Email campaigns from 3 Birds get opened more, read more, and lead to more sales than most typical automotive emails. The modern consumer’s email inbox is a crowded landscape of promotions, social updates, news, and more vying for attention. Keeping your emails out of spam folders or trash bins carries its own set of challenges—but even if you do get that oh-so-important click to open, your email design may be discouraging recipients from converting.

At 3 Birds, we’ve learned a thing or two about what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to designing emails. Here's our simple five-step formula to boost your email effectiveness.

1. Design for Every Device

The way customers are reading emails is changing. Over 50 percent of emails are now opened on smartphones, while some of us are now getting email alerts on their televisions or watches. As email trends continue to change, the importance of responsive, mobile-friendly design will continue to grow. But rendering correctly is only part of designing for multiple devices—your subject line and opening text also become critical when space is at a minimum.

2. Use High-Quality, Relevant Images

The right image can create an emotional connection with the recipient and generate excitement for your call-to-action. The wrong image, though, can create confusion or diminish the authority of your dealership’s brand. Make sure that your images are always appropriately sized and as high-quality as possible. However, using very large or too many images can cause your emails to take too long to load, which will earn the wrath of both spam filters and your customers.

3. Keep It Simple

It can be tempting to try to squeeze as much information as possible into every email, but often too many choices lead to no choice at all. The design of the email should clearly lead customers to this goal without introducing unnecessary clutter or extraneous information. Negative space is an email designer’s best friend for a reason, as it allows you to emphasize what’s important and leave out what’s not.

4. Include a Prominent Call-to-Action

The most effective emails are built around a clear goal, whether it’s getting customers to RSVP for a test drive event or register interest for a particular offer. Your email should make it easy for customers to take that next step through a clearly defined and prominent call-to-action button. You may choose to include more than one call-to-action if you’re spotlighting multiple models, but you should always work to minimize the effort it takes for customers

5. Test, Test, Test

At 3 Birds, we test every aspect of our emails, from colors to button text to subject line and more. We also test how each email will render across different email client types, including Gmail, Outlook, and Apple. Experimenting with your emails will help you learn more about your customers’ behavior and interests—and we make it easy to be as involved or as hands-off as you like by offering a wide selection of conversion-optimized templates and the potential for nearly endless customization.

Ready to get started? Schedule a strategy session today.