The Visual Advantage: Leveraging Graphics in Email Marketing

With inboxes increasingly crowded and attention spans fleeting, compelling graphics are essential for resonating with audiences. Graphics make emails stand out and deliver key messages at a glance, allowing you to convey complex ideas efficiently while establishing branding and style. Today, discover how graphics are a cornerstone of email campaigns that consistently grab attention, spark interest, and convert.

What Are Email Graphics?

In simple words, graphics refer to elements that can be represented visually. In emails, they can include the following:

• Product images

• Charts and graphs

• Logos

• Background images

• Banner images

• Call-to-action buttons

• Infographics

• Images of people

In other instances, graphics can include dynamic or interactive content (such as rollovers or carousels), videos, and static or animated images (like GIFs).

Why Graphics Are Important

Graphics are more than colors, images, and drawings. They represent your company’s beliefs, values, and history, setting the brand’s unique style, identity, and tone. Today, most customers are more likely to interact with brands through the designs posted on social media platforms. In turn, your business can see long-term, positive growth.

However, graphics will only work when they’re relevant and captivating. Having a good design shows your professionalism and commitment to your business, which increases conversions. When you instill this professional image in your customers, they will trust your business and be more comfortable interacting with you.

Why You Need Email Graphics

Draws Customers’ Attention

Now, an average person spends less than 15 seconds reading an email. Using long sentences or dull images will scare customers away. If you want to avoid that, add visuals! That will capture their attention and maintain it long enough for them to finish reading your email — breaking the 15-second habit.

Makes the Emails Scannable

In addition, only 80% of people scan emails. Due to today’s lifestyle, your audience will not give their undivided attention to emails they receive. In other words, they only look for the main message before deciding whether to take action. Email graphics can easily section out content, making it easier to scan.

In other cases, they provide a pictorial representation of the content, giving customers an overview of the email’s message by looking at the graphics.

Instills a Personalized Feeling

In addition to personalizing email copy, preheaders, and subject lines, you shouldn’t forget to tailor the graphics. For instance, you can include dynamic content to present targeted content to different segments without creating multiple emails.

Boosts Overall Engagement

Graphics are also akin to increased engagement. Because they’re compelling, graphics encourage customers to interact with your emails and take action. In fact, 66% of brands saw increased engagement after incorporating interactive content in their emails.

Makes You Entirely Stand Out

According to Tempafly’s report, the average office worker receives 121 emails daily. Due to that sheer number, getting people to read your email is getting harder. To make your emails stand out, you’ll have to make them visually appealing. Add a well-designed logo, infographic, or product image to help your message stand out.

Delivers the Messages Faster

Incorporating email graphics is crucial in conveying your message more efficiently and quickly. That allows you to convey complex information more efficiently — for instance, using charts instead of a paragraph explaining recent data or surveys.

Things to Look Out For

Pageweight

Just like building a webpage, the lighter your email is, the more performant it will be. If it takes too long to load because of all the images, that will impact your users' engagement rates (Remember - the average user will only spend 10-12 seconds reading an email!).

Image Blocking

Some email providers filter out images to protect users from malware or offensive content - so make sure your email still reads well even without images.

Spam Triggering

Like most things, images are good in moderation - a little is fine, a lot maybe not. If you have too many images in your email (especially relative to the amount of text) then your email can trigger spam filters. So be careful!

Takeaway

Email graphics are more than decorative elements — they're critical tools for engaging audiences and boosting campaign performance. Visually captivating images, infographics, and interactives command attention in crowded inboxes and drive message comprehension at a glance.

Well-selected graphics establish brand identity, increase email open rates, boost engagement metrics, and accelerate conversions. Yet graphics-rich campaigns require strategy and care. To optimize impact, images and other visuals should support key messages, speak to specific audiences, and align with overall branding. They should also be used judiciously to enhance the content, but not so much that they make the email feel spammy.

Thoughtful, strategic use of graphics allows your emails to deliver information faster, stand out amidst the fray, and connect with customers more deeply.

Sources:

Unlayer. (2021, August 24). Why you need email graphics + 19 tools to create them.

Emma. (n.d.). 18 email marketing stats that prove why it’s so important.

Easelly. (2022, August 16). Why email graphics are important and how to make them look good.