Author: Franz Malten Buemann

We’ve partnered with Unsplash to bring millions of beautiful, and best of all, free stock images directly to our customers.
Our Free Image Gallery is available in our email builder, saving you the time and hassle it would normally take for you to find a stock photo site, search for the perfect image, download, and then upload that image back into our builder. Our customers have already saved over 300 hours by using our Free Image Gallery.
We want our customers to feel confident about every send, so we’ve asked Meghan Sokolnicki, Senior Email Designer & Developer at CM Group, to share her best advice when it comes to designing emails with images.
Ready to give it a try? Sign up today and start building your best email yet.
Here are her best email design tips.
What is the best way to use images in emails?
Bottom line, it’s best to use images to help support your message. Images can be a great and effective way to capture an audience’s attention and add some visual interest to your emails. 
While I’d encourage using images in emails, it is important to make sure that images do not contain the most important pieces of information. They should be used to help support your message, not be used as the only way to deliver the message. As a rule of thumb, deliver important information with live text and support that information with images.
Keep in mind that not everyone receiving the email will be able to view images. Many people use screen readers or voice commands to listen to emails. Even people who are reading the emails may have images turned off or have spotty wifi that delays the time it takes for the images to download. 
As email designers, it’s our job to make sure that everyone receiving the emails has a consistent experience no matter how they interact with them.
What is the wrong way to use images in emails?
Don’t send image-only emails! I see this all the time and do not recommend it. Sure, it may be beautiful artwork, but that doesn’t make it an effective email. 
When images contain all of the key information in a given campaign, this can greatly limit the amount of your audience who can interact with the email. Think about all that information getting squished down on a smaller screen! It can be so hard to digest, and who wants to have to zoom in to read the message? Not me.
A common mistake designers make is to take a print design and paste it into an email without making any adjustments for the new medium. Print and web are completely different experiences so it’s best to design with those differences in mind. 
For example, instead of copy/pasting, make sure you’re adapting your designs for email. Be thoughtful about how your audience will interact with an email. In email we have the opportunity to click around, scroll, and engage with the campaign on a variety of different devices. Let’s use that to our advantage!
Give it a test drive in our free email template builder. 
How do designers choose the right image for their email? 
Most importantly you want to make sure that the image fits with your content. Consumers are less and less interested in seeing generic stock photography that serves no purpose. Instead, think about how you can use images with specificity to emotionally connect readers with your brand.
Everyone’s needs are going to be a little different, so choosing the right image comes down to if that photo makes sense for your brand and makes sense for the content. 
As a tip, we as humans seem to love seeing other humans! So our designers see a lot of engagement come from images using pictures of faces. I also love using illustrations and icons as a way to break up space. Even a small clock next to content about an upcoming deadline can help draw attention.
If you’re sending a letter or a quick announcement, you might not need an image, but there are other ways of adding some visual interest to your email design. Instead, use bold headlines or add a background color to help emphasize text. While I encourage using images where possible, they may not always be needed and that’s okay too! 
How can an email marketer measure whether their email design was successful or not?
Success is measured differently for every marketer. Sometimes the purpose of an email is to drive clicks or promote sales and that could be “successful,” and other times an email is about sharing relevant content to help your audience stay engaged with the brand. 
In my opinion there’s not a blanket answer for how to tell whether an email design is successful, but every brand needs to define success for themselves and work their design around that. 
An overall successful design for email is one that feels effortless for the consumer. This means making sure the content is compelling and styled in a way that takes out the guesswork: Clear hierarchy marked with headlines, bold calls-to-action, and whitespace used throughout the design to help give your text and images some breathing room. 
Also never underestimate the power of relevant content paired with a compelling subject line.
What is your design pet peeve?
I have a few actually! As you can tell, one major pet peeve is copying and pasting a print design into email and not considering the mobile experience. (See answer #3!) Another pet peeve, when there is too much text included on images, it can be such an awful experience. Some text can be included on images—just not all of your text. It’s such a quick fix to include live text in emails!
Also, trying to cram too much information into one email. This can feel so overwhelming for your audience—give your content room to breathe!
Where do you look for email design inspiration?
I love looking at Really Good Emails and seeing what other email designers are coming up with. Email design can sometimes feel like a very limited medium, because we’re designing with so many factors in mind. I love seeing how other designers use those limitations and make it work for them! Litmus is always testing the limits of what’s possible in email, and I love receiving their emails. 
It’s not supported everywhere, but I still love seeing simple movement in emails. A well-designed .gif can brighten my day.
What are your final design tips?

Make sure you use a balance of images and live text in your campaigns. Images are great to include in emails, just make sure they support the message. We don’t want “seeing” the image to be the only way to absorb your content. 

Use alt text when you include images! This is text that helps describe the image or the image’s intent for those who cannot view the image. You can still include some text as images (for example: Sale Today! You’re a winner! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!, etc.) just make sure when you, do you include alt text, so anyone not seeing the image still gets the full experience.
Don’t shy away from .gifs! Movement can be really fun in email.

Wrap up
There you have it, some of our best design tips from one of our in-house email design pros. If you’re ready to put these design tips to the test, you can start building an email in our drag-and-drop email builder right away for free. Check it out.
If you’re already a Campaign Monitor customer, sign in and get started.
The post Designing Emails With Images: Advice From a Pro appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Imagine being able to talk to thousands of potential and loyal customers one-on-one. That’s what email marketing does for you. It remains one of the most popular forms of marketing, thanks to its high ROI and incredible reach. Email marketing doesn’t work like magic, though. You need to have an actionable strategy, gather valuable insight,…
The post The Quickest Ways to Become an Email Marketing Fool appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

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Cure Brain Cancer is the leading organization for brain cancer research, advocacy and awareness in Australia with a mission to unite the community to increase brain cancer survival and quality of life. 
The patient-focused organization forges global collaborations, funds innovative research and brings world-class clinical trials to Australia to give children and adults with brain cancer access to new treatments faster. It relies heavily on email marketing to raise funds, engage its community, and promote its events. Switching to Campaign Monitor and completing a key integration with Salesforce has helped achieve many mission-critical goals for the nonprofit:

Raised $1.6 million (AUD) in a major campaign
Reduced amount of event registrants who didn’t fundraise by 90%
Near real-time engagement of subscribers

Finding the right match
One of Cure Brain Cancer’s greatest initiatives to grow awareness and raise funds for research is its annual Walk4BrainCancer event. What started as a single walk in 2003 in Sydney quickly expanded into a nationwide phenomenon with over 10,000 participants every year.

From recruiting registrants to encouraging participants to thanking fundraisers, email plays an essential part of every communication throughout the entire event cycle. Since making the switch to Campaign Monitor from Mailchimp, email has become easier and more effective when executing campaigns for this huge event.
When making the decision to switch email service providers, Cure Brain Cancer took several factors into account when ultimately choosing Campaign Monitor: 

Simple and easy ability to incorporate branding into emails
Best-in-class Salesforce integration
Non-profit friendly cost

Scalability and automation for their ever growing volume of emails and subscribers

“With the platform we were using before, everything was very manual,” said Alex Dobbing, Director of Fundraising and Development. “There was no sort of triggered automation to get our subscribers to keep engaging. We wanted to get more clever and make the most of building up our community.”
With a new more powerful tool, the nonprofit was able to increase the frequency, precision and relevance of its email campaigns for the Walk4BrainCancer event. A more intuitive interface made building emails faster than ever, like these high-performing case study emails:

And more automated customer journeys and triggered emails meant messaging was more personal and got sent right at the most opportune time to get subscribers to act. 
Email was a big contributor to helping the organization meet its fundraising goal for the most recent edition of Walk4BrainCancer, beating its goal of $1.5 million with $1.65 million raised!
“Email is by far the best channel for us. It’s such an easy way for us to reach our database and give them all of the needed information,” Dobbing said.
Virtual event, tangible success
Like many nonprofit organizations that rely heavily on big events to achieve their mission, Cure Brain Cancer had to adapt its strategy and get creative in the face of COVID-19.
Given the circumstances, a series of large gatherings was out of the question. Instead, it moved to a virtual event encouraging participants to walk at their own time and pace.

While this meant the organization no longer had to plan and orchestrate multiple large-scale events, it came with its own challenges. Cure Brain Cancer wanted to preserve that sense of excitement, energy and community that came with being together while walking for a cause.
“Because it is virtual, we are having to create the community slightly different,” said Dobbing. “We’re using the word ‘you’ a lot more; it’s definitely a case of wanting people to still feel included and like they’re part of something bigger. Which can be quite difficult to do when it’s a virtual campaign. We’re sending more emails because of that, but also we wanted to be a little bit cleverer with our journeys and the way we automate engagement.”
Thanks to this adaptation, the organization has converted a huge obstacle into a new opportunity. The communications team is now able to recruit and engage participants that otherwise would have been unable or unwilling to join a physical event.
“Obviously we’re never going to get to have a single physical event everyone can attend,  Australia is huge,” Dobbing explained. “Having a virtual aspect means no matter where they are, or if they’re not able to attend physical events in the future, we have that option for them. The community’s really rallied behind us, and we’ve raised almost $1.6 million in just a few months with the help of email!”
Email works better when technology plays nice
Campaign Monitor’s top-rated Salesforce email marketing integration streamlines email production for Cure Brain Cancer and makes every email more impactful.
The integration between these two powerful tools brings a suite of potent capabilities to Cure Brain Cancer, such as:

Easily build beautiful, branded email campaigns with Campaign Monitor’s drag-and-drop email builder

Send targeted email campaigns to their contacts in Salesforce
Measure how email campaigns drive donations and event signups
View email statistics directly within Salesforce
Map Campaign Monitor email fields with Salesforce
Automatically add subscribers

The integration makes creating emails and setting up campaigns faster and reduces the potential for human error. Because the platforms communicate and pass data back and forth seamlessly, it means the events and communications teams can stay focused on being creative and strategic.
Dobbing has the integration set to sync on an hourly basis, allowing the nonprofit to send timely, highly-personalized messages in near-real-time.
“Especially for our events, it means we can get our comms out in a very timely manner,” she said. “Before the integration, if someone signed up for an event, they might not get an email until the next day. That’s just not the kind of service that we want to provide—we want to say thank you for signing up, welcome, here’s what you need to do next immediately after they signup.”
An elevated journey leads to sky-high engagement rates
Empowered by the Salesforce integration, Cure Brain Cancer created a cross-channel participant journey for Walk4BrainCancer that generated astounding engagement rates.
The complex experience includes a multi-touch email series, invitations to join social media communities, fundraising reminders and tools, Zoom backgrounds, Facebook frames, fundraising incentives, and more.

The result: the number of inactive registrants plummeted. Nearly every person who signed up for the event raised some amount of money for the cause.
“Engagement has increased,” said Dobbing. “This year, less than 10 people signed up and didn’t raise anything out of 5000 registrants, normally it’s a couple hundred! And people raised more money per participant overall.”
Wrapping up
We’re honored to work with nonprofits championing important causes around the world like the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation. Learn more about their mission and the work they do on their site, and consider contributing, volunteering, or registering for an event.
Find other inspiring case studies in nonprofit email marketing here.
The post From In-person to Virtual Events: Cure Brain Cancer Pivots With Automation appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

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Just like Joey from “Friends,” we recognize the importance of giving and receiving in marketing. One of the best things to give and receive is feedback.
Without feedback, we would never be able to improve. And even though it’s hard, feedback is a great way to measure success.

With a post event survey, you’ll learn what attendees thought about the event, how they heard about it, and what they enjoyed most. Measuring attendee satisfaction will help you improve your event marketing and figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
In fact, 90% of virtual event organizers use surveys to measure attendee satisfaction. And 80% report that attendee engagement and satisfaction were KPIs used for measuring event success.
To design a post event survey, you’ll want to ask several types of questions — from Yes/No, rating, to open-ended questions.
Below, let’s review the best post event survey questions to ask.

1. How satisfied were you with the event?
First and foremost, it’s important to ask attendees about their overall satisfaction with an event. You can also ask participants to rate specific things including the venue, date, speakers, vendors, catering, quality of sessions, amount of sessions, and more.
This will help you gauge specifically how well you did in each area, but also the overall satisfaction of attendees.
This is probably the first and most important question that is asked on most surveys. It’s a great starting point for the specific questions that follow next.
2. What was your favorite experience or moment of the event?
This question should be open-ended and let the participants describe what they liked most about the event and why they liked that moment.
This will help you discover what you did right and what experiences are most valuable to your event attendees.
With this information, you can get an idea about how to plan events in the future and figure out if there’s anything that a majority of your attendees agree with or want to see again.
3. What could we improve on?
Again, this will be an open-ended question that lets your participants give constructive feedback. While it’s hard to hear sometimes, this will help you figure out what resonates with your audiences and what doesn’t.
By tracking what audiences don’t like, you can then improve and iterate future events so people don’t have those barriers about attending your next event.
The point of getting feedback isn’t just to receive positive feedback, but to figure out what isn’t working as well.
4. How useful was the event?
This is a great question for figuring out how actionable the event content was. Did your attendees find the information useful? Did they learn anything? Were they able to apply something they learned from your event into their work flow?
Depending on the type of event you’re holding, this can be a great way to figure out if people felt they got their money’s worth.
5. Did the event meet your expectations?
Similar to the question above, this question measures if people got what they thought they were going to get. This answers the question, “Did my audience achieve their goal by attending this event?”
This should be an open-ended question that allows users to expand and explain why the event met their expectations, or why it didn’t.
6. How likely would you be to attend our events in the future?
With this question, you’ll learn how many people plan to keep up to date with your events. If they were generally satisfied, they’ll say yes. If they weren’t, they’ll say no.
This does a good job of figuring out how well you marketed and sold your company as an authority and trustworthy leader in the industry.
7. Would you recommend our events to a friend or colleague?
Given that people are more likely to purchase a product their friend has shared with them and the importance of customer reviews, referrals are a great way to measure how satisfied your event attendees are.
Liking your event or products isn’t enough — do they like you enough to talk about you with their friends? That’s the true mark of success for an event.
8. Did you have an opportunity and place to ask questions and participate?
Whether you provided online support or you had event helpers around the building, it’s important to note whether attendees noticed that help and if they felt supported. When you run an event, there are bound to be questions about registration, access to certain workshops, and more.
This question lets you know that your audience knew where to go if they had a question. If they didn’t feel like they had a space to ask questions, then you can do better about promoting your support channels.
9. What would have made this event better?
This is a great question to crowdsource event ideas from your target audience. What do they want to see? What gaps did they see in your event from competitors? With this question, you’ll be able to brainstorm ways to improve your next event.
10. Why did you attend this event?
You can use this question as a way to inform your pre event marketing. This will let you know what your audience liked about your marketing and what they expected from you. This open-ended question will give you a chance to show up for your audience and give them what they want.
11. How did you hear about this event?
Again, this is a great way to evaluate your pre event marketing. Where are attendees learning about your event? What marketing channels are working best? What marketing channels aren’t working at all?
This will tell you where to focus your pre event marketing for your next event and let you know places where you need to pay more attention and improve on.
12. Have you attended this event before?
A great metric to keep track of is how many repeat attendees you have coming to your regular or annual events. This will let you know how many people see the value in your event and want to continue attending.
Again, this metric will let you know where to focus your marketing efforts. Do you want to increase repeat attendance? Then perhaps you need to focus on the customer experience during the event. Do you have great repeat customers but not enough new acquisitions? This will let you know that you need to focus on pre event marketing channels.
13. Would you want to attend this event again in the future?
This question, while similar to one of the above, measures how likely someone is to attend the same event in the future. Do they see value in attending this event every year? Or do they feel like they got everything they needed?
Again, just like it’s easier to retain customers than get new ones, it’s easier to convince former participants to attend the same event again. This will reveal if your audience is excited about coming to your event in the future and then you can compare with the number of attendees who actually came back the next year.
14. Have you attended our other events before?
This question will let you know how many loyal followers you have. Are the people coming to your events in your community? Or are these new people who haven’t heard of your brand before? This will help you measure where you’re acquiring event attendees.
15. Were you satisfied with the amount of activities/workshops?
This is a specific question that measures satisfaction with the quantity of activities or workshops available to attendees. Essentially, was there enough for your participants to do during the event. Or was there too much? Either way, this question is important to figure out if you and your audience are aligned on what content they want.
16. Were you satisfied with the quality of the content?
Once you know how much content to offer your audience, it’s time to ask about the quality of the content. Did they find the information helpful? Was this worth paying for? This will help establish trust with your audience that you can present high quality content and information that they find valuable and useful.
This will also help you gauge what content your audience is interested in. If they were not satisfied with the quality, it could be because the type of content, the speakers, or the way it was presented.
17. How helpful was the staff at the event?
This is an excellent question that will help you figure out how your staff performed during this event. When attendees asked questions or used support, was the staff friendly and helpful? Or was there a staffing issue?
This will help you figure out how quickly issues were resolved and if participants enjoyed their experience.
18. What was your biggest takeaway from the event?
Again, this helps you determine what people were able to learn from your event and what they got out of it. Does that align with your goals for the event? If not, this is a great way to learn what people took away from your event and what they expected.
19. How satisfied were you with the virtual experience?
If you’re holding a virtual event, it’s important to add post event questions that measure the success of the virtual experience.
You can leave this as a rating and/or an optional open-ended question to let people explain why they were or were not satisfied with the virtual experience. Attendees might comment on the ease of navigation or the audio quality, for instance.
20. What were your favorite virtual features?
If you offered any special online features or an event app, this is the place to figure out what your attendees thought about those features. This lets you measure the success of your virtual platform overall — did this platform provide features that your audience liked? Or were there other features they wished were available?
21. How easy to navigate was the platform for the event?
Similarly, this question is meant to measure the effectiveness of your online platform for your virtual events. If the platform isn’t intuitive or easy for participants to use, then they probably won’t consider coming back for your other events. This will help you gauge if improvements need to be made to the online experience.
22. How satisfied were you with the networking opportunities provided?
Lots of marketing events are meant to allow networking and a lot of people attend these events to network with other professionals. If networking is something that your audience wants from you, it’s important to measure the success of your networking opportunities.
This can be a rating question or an open-ended question so your attendees can elaborate on what they liked about the networking opportunities or didn’t like.
23. What topics would you want to see more of at future events?
Again, it’s always a good idea to learn what content your audience wants to see. How can you figure that out? Just ask.
In your survey, you can ask what type of topics they’re interested in learning about in the future. This will also give you new perspectives and content ideas for your next event.
24. How did this event impact your perception of our company?
This is a great question for learning how effective your brand story and messaging is at your event. Is your branding clear through your event marketing materials? How does it fit in to the larger strategic picture? This question will let you track how effective your event was in terms of branding.
25. Please share any additional comments, thoughts, suggestions for future events.
Of course, ending with an open-ended question where participants can leave feedback on any area is a best practice. You want your attendees to feel like they can tell you their overall thoughts and opinions.
Hopefully the questions in your survey got your attendees thinking and they might also feel like there are other topics to cover. Since you can’t ask every question you’d probably like to, this helps you figure out what’s important to your audience.
Post event surveys are mainly used to measure how successful an event was. These surveys will give you information that you need to improve future events.
Now, post event survey questions aren’t the only type of surveys you’ll want to send out. You might consider also sending a pre-event survey. A pre-event survey will help you measure your current event marketing, see what got people excited about the event in the first place, and how to tailor the event to the actual attendees.
Here are some examples of what that might look like.

1. How did you hear about this event?
This question is great to ask either before or after an event. You could send this in a pre event survey to figure out what marketing channels are working the best. This will help you make changes to your budget and priorities when you continue marketing the event.
2. What are you most excited about?
With this pre event question, you can gauge what people are most looking forward to. Again, this will help inform your marketing budget and priorities so you can fulfill any customer expectations.
3. Have you attended this event before?
Similar to the first question, this can be asked before or after an event. The reason to find this out before an event is to see if you are getting a lot of repeat attendees or if you need to do more marketing to previous attendees.
4. Why did you choose to attend this event?
This is a great question to ask before an event because it will tell you what people are most looking forward to. This will help you prepare for an event so you can deliver on what people are expecting.
5. Do you have special accommodations you would like us to be aware of?
Logistically, this is important to know. If you don’t have a lot of attendees, and accommodations need to be made, then you should be aware of what those accommodations are. If you’re holding a larger event, you need to consider the type of accommodations you’ll need to make for various attendees.
6. Was there any event information that was difficult for you to find?
Again, this will help you make adjustments to the pre event and registration process while it’s still going on. This should help you get more registrants, ultimately, because you can pivot your strategy in real time.
7. Which social media platform do you use the most?
If you don’t have a plan for how you’re going to communicate with your attendees during the event, social media is a great option. But what platform would work best? You can use a pre event survey to learn what social media platforms your audience uses the most, so you can provide helpful information during your event.
Conducting pre or post event surveys is an important part of measuring the success of your event team and marketing team. To do this, you can use a survey tool, like HubSpot. Regardless of the tool you use, remember that the goal of sending a survey is to receive both positive and constructive feedback so that you can improve your event marketing and events.