5 Reasons You Need a Designer to Build your MailChimp Emails

Planning a MailChimp email marketing initiative can be challenging. There are many decisions to make when starting out and it can be overwhelming at times.  Some decisions you’ll be thinking about are; what types of content do I plan to share, how often do I plan to send emails, where will I send my audience when they interact with my emails, and many more. But if there was one simple suggestion I would make, it would be to hire or work with a designer who can visually create and build your emails for you. Here are my five reasons why I would encourage you to use a designer to build your MailChimp emails:

 

1) Brand Consistency

MailChimp offers many different integrated marketing components. For example, they offer: Websites, Landing pages, Welcome Emails, and Campaign Emails. These components are just a few example touchpoints that your audience may interact within a single sequence. You want all of these touchpoints to appropriately apply your brand. A designer, aware of your brand’s visual identity, will be able to do this with little trouble.
 

2) Detailed Eye

Similar to my first point, Brand Consistency, it’s important that your MailChimp email builder has a detailed eye. Most of MailChimp’s components live on their server and have unique URLs. So, what does that mean?  When people go through the process of becoming a new subscriber, they may leave the website for a moment. They won’t even realize they left. It’s important that your designer pays close attention to detail. They should have the awareness to make MailChimp’s subscribe landing page design look seamless with your website. They can do this by utilizing the exact colors, fonts (when possible), elements sizes, imagery, and patterns. People may never know they momentarily left your website.
 

3) Adobe Photoshop Skills

You can get away with just creating a basic email that includes photos and copy. But it would be better to have someone who can push the threshold of design. Someone who can create appealing photo graphics, illustrations, and animated GIF in Adobe Photoshop. That’s of course if it’s on-brand. Typically it’s good to have this skillset for email and as well as social.  It’s no secret that a visually appealing email will get you more clicks than an email with just copy.

 

4) Efficiency

Having multiple people create your email newsletters can make the process cumbersome and inefficient. Having a designer create the layout and then pass it over to the email builder can be cumbersome. It’s more efficient to have a designer both design and build the email simultaneously in MailChimp. This will save your team time and they’ll be happier at the end of the day.

 

5) Problem Solve

Designers are trained to visually communicate effectively and solve problems. Email marketing can be a bit of a storm at first getting it set up. The best person to have to take the bull by the horns is a designer. Designers can help jump-start and visually communicate the initial content struggles you may have difficulty trying to organize. Designers actually prefer this method because then they feel more involved and can be more creative in their solutions. 

 

If you have any questions about my reasons for having a designer create your MailChimp emails, please contact me at shaun@designroom.com. If you have worked with me in the past you know that I’m very passionate about my work. Also care very much about your organization’s well-being. My suggestions may not work for all organizations. Though the principles of my blog can influence anyone who is not a designer. It can also inspire those who want to become more driven to do great work and have positive results.