How to Choose the Best Colour Schemes for Email Marketing

What do psychologists have in common with marketers? Well… a lot, actually. Both look at human behavior to help predict the actions that a person might take. One of the ways marketers have hacked psychology is through colour theory. In the following article, we’ll explore how colour theory can help you select the best colour schemes for email marketing.

How to Pick the Best Colors for Your Emails

A 2014 study found that the color of a logo impacted how consumers responded to brands. Some colors made brands seem relatable while others made the brands seem modern or fun. Have you ever judged a brand simply by its logo? Then you’re already familiar with this concept!

Years of psychological experiments have proven that beyond being aesthetically pleasing, colors have an effect on our brains, especially our emotional responses. Color psychology explores this fact by researching how color influences human behavior and decision-making. Implementing color psychology in email marketing means paying attention to how different colors can impact the way buyers perceive a brand or marketing campaign.

Even though colors are very important in how a business is perceived, about 65% of small business owners admitted that they chose their logo colors based on personal taste and preference. While a complete re-brand might be out of the question, you can still be strategic about the colors you are working with to create more engaging email marketing.

We won’t dig into the fundamentals of color theory here, but let’s go over how to start incorporating it into your email marketing strategy right away.

How to Pick the Best Colors for Your Emails

Optimizing colors for your emails all comes back to your audience – no surprise there! When thinking about a color scheme, you’re not dissecting every pixel in your campaigns. Instead, color psychology in email marketing allows you to think more strategically about your call-to-actions (CTAs) and user experience (UX).

First, you’ll want to consider who you’re talking to. If your market is high-earning, older individuals, sticking with a more subdued, sophisticated palette makes sense. If your target audience is trend-focused, young shoppers then something in today’s trending colors would fit perfectly for them.

Now that you know your audience, it’s time to think about the goal of your email campaign. Color plays an important role in how your customers will engage. Do you have a big CTA that is getting all the attention, are you encouraging the reader to browse products within the email, or are you presenting information with a CTA at the end? The ultimate goal will change your strategy.

Campaigns that need a strong call-to-action at the top could use bright, powerful colors like red or orange. If you’re trying to draw the reader’s eye down the email, using subtle hues at the top with bolder colors at the fold will draw users’ eyes down and encourage them to scroll up.

With a goal in mind, now you can explore the color options. Do you need an attention-grabbing color like red for the buttons or do you want to come off calm and friendly with a shade of blue or yellow?

How to Choose the Best Color Schemes for Email Marketing

Color Considerations

Certain colors are known to elicit specific emotions. Narrowing down which ones to use will depend on your audience, but can be essential to building your brand relationship with your customers. Color meanings can shift between cultures and gender, so researching color meanings for your target market is a good start.

In western culture, we often see these common colors associated with these moods:

Red

Red is energizing and stimulating. It’s attention-grabbing, our eyes are drawn to it. Red literally stimulates our brains. Studies have shown that red impacts the nervous system more than any other color; when people look at red their blood pressure rises. Red communicates power, assertiveness, strength, and warmth.

Orange

This color represents positivity, warmth, and happiness. It is also often associated with optimism and trust. You’ll see this color a lot in sports team logos and kids’ games because it naturally elicits a positive attitude. It is also often used to represent a deal, so it could be incorporated when the email is a discount or offer.

Yellow

Be careful with yellow. Although it’s often used to represent fun and playfulness, too much of it or the wrong shade can be off-putting. You don’t want someone running from your campaigns because of a too yellow background! If your team isn’t staffed with a design pro, here’s one tool that can help you choose or use one of the many color palette generators available.

Green

It represents nature, growth, serenity, fertility, and prosperity. Green is calming for our brains. It brings a sense of peace and restoration. However, it also bring a sense of urgency when it comes to making decisions. When used in email campaigns, this color can become a powerful tool for discounts, event invites, and limited product offerings.

Purple

This color elicits a sense of calm and luxury. It is also often tied with spirituality and femininity. Purple is a rare color in nature, which is what gives it the sense of wealth and luxury. It has also been found to stimulate the part of the brain responsible for problem-solving and creativity.

Blue

Blue is most commonly associated with calm and trust. It also gives a sense of intelligence, communication, trust, efficiency, serenity, duty, logic, coolness and reflection. You’ll notice this color the most in brand logos, especially brands that want to seem friendly and trustworthy like Meta (formally Facebook), IKEA, PayPal, and many, many others.

Black

This is the color most commonly associated with elegance, luxury, refinement, power, and stability. Dress codes for luxury events usually call for black attire. However, it can also be associated with darkness and fear like on Halloween or in scary movies.

White

This color is clean and simple — think of crisp white linen or a blank white page. It can give feelings of a fresh start or a clean slate. It represents purity, simplicity, coolness, sophistication, and new beginnings.

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Key Takeaways

With a little creative thinking, you can start working color psychology into your email best practices right away. The goal is finding a few colors that work well for key elements of your marketing, such as orange for announcements or blue for buttons.

You can start using color psychology in your emails right away by:

• Being mindful of how you want a reader’s eyes to travel through the email.

• Focus on the CTAs or where you want the customer’s eye to go first.

• Use colors that are in or compliment the brand palette to tie everything together.

Don’t forget to A/B test! The best way to know if a new design element is working or not is to A/B test it against your regular template. If you would like to get started with email marketing, then contact the V5 Digital Team today.

This article was sourced from our Partners at SharpSpring. With a background in writing, tech support, product training, and community management at SharpSpring, Harryson Pointdujour has years of experience solving problems first-hand and advocating on behalf of SharpSpring’s partners. Most recently, Harryson joined the Product Marketing team to develop high-quality resources and marketing materials that help agencies and SMBs scale.

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10 Ways to meet 2022 Digital Marketing trends using your Email Signature

In the rapidly-evolving world of digital marketing, it’s essential that you and your business are up to speed with the latest digital marketing trends if you’re going to succeed.

With this in mind, we’ve looked around the digital marketing landscape to see which trends you can easily – and cost-effectively – take advantage of simply using your business email signature to ensure audience engagement and brand success in 2022.

1. Optimize for mobile to maximize engagement

With more than half of website traffic coming from mobile devices, as Pamela Bump of Hubspot highlights in The Marketing Trends of 2022, it’s essential that your website offers a fast, fully mobile-optimized user experience.

But it’s not just your website that needs to be optimized for mobile in 2022. With up to 81% of business email opened on mobile devices it’s essential that your branded email signature displays correctly on mobile. You can’t take this for granted so make sure you choose email signature software that automatically ensures your signature is mobile optimized and displays correctly every time on every device. What’s more, a clear clickable link in your mobile optimized email signature is a great way to drive traffic to your mobile-optimized website! Need help optimizing your email signature for mobile? Read our blog on how to make your email signature mobile-friendly.

2. Showcase your brand’s social responsibility

The modern consumer cares about social responsibility – it’s that simple. In their 2022 Global Marketing Trends, Deloitte highlights the need for ‘Authentically Inclusive Marketing’ with their survey showing that ‘57% of consumers are more loyal to brands that commit to addressing social inequalities in their actions’. These actions range from hiring and retention policies to using diverse suppliers and reflecting audience diversity across marketing messaging.

Email signatures offer a great opportunity to showcase your brand’s social responsibility and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) commitments, whether through email signature marketing banners, an icon promoting a specific company initiative so that recipients can click through for more details, or statements in your email signature disclaimer outlining your company’s environmental and DEI policies. The sheer number of emails sent ensures that email signatures are a highly effective way of communicating your brand’s social responsibility commitments.

3. Drive viewers to your short-form video

Within Hubspot’s Marketing Trends of 2022, their survey shows that short-form content is the second most effective trend marketers are currently leveraging and, in 2022, 89% of global marketers are planning to continue investing in it or increase their investment. Why? Because engaging short-form video gets to the point, it’s quicker to create and caters to the shorter attention span.

Want to promote your new videos to a wide audience cost-effectively? The interactive call-to-action ‘Watch our 1-minute video‘ is easy to incorporate into your business signature or email banner to get recipients clicking through to view your latest video content.

4. Keep remote workers engaged and on-brand

As Mateuz Makosiewicz at Ahrefs observes in 8 Digital Marketing Trends That Will Continue in 2022 ‘remote work is here to stay’ as, two years into the pandemic, it appears that the transition to home offices has been mostly successful. The post features a Stanford survey showing that working from home has increased productivity by 13% as well as the benefits of increased employee loyalty, better mental health and obviously less time and cost commuting.

How do email signatures fit into the Work From Home trend? Centrally-controlled, consistent company email signatures can help your remote workforce present a unified brand to the world whilst keeping your marketing cost-effective and your service levels high. Most importantly, they give you an effective internal marketing tool to keep all your remote employees engaged with your brand. It’s a key reason to have great email signatures in 2022 and you can find out how to really make them work in our dedicated blogpost ‘7 ways your email signatures can meet the challenges of remote working’.

5. Secure attendees for high quality virtual events

The current climate means that companies will continue to host virtual events – but a key 2022 marketing trend is that quality will have to improve. Webinars and virtual conferences need to offer attendees more than a narrated slideshow, so the emphasis is on professional production values. Your email signature might not be able to improve your creativity but, if you’re going to invest in improved design and production, they’re a great wide-reaching way to promote your upcoming virtual event with a clear ‘Book your place’ call to action.

6. Automate to increase efficiency and insights

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic for global marketers eager to automate how they engage audiences, efficiently answer customer enquiries and solve problems. Hubspot’s Marketing Trends of 2022 identifies key areas spanning everything from predictive marketing and lead scoring to chatbots and content creation.

How do email signatures fit into automation? By integrating seamlessly with your marketing automation and CRM systems, such as Salesforce. That way any recipient click-through from email signature and banner campaigns automatically feeds into your marketing automation to deliver extra customer insights and help further qualify leads. You can also use the information gathered by marketing automation tools to determine the banners applied to business emails (including those sent direct from your CRM system), ensuring that the target audience receives marketing messaging that best meets their interest and helps drive conversion.

7. Streamline social media channel selection

It’s tempting to keep adding new on-trend platforms to your social marketing mix but companies are increasingly realizing that by keeping their brands’ social media presence to 3-5 platforms they can effectively reach different audiences without overstretching their marketing management resources.

Prioritize the social platforms that achieve the best engagement amongst your target audience and cost-effectively repurpose content between them where possible. For a professional audience, LinkedIn continues to be a rising star in 2022 with rapidly growing users, engagement and new features.

The great thing about keeping your social media channels to between 3 and 5 is that this number of clickable icons can comfortably fit on your email signature, encouraging recipient engagement with your latest branded social content with every email your employees send.

8. Personalize customer experience with segmentation & targeting rules

Personalization is more important than ever in 2022 with 80% of consumers saying they are more likely to do business with a company that offers them a personalized experience than one that doesn’t!

So whilst you might think that email signatures are only personalized for the sender, the addition of an interactive marketing banner means that the recipient can directly engage with a marketing message that’s relevant to them. How can you make sure this approaches personalization? By choosing email signature software with advanced segmentation, targeting and scheduling rules so that the right recipient or recipient group receives the right email banner marketing message at the right time – and even based on their previous banner interaction – to maximize engagement.

Check out our email signature banners page to learn more about targeting, scheduling and automating email signature banner campaigns that will further personalise your business email and improve your customer experience.

9. Promote content that converts – blogs & case studies

Within a company’s content strategy an engaging blog can really generate ROI. A regularly updated blog with relevant consumer content helps your SEO, drives customer engagement and builds your brand – and it’s as effective in 2022 as it’s ever been. An email banner, or even just a call-to-action (CTA) in your signature, is an incredibly effective way to promote and drive traffic to your latest or most relevant blog post.

Case studies also continue to be a key content requirement for 2022, driving leads and creating brand credibility by showing in detail how customers benefit from your product or service, as well as showcasing the calibre of your client base. Easily promote them in your email signature banners, especially when featuring a key result or glowing testimonial quote. Make it easy for recipients to click through to see how your product or service delivered results.

The ‘Blog Booster’ and ‘The Client Case Study’ are just two of our 33 Great Email Signature Banner Examples to help you get the most from your email signature in 2022.

10. Take control of your key communication channel

As Forbes Council Member Krista Neher observes in Twelve Digital Marketing Trends For 2022 And How To Take Advantage Of Them, a simple 2022 digital marketing trend is for marketers to become more focused and aim to do fewer things better, in other words ‘less is more’. With so many digital marketing channels available it’s easy for marketers to spread their efforts and budgets too thin. As she points out, it’s ‘the foundations that still matter’ and marketers need to avoid the danger of being distracted by shiny new digital marketing tools.

So when it comes to focusing your efforts, it’s important to remember that email is still your business’s number 1, 1-to-1 communication channel (and you have complete control over it) so it’s worth exploring all the branding, promotional and analytical opportunities that email signatures, banner campaigns and reporting can offer.

Final thoughts…

2022 digital marketing trends offer plenty for you to take advantage of, whilst remembering to get the marketing fundamentals right. Your everyday business email might not seem to be the trendiest channel, but by adding professional email signatures and banner campaigns you can transform your everyday email to deliver exceptional engagement results and help your brand stay on top of digital marketing trends in 2022. To find out more about how email signatures can help build your brand in 2022, contact us today.

Sources / Credit to: Shanique Brophy | Marketing Executive at Rocketseed