Best Practices for Creating Guided Marketo Email Templates

Help your marketing team succeed with guided marketo emails 

Email marketing is an imperative aspect of a successful marketing strategy, and Marketo allows us to effectively connect with our audience through personalized, targeted emails. Just like Marketo Guided Landing Pages, Guided Emails are customizable and editable, providing an opportunity to create messages that resonate with your audience. This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide on best practices for creating Guided Marketo Emails.

Start with the Email Design Process

Designing an effective email begins with a clean and organized layout that ensures your message is clear and easily digestible. Be mindful of breaking up your content into short paragraphs and using bulleted lists where applicable to increase readability. The layout should also include a clear and compelling header, followed by a concise body text that directly conveys your message. The inclusion of a strong, action-oriented call to action (CTA) is paramount. The CTA should be visually prominent and its language should entice the reader to take the desired action, whether it’s visiting a website, making a purchase, or signing up for a service.

Visual consistency is another critical aspect of email design. Your email should align with your brand’s color scheme, typography, and overall aesthetic. This not only enhances recognition and trust among your audience but also contributes to a cohesive and professional look. Including relevant images or graphics can enhance engagement and understanding of your message, but remember to balance them with text to avoid overwhelming the reader or triggering spam filters. Additionally, ensure your email design is responsive and looks good across all devices, as a significant portion of emails are opened on mobile devices.

Modules and Editable Elements Keep emails on Brand

Incorporating modules into your Marketo email templates can significantly enhance their flexibility and functionality. Modules consist of pre-designed sections of content that can be mixed, matched, and reused across different email templates. This modular approach not only streamlines the email creation process but also ensures brand consistency and design coherence. For instance, you might have a module for your standard email header, another for a product feature block, and another for your typical footer. By using these modules, you can effortlessly build a variety of email layouts while still maintaining a unified brand aesthetic. Furthermore, modules can be personalized and tested in the same way as editable elements, enabling a data-driven and audience-centric email marketing strategy.

Marketo’s editable elements are a game-changer for creating dynamic and personalized email templates. These elements allow you to insert sections of content that can be easily tweaked or swapped out without disturbing the overall layout or design of your email. This flexibility means you can modify the content for different audiences or campaigns, ensuring that your messaging is always relevant and engaging.

Using editable elements in your Marketo email templates paves the way for A/B testing different content variations. You can experiment with different headers, calls-to-action, or even entirely different content sections, analyzing which versions yield the best engagement rates. This data-driven approach to email marketing allows for continual learning and optimization, ensuring that your emails are always improving and evolving in line with your audience’s preferences and behaviors.

Leveraging Animated GIFs in Emails

Animated GIFs can serve as an effective tool when looking to add a dynamic touch to your emails. These small, looping animations can capture the reader’s attention, help communicate complex ideas succinctly, and inject a sense of fun into your communications.

When using animated GIFs, it’s important to ensure they support rather than distract from your message. Choose or create animations that are relevant to your content, and don’t overload your email with too many GIFs that may make the message feel cluttered or cause slow load times.

Remember, not all email clients support animated GIFs. For clients that don’t, the first frame of the GIF is typically displayed as a static image. Therefore, make sure your first frame can stand alone in conveying your message or make sense in the context of your email.

Always optimize your GIFs for email. This means they should be small in file size to ensure they load quickly and don’t consume too much data for the recipient. Ideally, your GIFs should be no larger than 1MB.

Incorporating animated GIFs into your emails can make them more engaging and memorable, contributing to a better user experience and potentially leading to higher click-through rates.

Check out these GIF creators:

• https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker
• https://www.canva.com/create/gif-maker/
• https://www.kapwing.com/tools/make/gif

Personalize Your Messaging

Personalization goes beyond just addressing the recipient by name. It involves understanding your audience’s preferences and tailoring the email content to meet their needs. Marketo’s dynamic content feature allows for this level of personalization, changing the email content based on the recipient’s characteristics. This could be anything from their industry, job role, or previous interactions with your brand.

Craft a Compelling Subject Line

The subject line is the first thing your recipients see, so make it count. It should be engaging, relevant, and provide a clear idea of what the email is about. Avoid using all caps or excessive punctuation as these can trigger spam filters.

Engage with Call-to-Actions

Effective emails are not just informative but also prompt action. Whether you want the recipient to read a blog post, sign up for a webinar, or make a purchase, make sure your call-to-action (CTA) is clear, concise, and compelling. It’s also a good practice to make your CTAs buttons rather than links, as buttons are more noticeable and mobile-friendly.

Test, Test, and Test Again

Before you hit send, make sure to thoroughly test your email. This involves checking the email on different email clients and devices to ensure that the design is rendered correctly. It’s also vital to test your links, images, and CTAs to make sure everything is working as intended. Marketo’s Email Preview and Test Send features can be invaluable for this.

Use Analytics for Improvement

Finally, after your emails are sent out, use Marketo’s analytics to understand how they’re performing. These insights can help you identify what’s working, what isn’t, and how you can improve your future emails. For instance, if you notice that your emails have a high open rate but low click-through rate, you may want to reassess your email content or CTAs.

In Conclusion

Creating effective Guided Marketo Emails requires a combination of strategic planning, creative design, careful execution, and ongoing optimization. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your email marketing efforts are not only reaching your audience but also resonating with them, driving engagement, and ultimately, achieving your marketing objectives.

Creating effective Guided Marketo Emails requires a combination of strategic planning, creative design, careful execution, and ongoing optimization. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your email marketing efforts are not only reaching your audience but also resonating with them, driving engagement, and ultimately, achieving your marketing objectives.