As we inch closer to the second quarter of 2021, B2B email marketing is rapidly evolving to meet the criteria of post-pandemic economies. This will also make it necessary for email marketers to evolve email designs to accommodate the new requirements. Some of the biggest changes we experienced were the cost optimization drives and the budget cuts. However, changes in conversion rates also made marketer scratch their heads as they dropped below the 15% mark, a historic low for the blue-eyed boy of digital marketing:

If you are looking forward to hitchhiking your way to the top despite the odds, you are at the right place. I am putting down the top B2B email design trends that every email marketer needs to implement right away. Have a closer look at the email marketers’ guide to savvy and conversion-oriented design trends below:

#1 Joining The Dark Mode Elite Club

Dark mode has been around since many decades. Remember the black screens and green fonts in the old computers? But the recent adoption by all leading operating systems, email clients, social media, and productivity tools has made it necessary for email marketers to join the trend. Dark mode friendly emails can be a big game-changer since the corporate professionals are working from the comfort of their homes for quite a long time. This will make it easy for readers to consume your messages while giving a consistent aesthetic feel with other dark mode friendly apps, as shown in the below example:

#2 Making Use Of AMP Friendly Email Templates

Almost every email marketer complained about the lack of support for any innovation in emails, but recently Google announced AMP for emails. If you are a Mailchimp user, your email developers can now use the Mailchimp email templates with JavaScript functionalities along with HTML. AMP-friendly email Mailchimp templates give you an opportunity to send website-like experiences in your subscriber’s inboxes. As a B2B marketer, you can benefit from its dynamic content to add fresh data using APIs. Sending real-time data and allowing users to interact can open doors to new possibilities. 

#3 Transitioning From Mobile Friendly To Mobile First Designs

B2B marketers have been a bit slower than their B2C contemporaries when it comes to adopting different design trends, and it is the same with mobile optimization. One of the biggest shifts in email design for B2B marketers this year will be moving towards mobile-first design. Again, the most popular ESP Mailchimp comes with a lot of mobile-friendly Mailchimp templates that you can use, but if you are using a different tool, you can also go for single-column templates available out there, like in the example given below:

#4 Harnessing Interactivity Before Anyone Else

Interactive email design can do wonders for B2B email marketers in 2021 as it powers progressive lead nurturing through engagement. I recommend including interactivity in your design strategy this year since it isn’t mainstream in the B2B campaigns yet. Generally, B2B email campaigns stretch over long periods, and it becomes tough to maintain engagement. Adding interactive features in the emails will help you in this area while giving your messages a fresh look as your competitors won’t be adding interactivity in their messages unless they are also reading this article.

#5 Replacing Images With CSS Animations, GIFs and Animated Illustrations

When was the last time you used any rich media apart from images? As a B2B marketer, you should explore other options as it will give you a chance to express your copy better. This year, we can expect APNGs, CSS animations, and GIFs to enter the B2B email templates. They give you a chance to express your message in a more intuitive way and leave little to the reader’s imagination. For instance, you can use the GIFs to demonstrate a product functionality that would have otherwise required you to write a couple of steps. This is illustrated in the below emailer:

#6 Using Infographics To Add Value

How about including infographics in your B2B emails? Infographics combine the benefits of visuals and wrapping words within them to display information, and they have been extremely popular in the office roundtables since the early 2010s. You can include infographics to give an overview of the vital statistics, user data, benefits of using your products/services, and other subjects that have a considerable amount of data, but you don’t share them to avoid making your messages boring. In the below example, you can see how infographics in email can be a perfect way to summarize a lot of data in an engaging way for your customers:

Summing Up

There is no doubt that emails will still play an important role in bringing revenue in 2021. Also, they are the best performing digital marketing channel in terms of ROI, so it makes complete sense to invest your time and efforts in improving email template design. I hope you find this guide on B2B email trends useful for your campaigns in 2021 and beyond.

Author Bio: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing full service Email Marketing Agency that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

Business competition has become so intense that to keep your local business up and running, it is not enough to depend on traditional methods of attracting customers, primarily based on word of mouth. Local businesses rely heavily on local buyers. To publicize your business at the least cost while making it easy for buyers to locate your address, you must create a business website that enhances visibility many more times. Buyers can view your business online by logging on to your website and gather all information that inspires them to engage in some meaningful transaction that generates revenue.

Since the website is the most crucial virtual asset that attracts traffic with high potential for generating business, web design for local businesses acquires a lot of importance.  Web design is responsible for creating attractive and fully functional websites that enhance viewer engagement necessary for generating more leads and conversions that open the gates for revenue to flow in.

Here are some reasons for the importance of web design for all businesses.

Create the first impression

The web designer creates the initial attraction that encourages viewers to open the website and peep inside to understand its contents.  The moment they step inside your website, they take just a few seconds to form some impression about your business. It is critical to ensure positivity to feel that your business is worth paying some attention to.  Failing to make a positive first impression will drive away viewers from your website and defeat the purpose of creating websites to initiate business. The web design influences the viewer’s perception of the brand. The more trustworthy the brand appears to them, the better are the business prospects.

 Support your SEO strategy

Since gaining high visibility is the goal of any website, web design elements must amply support the search engine optimization (SEO) measures to rank high in the search results. The design elements must support your SEO strategies that revolve around publishing high-quality content and allowing the search spiders to crawl the website that aids indexing by search engines seamlessly. Proper indexing is critical for website visibility when search engines pick up a website against specific search terms. The web design must effectively support your on-page SEO initiatives that help to achieve the business goals.

Build trust with the audience

People look upon poorly designed websites with some suspicion because they start doubting the intention of the website owner. On the other hand, well designed websites that contain exhaustive business information and focus on the mission and vision of the business seem to be more trustworthy as it is easy to understand the business motive for creating the website. Professionally designed websites generate instant trust for the brand and business and put the business on a firm footing. Visitors find enough reasons to interact and engage with the business.

Based on the trust reposed by the viewers on your business, you can create better brand building strategies that pay back well in the long run.

The vast realm of eCommerce is filled with specifics, authentic terms and concepts, pitfalls, and brain-busting moments. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you need to wrap your head around most every nuance of the industry. Namely, the concepts of brand persona and buyer persona aren’t outlined enough to get a good understanding of both right away. What is the underlying difference between the two? If you don’t know, we’re here to make your life easier and define these terms with some explanations and examples.

What Are “Personas”?

In any commercial business, there are different targeted audiences (TAs) of customers that are segmented and summarized by certain characteristics. And there is also branding. Coming up with a collective portrait of your target audience of buyers is a crucial stage of starting up or maintaining any eCommerce.

The services or products you offer and how you offer them should be based on this portrait because the main goal of business is to turn as many people as possible into buyers and keep them satisfied, thus achieving stable, steadily growing sales.

Buyer persona

What is a buyer persona? In simple words, it is a generalized character that you should know how to treat and satisfy their main pain points, needs, and tendencies. But how does your target audience perceive your brand? See, this is the flip side of the whole thing. And it’s easy to miss this point. The wholesome vision of your brand for potential customers is as important as your vision of your TA.

Brand persona

This brings us to the brand persona, which is the personality of a brand – the essential characteristics of your business. The main traits that tie up your offers and make your business image consistent. Such traits can be similar to human mood sets and types of personalities (e.g., formality or casualness, conciseness or descriptiveness, strictness or simplicity).

The important thing is that the brand persona is more about the emotional association. This detail separates it, for example, from the brand image – a presentation of the main benefits that the business brings and its main purposes. However, the brand persona also covers many TA portrait points, such as:

• demographics (age, region)
• education
• occupation
• personal status (married/single, etc.)
• price sensitivity
• product preferences
• needs and goals

Brand Personality vs. Buyer Persona

You will be shocked, but brand and buyer personas are interdependent concepts based on one another. That’s why it is so difficult to point out the difference between them. It all comes down to the fact that you must relate to your potential buyers if you want them to pay attention and see you as a reputable provider.

In a nutshell, your brand’s traits should correlate with your TA’s characteristics. For this, you should first analyze and paint a picture of your TA, i.e., outline a buyer persona. It should serve as the foundation for forming the emotional association. To better understand what we’re talking about, let’s take a look at some successful brand persona cases.

Brand Persona Examples

How these brands position themselves in the eyes of their target customers should give you a pretty good idea about approaching your brand persona the right way.

Nike

Active people who are into sports and adrenaline-pumping activities always seek inspiration to move forward and achieve new goals. And Nike fires up their motivation with the inspirational motto (the famous “Just do it!”), focusing on efficiency and promotion of a general image of a winner.

As simple as that, by positioning themselves as the absolute #1, Nike efficiently warms up the ego of every go-getter out there. See what they did there? This is why it is so important to identify with your buyers to be successful.

IKEA

You probably already know IKEA’s approach – a simple, casual yet absolutely practical everyday life. Nothing more, nothing less. The main goal of IKEA products is to help buyers tie up a minimalistic, stylish, balanced living space. That’s why their brand persona is about balance, simplicity, and carelessness of life. This perfectly fits their main segment of customers – adults with the budget and desire to buy new furniture who aren’t into leopard print beds and plain linoleum floors.

Coca-Cola

To put it harshly – you have no heart if you don’t relate to those amazing Christmas ads. Coca-Cola has managed to cover the widest audience of potential buyers by focusing on family values, childhood nostalgia, and the kind, fairytale-like atmosphere of winter holidays. This is how you come up with the vibes to revolutionize the business.

Wrapping It Up

When you need to form a persona for your brand, there is no standard template. The main pro tip here is to build your business persona background according to the main traits and moods of your target audience. You can create a simple buyer persona checklist and analyze how you can relate to your buyers point by point.

Does your TA consist of serious, business-minded adult entrepreneurs? Be formal and to the point. Do you focus on younger IT enthusiasts? Keep it simple and charismatic, and don’t forget to throw in some memes. Just make sure that if you were in the place of your buyer, you’d pay attention to the brand, and you’ll do fine.