Signing up for an email marketing service is one way to enhance customer engagement and ultimately, increase your business revenue. However, to make the most of your email marketing subscription, you want to learn more about the different features you can take advantage of.
One of the features you want to master is choosing the best colors for email marketing. Knowing which colors to add to which campaign can significantly help to capture your subscribers’ attention. So, in the guide below, you will find detailed information on what are the best colors for email marketing and why.
Why Is It Important To Choose The Best Colors For Email Marketing?
It is a known fact that every single visual detail on an email campaign including colors affects its effectiveness and performance. As with every other process, colors on your email campaigns hold meaning and can easily affect one’s subconscious.
Every color holds a message behind it, therefore, you must learn to decipher every color’s meaning and understand the psychology of colors before sending out your campaigns. According to data from Kissmetrics, over 93% of consumers are first attracted to a campaign through its visual attention. Of these consumers, 85% report that color is their primary reason for the engagement.
Additionally, according to Kissmetrics, different colors have different meanings to the public and consumers. For example, in clothing and fashion retail settings, colors such as pink, sky blue, and rose attract traditional buyers the most. On the other hand, colors such as red-orange, royal blue, and black attract impulse shoppers the most in settings such as fast food, outlet malls, and clearance sales.
Best Colors In Emails
Now, let’s look at individual colors in campaigns and their effectiveness;
White
Using the color white on an email campaign can bring about positivity. It implies purity and cleanliness. However, on a campaign, it shouldn’t be overused. You want to pair the color with other colors to prevent it from appearing boring and incomplete.
Email campaigns, in part, represent your brand. Thus, you have to be careful when designing one to ensure it reflects your brand. As a general rule of thumb, you want to avoid plaintext emails. Instead, go for templates with a white background that is combined with another significant color.
Doing so helps to brighten up your content and grab the reader’s attention. Again, you want the background color to be white not the text. With white or extremely light-colored text, your content becomes difficult to read and appears spam-like – which can make it easy for the reader to abandon reading through the campaign.
Black
There’s one main reason why brands like to use the color black in their campaigns – Power! The black color represents power, luxury, elegance, and authority. This is why the color is typically used with luxury items such as cars, expensive alcohol, and even, high end nightclubs.
However, in email campaigns, the color black should be used strategically and in regulation. You don’t want to overuse it to a point where it loses its symbolism – ending up with a negative connotation. In an email campaign, you want to use the color black to accentuate the elements and features of the campaign.
This gives your product authority, legitimacy, elegance, and power. You want to use it as a complementary color. However, unlike the color white, avoid using it as a background color. This is because, with black as the background color, your text and content may be difficult to read. Try to integrate it into the designs and content.
Purple
Purple primarily represents luxury, beauty, wealth, and creativity. For creative and luxury brands, the color purple is perfect. Plus, it makes it easy for your customers to identify your campaigns. You can even combine the color with other distinctive colors such as gold or yellow to help it stand out better.
However, keep in mind that dark purple color intensity, may not invoke the same feelings from your audiences. This is because this color typically represents sadness and frustration.
Blue
The color blue on the other hand is calming, but, it also represents symbols such as security, reliability, confidence, and stability. However, unlike colors such as white or black, the color blue is not a universal one for all businesses. For example, it can work perfectly for financial institutions, tech, and academia.
However, for the food or restaurant industry, it may not be the best option. Additionally, the color blue works best for these industries as it is not gender-based. It can be included in content intended for any reader in such industries. It is a perfect color if you want to solidify your legitimacy and dependability. However, don’t overuse the color as it may become unrealistic, distant, and cold.
Green
Similar to blue and white, the color green represents calmness and tranquility. Additionally, the color green is fresh, clean, natural, and relaxing. It works particularly well for industries such as health-related products –whether it’s cosmetics, medication, skincare or even, food. On campaigns, it offers a sense of renewal, improvement, and soothing.
However, in other industries, such as money-related, it can represent wealth and growth. But, you want to remember that with the color green, you want to pay attention to the intensity and varying shades as they may represent different meanings. What a customer relates with a light green shade will be completely different from what they relate with yellow-green or dark green.
Yellow
The colors yellow and orange represent brightness and cheerfulness, creativity, and enthusiasm which are associated with positivity. Similar to the color white, bright yellow and orange colors can be used as background colors.
As background colors, they easily attract your reader’s attention. Pairing a bright orange or yellow background with bold texts can easily capture your reader’s attention – similarly to road signs. But, similar to the color green, it is important to choose the right shades and intensities as they may represent something different.
Red
The color red should be used when you are trying to send out an important message or trying to prompt a reaction from your reader. Nonetheless, red can represent both negativity and positivity. For some people, red represents danger and blood.
For others, it represents energy and power. for campaigns, it works best for features such as the Click Here or Buy now buttons – almost like a color for action points. Due to its distinctive visibility, the color red is thought to stimulate people into making quick and ultimate decisions.
So, if you have details that you want to stand out or want to stimulate your reader to make a quick decision, you want to use the color red on the relevant feature. However, you should avoid using it on the texts. After all, due to its bold nature and appearance, the color red should be paired with light colors such as white.
Build Email Campaigns Using Different Color Combinations
Once, you’ve identified the best colors for your email marketing campaigns, the next step is to combine them. You want your campaigns to be readable and easy on the eyes, yet, beautiful and attractive. Thus, you can combine up to 1 or 2 bright colors and 1 to 3 neutral colors to complement them.
There are many ways you can combine the colors to ensure your color themes stands out. For example, some people combine dark colors with bright ones and directly opposite colors – think of black and yellow or red/green and blue/yellow, along with the colors, you want to pay attention to the shades and intensities.
Whilst combining dark and bright colors works out, you also want to be careful and realistic. For example, your design would look disastrous if you combined dark dirty colors with pastel colors. Furthermore, on the campaigns, you want to balance the colors – don’t overuse either one!
As a general rule of thumb;
- Don’t combine more than 3 color options
- Stick to a color pattern to match your company’s brand colors – this makes it easy for your audiences to recognize your brand
- Font colors should be easy-to-read and background/other details should be easy on the eyes
- Integrate only one main contrast color to make your campaigns stand out
- Pick the right colors to invoke the emotions you want from your audience
- If you don’t feel as creative, opt for naturally occurring color combinations
Final Verdict
As with all your other online business processes, you can easily gauge whether or not the choice for your email campaign colors is effective or not. So, to decide if you have chosen the best colors for email marketing for your online business, use tools that are available to you through the email marketing service. These include an A/B testing tool or even, install analytics or tracking tools.