Who Is Téa Liarokapi
Téa Liarokapi is a Senior Content Writer for Moosend, an email marketing and marketing automation platform, and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas - and cats - to play with.
Email marketing is one of the staples of day-to-day communication between brands and customers. The number of email users in 2023 is a staggering 4.37 billion, making it one of the most extensively used communication channels in this day and age:
Brands that do not come up with email design that caters to accessibility factors could very well alienate a segment of their customers and impact their audience in a very negative way. This, in turn, is bound to impact email and overall business performance.
You’ll need to cater to your entire audience’s needs as an email marketer, the same way you cater to their needs when using inclusive design for your website.
Table of Contents
What Can Email Accessibility Do for Your Brand?
Brands that don’t create accessible email marketing campaigns could be branded as inconsiderate or ignorant. This is not something any brand wants, especially in the day and age of social justice.
Not to mention the fact that it could create a substantial gap between your marketing budget and your expected ROI.
Understanding your audience’s pain points has a lot more to do with looking into their individual needs and a lot less to do with telling them how your product will solve their problems.
Building accessible email marketing campaigns is a lot like segmenting your list and personalizing your marketing message. By using accessibility as a guiding principle, you can speak to your separate audiences’ needs.
Your subscribers are not simple names and email addresses, after all. They’re users with individual behavioral needs and wants. Accessible emails improve your reach and your engagement. Using email newsletter software that can give you all the necessary information on your potential customers and enable you to fully customize pre-existing email templates or create one from scratch.
Accessible design can help you stand out. If your competitors are using it already, you ought to do it better. If not, you will need to start implementing it. This will give you some extra leverage, seeing as it will improve users’ content experience as a whole.
Of course, to achieve all of the above, you need to know the steps you’ll need to take.
Accessible Email Content: Three Best Practices to Consider
- Use Appropriate Color Contrast
- Cater To Non-neurotypical Users
- Automate Simple Tasks
- Email Accessibility: The Honorable Tips
When creating an email marketing campaign, you should be aware of the percentage of users that need accessible content and how you can accommodate them. Let’s discuss the types of content you should include in your next accessible email marketing campaign.
1. Use Appropriate Color Contrast
Do you know what type of vision disabilities there are and how to better cater to them? Vision disabilities can span from photophobia to low vision, or even color blindness.
To cater to users with visual impairments, make sure to create and use appropriate color contrast. It’s not easy to distinguish between the low-contrasting background color and the font color for people with visual impairments.
A large font and a black-and-white combination is your safest bet in that case, along with comprehensive alt-text and microcopy instead of color-coding:
Don’t forget to use a bold font with a readable font size and avoid using red to highlight an error, or green to show the right choice.
2. Cater To Non-neurotypical Users
Non-neurotypical users could span from people with conditions like epilepsy to people with ADHD. Create accessible emails for maximum customer engagement by using H1 and H2 tags and breaking down your content to smaller pieces.
Neurotypical users will find your content more digestible that way, whereas non-neurotypical users will manage to focus and understand more easily.
Headers also help your content stand out by creating a logical order for both the readers themselves and those who use screen readers to navigate your content.
Lastly, ensure that your content contains GIFs or videos that are suitable for all audiences. Some users could have an issue with strobe lights or quickly changing images.
3. Automate Simple Tasks
Automating for email accessibility might sound like something impossible to achieve, but it really is not. It’s all about where you want to focus.
There are many tools that can help you create and curate emails that will have the perfect color contrast and accessible design, but is that all there is when it comes to email accessibility?
Cater to users with the use of AI and machine learning that will enable you to study your customer personas and tailor marketing messages that correspond with recipients on a one-on-one basis.
Accessibility is the core of email design, and AI tools will allow you to automate and adjust accordingly, spending less time and resources on your next steps. For example, you can create an automated email that will be triggered when a user fails to click on your CTA button.
This email could be a questionnaire or a survey to gather data on what went wrong. Include questions around accessible design and you’ll be able to understand which segment didn’t click and why.
Email Accessibility: The Honorable Tips
Accessible email content has come a long way, and marketers tend to cater to wider audiences with each passing day. Here are some honorable tips that could work for your prospects:
- Don’t overwhelm users with a variety of colors and information, no matter the contrast
- Use keyboard navigation for users who experience physical limitations
- Use link text to allow screen readers to understand what your link is about
- Write clear instructions and step-by-step guides
A brand being up for the challenge of accessible email marketing makes the user feel like they’re “part of the family”, which can work wonders for your brand, your exposure, and your revenue.
The Takeaway
Never take your audiences for granted, and don’t think that accessible email design is optional in 2023. It’s actually quite the opposite.
If you’re not sure about the best way to approach the matter, don’t hesitate to consult Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and allow experts to help you figure out what the best way to cater to your audience is.
By implementing the tactics above, you’re sure to complete a very important first step towards creating accessible email marketing campaigns that are full of meaning.
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