizes making emails easily scannable. However, in a landscape where email opens primarily occur on mobile devices, with shrinking attention spans, skimmability alone isn’t enough. Recent statistics show that average email read times have decreased, emphasizing the need for concise and impactful design.

While making emails skimmable is a common design approach, it doesn’t guarantee action. This is where persuasive design comes into play. It can emphasize key features, direct attention to critical information, and facilitate clicks, ultimately keeping readers engaged and increasing the likelihood of them exploring your offers.

Email designers can employ overt and covert tactics to persuade recipients. Overt persuasive design employs explicit elements like images, animations, and layouts to draw attention to important content such as calls to action, price changes, and offers. It relies on the principle of cognitive ease, making it easy for readers to absorb information. Covert persuasive design uses subtler visual cues to guide readers’ attention. This method taps into psychological principles to motivate readers to take action.

Combining both overt and covert persuasive design concepts within a single email can effectively reach different types of readers: those who need a gentle nudge and those who require more information and motivation.

Here are some persuasive design tactics that leverage cognitive biases to influence customers:

1. The Principle of Least Effort: This concept suggests that people prefer the path of least resistance. Design can use visual cues to guide readers to the content they need, making it easier for them to act. Subtle, covert design cues can be more effective than overt ones.
2. Persuasion Tactics: Anchoring and Visual Cues: Anchoring relies on the first piece of information offered to influence decisions. Design can incorporate persuasive elements to highlight anchored text, making it more appealing and memorable.
3. Persuasion Tactic: Cognitive Ease: Cognitive ease measures how easily our brains process information associated with a concept or cue. Design can use familiar visual cues, such as arrows, to direct attention and convey importance.
4. Persuasion Tactic: Hick’s Law / the Paradox of Choice: Hick’s Law states that more options can lead to decision paralysis. Design should help readers quickly find key information, especially in emails with multiple CTAs and content modules.
5. Persuasion Tactic: The von Restorff Effect: This principle suggests that items that stand out are more likely to be remembered. Design can apply this to call-to-action buttons, making them easy to find and read.
6. Persuasion Tactic: Rule of 3: People tend to remember things in sets of three. Designing emails with a manageable number of choices helps avoid overwhelming readers.

Incorporating these design principles can make your emails more persuasive and conversion-focused. However, it’s essential to test different designs to determine what works best for your audience and objectives before making significant changes. Effective email design is more than basic aesthetics; it’s about removing barriers that hinder conversion.