Marketers are under constant pressure to reach out to more potential customers as they want their brands to stay ahead in the rising competition of the marketing industry driven by digitization. Email marketing is the most impactful form of digital marketing and can offer marketers a huge relief. But unfortunately, not many marketers understand how to optimize email accessibility according to industry best practices to benefit the organization’s marketing goal. Designing an email is not just about making it pretty, but about making it more functional and improving accessibility for all your intended audiences.
If you are looking forward to a successful digital marketing turnout, you need to create an inclusive design for all your emails. An email that has the potential to include more customers irrespective of their physical, visual, and cognitive disabilities will automatically increase your user, subscriber, and customer diversity. Email accessibility ensures people who use assistive technologies don’t miss out on crucial information in their emails. This method of adding an inclusive design to understand user diversity enables the marketing team to address different capabilities, needs, and aspirations. To engage and build emotional connections with every one of your subscribers, you need to provide them with easy access to your digital content.
You can optimize your email accessibility by putting yourself in the position of different categories of customers. This will ensure all your target email receivers understand the email content precisely the way you intended to explain it. Email accessibility enables customers with visual, auditory, cognitive, mobility, etc. to access email content easily. Not being able to optimize your email for accessibility makes you miss out on many potential customers as your marketers cannot communicate with them effectively.
To help you get a better idea of how to make your email accessible, here is a list of some industry best practice guidelines to implement in emails for inclusive design:
Add captions and transcripts to your videos
It’s important to remember that members of your audience may experience visual and auditory impairments. Thus you must integrate codes that will enable the screen reader to narrate the video for the end user.
Include ALT tags for your images
ALT tags for images are essential for screen readers and if the user has their image display settings off or with a weak internet connection. If you fail to add ALT tags, your emails’ images might not always be visible to your subscribers.
If your image contains essential information and is not visible or readable by screen readers, then your entire email marketing effort will go to waste. Wherever you have a <IMG> tag in your email code, make sure to set the ALT tag and ensure that the text matches the text on the image. Simultaneously, if you have empty ALT tags, make sure that there isn’t any text on the image. Otherwise, the screen reader will read out the URL of the image, disrupting the email content. You can use different kinds of tools available to test your alt text.
Add language code to your <HTML>
Because some of your target audience might be using screen readers to read emails, you should also add language codes according to the marketing region. To make sure that the pronunciation is correct, you will need to add a simple snippet of code that specifies your email’s language to let screen readers know what language your email is written in. Localization setup within your ESP helps you populate the language code dynamically.
Balance text with images
A continuous flow of text in an email can get tedious to read, and at the same time, using just images in your email might not be very impactful. Instead, try breaking up long chunks of content with images to keep your readers engaged and make it flow more smoothly.
Add an engaging subject line
Email allows you to generate an 80-character preview of your email. You should utilize this power of email creation to grab readers’ attention and use this subject line as a teaser to your email to increase the open rate. Also, forgetting to add the subject line might push the screen reader to read aloud a long line of code.
Use semantic elements to structure your content
You should use semantic elements <H> tag and <P> tag to highlight content hierarchy. This makes your email easier to navigate and helps the screen reader emphasize the headlines and not confuse them with sub-headers and paragraphs. Ensuring headline-worthy copies are enclosed within <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> helps you create clear email body content.
Use impactful and clear hyperlinks
The age-old practice of writing “Click Here” does not create the same desired interest to click on it. With the increasing need to personalize and be creative in your emails, if you want to increase the click rate of the links you are adding to your email content, you need to use impactful and clear hyperlinks. Besides adding hover effects to it, you also need to make the hyperlinks clear, easily visible, and with a descriptive copy that creates the desire to click on them.
Moreover, a descriptive copy enables the screen reader to read out what the link is all about, which otherwise will just read aloud “Click Here.” You can use the full title of the destination page or only a brief, impactful copy, which will help the receiver decide if they want to engage further. And don’t forget to make the link text bold.
Optimize for various devices
By optimizing your email content for every kind of device, your email gets correctly displayed no matter if the reader uses a desktop or smartphone. This process of creating design responsive emails helps the content display optimally.
By not optimizing your email accessibility, you ignore many audiences who can become your customers by sending the wrong kind of emails, and your email marketing campaign can be illegal. Making emails accessible improves your email marketing by reaching a segment of the audience that most organizations often forget to target.
If you need professional assistance with email accessibility and implementing the current industry best practices to grow your audience reach and engagement then, we are here for you – all you need is to contact us or simply say “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com. Or you can DM us on Twitter, or LinkedIn.
