Email marketing forms the pillar of digital marketing and marketers these days leave no effort to create and send the best form of emails to their subscribers. Similarly, maybe even your organization has also invested in the best email marketing tools to run spam tests, email design-display tests, and user experience tests. But are your emails accessible for those who are physically, visually, or cognitively disabled? Do the images used in the content of the email have ALT tags? Are your emails optimized for mobile users?
Well, most marketers fail to optimize their emails for the right accessibility, alienating some of their subscribers, and impacting the overall digital marketing turn out. Or we can say most marketers don’t give importance to email accessibility optimization since they don’t understand the benefits of it and how it affects their marketing campaign.
By not optimizing your email accessibility, you not only ignore a large number of audiences who have the potential to become your customers by sending the wrong kind of emails but also your email marketing campaign can be illegal. Making emails accessible improves your email marketing by reaching a segment of the audience that most organizations often forget to target. Also, email accessibility ensures people who use assistive technologies don’t miss out on key information in your emails.
Here is a list of 10 simple tips you need to implement in your email creation to improve your email accessibility:
1. Add language code to your <HTML>
Considering the fact that some of your target audience can be visually disabled and use screen readers to read emails, you should add language code according to the marketing region. To make sure that the pronunciation is right, you will need to add a simple snippet of code that specifies your email’s language to let screen readers know what language your email is written in. Localization setup within your ESP helps you populate the language code dynamically.
2. Include ALT tags for your images
ALT tags for images are important not only for screen readers but also if the user has their image display setting off or with a bad internet connection. If you fail to add ALT tags, the images in your emails might not always be visible for your subscribers. Also, if your image contains important information and is not visible or readable by screen readers, then your entire email marketing effort will go to waste. Wherever you have a <IMG> tag in your email code, make sure to set the ALT tag and ensure that the text matches the text on the image. At the same time, if you have empty ALT tags, make sure that there isn’t any text on the image. Otherwise, the screen reader will read out the URL of the image, creating a disruption in the email content. You can use different kinds of tools available to test your alt text.
3. Add hover effects for CTAs, links, and clickable images
CTAs, links, and clickable images form one of the most important parts of your emails since it generally takes the reader to the next step. Thus, you don’t want them to go unnoticed. Using hover effects on our CTAs, links, and clickable images to indicate that the text or image is clickable and will take you to a different page. Adding this simple interactive element can make your emails more engaging and also increases the click rate. Hover effect can be of different types, such as color fading of images, color change of CTA buttons, pop-up tabs, and more.
4. Contrast in text and background colors
To increase the readability of your email content, check the contrast ratio of your text colors against the background colors of your email. Readers who have color deficits might not be able to read your email if the colors are not contrasting. You can manually input color codes or host your HTML and produce a URL to use.
5. Optimize for various devices
By optimizing your email content for every kind of device, your email gets properly displayed no matter if the reader is using a desktop or smartphone. This process of creating design responsive emails helps the content display optimally.
6. Use the role of “presentation” on layout tables
Including role=”presentation” attribute on all <TABLE> elements tells the screen readers to remove any semantic meaning from the tables. Since most email marketers rely on tables to structure their email layout, not using the role of presentation causes serious issues for screen readers. A role=”presentation” attribute tells the screen reader that you’re using the table for layout purposes only and it need not read out loud about the number of rows and columns or email code.
7. Add captions and transcripts to your videos
As important as it is to consider your subscribers and potential customers who are blind, it is equally important to keep in mind that some of them can also be deaf. Thus it is important that you integrate codes that will enable the screen reader to narrate the video for the visually impaired and add captions for those with hearing disability.
8. Use impactful and clear hyperlinks: The age-old practice of writing “Click Here” no more creates the same desired interest to click on it. With the increasing need to personalize and be creative in your emails, if you want to increase the click rate of the links you are adding in your email content, you need to use impactful and clear hyperlinks. Besides adding hover effects to it, you also need to make the hyperlinks clear, easily visible, and with a descriptive copy that creates the desire to click on it. Moreover, a descriptive copy enables the screen reader to read out what the link is all about, which otherwise will just read aloud “Click Here.” You can use the full title of the destination page or just a brief, impactful copy, which will help the receiver decide if they want to engage further.
9. Use semantic elements to structure your content
To highlight content hierarchy, you should use semantic elements <H> tag and <P> tag. This not only makes your email easier to navigate but also helps the screen reader to emphasize on the headlines and not confuse with the sub-heads and paragraphs. Ensuring headline-worthy copies are enclosed within <H1>, <H2>, <H3> helps you create a clear email body.
10. Balance text with images
A continuous flow of text in an email can get boring to read, and at the same time, using just images in your email might not be very impactful. Instead, try breaking up long chunks of content with images to keep your readers engaged and to make it easier to understand.
Including these tips while drafting emails will make it more understandable and user-friendly, and optimizing your email accessibility will increase your customer diversity. To maximize the ROI of your email marketing budget by reaching more recipients across every platform and context, never forget to optimize email accessibility.
