Prioritizing accessibility in email marketing
One of the most underrated ways to ensure you get results from your email marketing efforts is to prioritize accessibility. When your emails are accessible, it allows more people in your subscriber base to enjoy them, particularly those living with a disability.
While other businesses neglect this massive pool of users, you can set yourself apart by ensuring your emails are inclusive of everyone, regardless of ability, experience, and background. Here are four strategies for prioritizing accessibility in your email marketing.
Continually Learn Your Audience
With 62 million people living with disabilities in the U.S. alone, many of these individuals are likely also a part of your target audience. Disability impacts everyone in some shape or form. It’s essential to educate yourself on common disabilities to navigate accessibility considerations effectively.
It’s also vital to continually learn about your unique audience. Understand their needs and wants to tailor your email marketing messages. Note the steps you must take to offer the most accessible, enjoyable experience with your emails — while providing solutions to your consumers’ most pressing problems.
Marketing analytics are crucial for business insights, allowing you to watch to see if your accessibility considerations affect email performance. You should have analytics tools set up on your email marketing platform, as well as your other digital marketing channels. These tools can collect data from your target audience to inform you of their lifestyle, needs, interests, behaviors, and habits. Use this information to optimize your email marketing strategy for accessibility. When you continually learn about your target audience, you can better meet their needs — including what they would need to consume your email content and how your services or products can benefit their unique situation.
Keep Your Design and Layout Simple
As tempting as it is to experiment with bold colors, animation, and unusual visual elements in your emails, that kind of experimentation doesn’t perpetuate accessibility. On the contrary, it can negatively impact subscribers living with visual, cognitive, and auditory impairments. Think outside the box when concocting accessible design, because impairments come in all shapes and sizes. Individuals within your target audience may develop impairments at birth, after an accident, or simply with age, such as the development of age-related vision degeneration — the top cause of blindness and vision loss in older adults in the U.S.
To make your email marketing more accessible, keep your email designs and layouts simple. Your content should read from left to right. Use colors responsibly. Don’t crowd your emails with images and text. Use whitespace effectively. And be sure your calls to action stand out. Keep your email designs and layouts as simple as possible to ensure they’re accessible to the entirety of your audience.
Care About the Details
If you truly want to prioritize accessibility in your email marketing, you must be detail-oriented. You should put everything under an accessibility microscope. Take your time including the following fine details for each email to improve accessibility:
- Alt text for images and videos;
- Captions and audio for videos;
- Meta descriptions;
- 14-point font or larger;
- Enabled keyboard navigation;
- Descriptive headlines, links, and subject lines;
- Images and visual elements formatted correctly;
- Easily digestible content.
Think about accessibility before finalizing any detail in your emails. The goal is to level the playing field, allowing all email recipients equal access to the content.
Optimize Your Emails for Assistive Technology
Many people living with a disability use assistive technology to navigate life off and online. So, if your emails aren’t accessible through assistive devices, many of your subscribers won’t be able to interact with them. A few examples of assistive technology are:
- Screen readers;
- Text-to-speech tools;
- Voice recognition software;
- Reading pens;
- Alternative input devices;
- Magnifiers.
Optimize your emails so that those who use assistive technology can enjoy them. Test your emails with various assistive devices before sending them out. Similarly, you could ask users living with a disability that use assistive technology to test your emails for you. You may even have someone on your team willing to be a disability advocate and give emails the proper run-through before sending. Optimizing your emails for assistive technology ensures no one is left unable to view your email marketing campaign.
Conclusion
To expand the reach of your email marketing campaigns, you must put customers first when crafting messaging and design details. The more accessible your emails are, the more subscribers can engage with and enjoy them. Use the strategies above to ensure your emails are always as accessible as possible. It’s not only ethical and kind — it may improve your bottom line.
