Last updated - March 7, 2022
Email marketing is a valuable tool in the modern era: an intimate, tailored and direct way of accessing your target audience anytime of the day or night. Gaining access to someone’s email address for your mailing list is a real privilege and, consequently, it requires you to be respectful and considerate in how you create and format your content for your readers’ consumption. Go about this right and you’ll have grateful, valuable customers for life. Do it wrong and you risk angering, alienating and losing potential customers. One of the major parts of getting this right means considering the accessibility of your email content. This can be challenging so, without further delay, here are 5 tips for maintaining accessibility in your written content.
Make Text Readable
It doesn’t take a genius to see that your marketing emails being legible is important for their success and adoption. But what you or I may consider legible isn’t a universal standard and you must account for that. Hundreds of millions of people have visual impairments across the world. You need to pick uncrowded, nicely designed fonts which can be zoomed into closely without losing their quality. Watch out for your formatting as well, don’t crowd paragraphs or headings together or some people might not follow.
Opt For Responsive Design
Even for people without disabilities, your emails might be being viewed on mobile devices and tablets which warp the screen and make the content illegible. This will be most damaging, of course, if your emails are being read via an on-screen reader or some other sort of disability aid which might warp the email. Responsive design ensures that your content is going to be able to adjust, via scaling tools, to the demands of the device which is reading it. With so much work now being carried out on mobiles and the notifications aspect to most smart phones, making your emails flexible in their design will do you a lot of favors in the long run.
Write Effectively
It can often be tempting, when writing any sort of professional document on behalf of your company to opt for language which is complex or to even use a thesaurus to elevate the tone of your writing. In this instance, that would be a mistake. Instead, you should be looking to make your prose clear, to the point, simplistic and with a relatively short sentence structure.
You don’t really know who will be reading your emails so it’s vital that you make sure that for anyone with learning disabilities like dyslexia or even behavioral issues like ADHD your writing is still legible and still gets the point across. Knowing exactly how to do this can be really difficult, so here are some valuable tools to help you navigate this essential task:
- ViaWriting and MyWritingWay – Two grammar resources, to help you incorporate this difficult element in your emails accessibly.
- WritingPopulist and Studydemic – Some blogs with useful, general suggestions on how to write accessible emails for your clients.
- SimpleGrad and LetsGoandLearn – Some generalized writing guides, to help you in any writing situation, to put out the best written work you can.
Allow For Color Blindness
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are color blind in some sense. To handle this, you have to ensure that your work won’t exclude those people. This doesn’t mean using no color, color can be a great tool, you just have to be careful. Someone who’s color blind won’t necessarily simply not see the colors. All sorts of other side affects can be caused. Sometimes the colors will swap in their eyes or vibrate in a way which can make it extremely difficult to stay looking at the page. Choose colors carefully for the best results.
Conclusion
Accessibility is something which, sadly, has been traditionally sidelined, which has made life very hard for those people with disabilities of some sort. It’s also made it difficult for people without disabilities, since companies often put out email marketing which is poorly done. From a business perspective, not accounting for all the different types of people can hurt you financially, so take it into account for your email marketing.
Also read about Web Accessibility Matters for SEO.
