Email Design That Actually Drives Clicks

Welcome back, Creative Con. Hope you stretched your legs, refueled, maybe even checked your inbox. Though, let's be honest, 90% of those emails probably sucked. Here's the thing.

The subject line might get the open, but once you're inside, the design is what makes you click or makes you hit delete faster than a bad cold email from a SAS founder. Our next speaker has seen it all, the good, the bad, and the downright embarrassing. And he's on a mission to make sure your emails don't end up in the trash heap. He's the CEO of Retentio, where he helps brand create emails that not only look sharp, but actually perform, pulling clicks, driving revenue, and, you know, proving that email is far from dead.

So, let's drop some fire emojis in the chat and give a loud creative con welcome to Bobby Callahan. Hey, my name is Bobby Callahan and I'm super excited to be here. I heard about Creative Con when it was just an idea and so it's pretty surreal to kind of look at these slides and be here. I'm super grateful and uh shout out to Chase for just being an awesome human being and building a incredible business and an incredible tool that me and my team use every day.

My name is Bobby Callahan and I'm the founder of Retentio. We're a retention marketing agency. We drive email, SMS, and direct mail sales to direct to consumer brands and we kind of really want to drive high margin sales to your business so that you can scale your ads higher. A lot of people and design teams talk about ads and they systematically approach ads to try and test different hooks and headlines and all these types of things so that they can generate learnings to generate their next batch to help find efficiency.

I don't see that same vigor on the email side. I don't see those same systems on the email side. And so I'm kind of here to talk about email design that actually drives clicks and how you can stay disciplined in earning those clicks. I have a lot that I want to cover today.

I want to talk about the volume of clicks versus the quality, just design in general, segmentation, zero party data. Uh there's a lot of awesome things that I think that brands can deploy that are quick wins and if they stay disciplined about it will compound over time. I want to start by kind of defining click volume versus click quality. You kind of hear quality over quantity in a lot of different facets of life.

And usually that's completely true. Uh but in marketing, although we want to try and drive more quality clicks, we also do want to drive clicks in general. Every click is an atbass for your website to kind of earn and nurture attention from people. And if there isn't an atbat, you don't have any ball to swing at, which means you can't hit that home run or earn that sale.

And so although quality is important and we're going to do a ton to earn quality clicks, we also do want to just earn clicks in general. And so as I kind of talk, I'll be kind of picking aside sometimes where it's like, hey, this is how we drive volume. This is how we drive quality. And then this is how we bring them together to to build a successful email program.

So from a click volume perspective, we want to just be adding more clickable surfaces, adding more opportunities for people to click. And from a click quality perspective, what can we do to engineer the clicks in a way where once we earn them, that gives us intent data on the individual. For an example, let's say the individual clicks on travel gear, that's intent. They're looking for travel gear.

What can we do with that data? How do we store that data? How do we use it to drive more and better clicks in the future? So, we'll kind of start with something that I want to call the more toclick principle.

And it's pretty simple. If there's more things to click on, there's more opportunities for clicks. Uh we don't want to clutter the space, but we do want to make sure that there's design paths in every module, right? So, if you look at the right here, you see there's kind of two opportunities to click, which is two buttons.

But if you look at the left, you see that there's a banner section, there's a button, there's a block section, and there's a footer section with categories. Um, this is low fidelity, but you can see these green arrows representing opportunities for our users to move to the next stage. Again, we don't want to clutter, but we do want to give people more to click. This will just get us more clicks in general.

This is from a volume perspective. However, we don't want to overdesign. So, when you look at the initial slide, you can see that there was all these green arrows, but in practice, it's actually not that cluttered. So, in this example, very simple.

The design is supporting the message and there's not much decoration that can kill clarity. Right? We're talking about a blueberry protein pastry. Very simple body, very clear button.

We have a purple background. We have a purple blueberry protein pastry picture. We have a banner at top on the top that talks about something that's valuable, free shipping. Um, and then under we just have a module where people can kind of self-bucket themselves.

They can take the best offer that this brand has to offer, which is subscribe and save or they can just shop for different things, pastry, donuts, rolls, and chips. And so although in the initial slide it looks like there's all this stuff that we're building, if you design correctly, the design has a lot of room to breathe and there's not actually clutter, but there is a ton of opportunity. And different uh designs that I show you are going to have different levels of this, but this is just a very simple design to start. Lots of click paths, but very simple.

We really do want to focus on one message at a time. We do not want to get confused. We do not want to confuse our users. When we have clarity, our users have clarity and they can move to the next stage of the funnel if they're interested.

So, in this example here, we have one main job. We're talking about this offer, the buy these power cords, buy two of them, get one free. very simple, very clear code, a little bit of body just to talk through it. Um, we also have an opportunity at the bottom here.

It says get powered. So although that's not a button, that is somewhere you can click. Uh, and at the top we have a supporting banner that kind of talks about the urgency. So we have urgency, message, couple opportunities to click, and that's the job.

If someone's not interested, that's okay. We don't need to say a bunch of different things with a bunch of different buttons and get confused. It's okay that we're talking about the one thing, the buy two power cords, get one free. And then under this section, we can give more opportunities to click.

Uh but again, one thing at a time. If someone doesn't click, that's okay. That's actually data we can use. Be very clear and do not clutter from a design perspective and from a messaging perspective.

We need to be very clear. Clarity earns us more clicks and clarity also earns us better clicks because when we're clear and someone clicks, we know why they're clicking and that's data that we can use. We want to make things feel clickable. So, this is a design principle, very simple.

I took a Creative OS template and I kind of just designed the left versus the right. Uh, I took away the things that make the design clickable on the right and I kind of enhanced on the left a little bit here. So on the left you see that shop now button. It's bolded.

It has an arrow after it. It's green. It's clickable at the top. For a limited time, I threw an arrow at the end and I made it green.

It's clickable. When you take those things away, you kind of your eyes don't go anywhere meaningful. So on the right, your eyes are going to go to the green $30 value. You're going to go to the headline, but then you're not really going to find your way to the urgency, the limited time messaging, and the shop now button, which is where we want you to eventually go.

Buttons got to look like buttons. Links should look like links. And uh yeah, we need to drive action through the look and feel of the marketing material because without that, we're just not going to earn the clicks. Next, I want to talk about banners and banners that pull their weight.

Banners are awesome because they can be clickable or they can be supporting. So, there can be utility, there can be urgency and banners can earn clicks as well. So, here's a few examples here. You can see that in one scenario, we have a find a store near you.

This is a banner that can earn its own click. And then we have some that talk about, you know, offers and urgency and they're designed in different ways. You can see this save up to 25, you can say see the save up to 25% off one with the shop now underlined next to it. That's clickable.

People click that. Um, and that's our hero offer in that email. You can see that the code under it is a last call email. You can see the free shipping that we utilized earlier with a blue protein pastry email.

And so we have arrows, we have underlines, we have urgency. These are important. These drive awesome clicks and they drive urgency. So you're going to see banners and emails going forward.

Um, so keep an eye on those and kind of see how we're using it to either earn its own clicks or support the click that we really want to earn. blocks. Blocks are awesome because we can design blocks that we use in a ton of different emails. So, if you look at the email on the left, there is a block in the middle of it above the footer.

And in that situation, we want people to join a product testing program. And if we didn't have that block, we would just have the main section and the category section. But now we have been able to inject uh a new block that is potentially relevant or potentially moving someone slightly different in a slightly different way. Um you can see one of these blocks talks about a replacement program.

Uh this is for a fishing rod. So, if we were talking about the fishing rod and that was the hero of the the se of the email, we could put the replacement block under it and that just gives us more nurturing, more opportunity, and we're better off with that block. There's more opportunity to click. It's a section that we can pull out and push in when we need.

Uh, and we can kind of define these things that we want our people to do and add those blocks when we need to. And we can also change blocks based off segments. For example, you can see the loyalty points block. If someone's a loyalty member, we can add that and it can show their total points.

But if someone's not a loyalty member, maybe we switch it out for something else. And being strategic with these and eventually personalizing these blocks allows us to add more opportunity for click and personalize at a certain level of scale. So each block is its own click click path. Um kind of has a vertical flow so we can guide attention downwards.

And these are modular, testable and scalable. And so if your brand doesn't have blocks that have core places that we want to push people to, you should make those define those and start adding them to emails as a starting place. At the start, it'll just be more opportunity to click, but eventually if you get more sophisticated with it, you can start showing different blocks to different people to earn even more clicks that are quality. Next thing I want to talk about here is vertical success.

And so emails are 1,000 or 1200 pixels wide. Uh if you try to squeeze things into that 1,00 to 1200 pixel, you're going to have a lot of trouble. you can design down, not infinitely, but you can just scale your email down to fit more within it. So, this is more just a design principle that really helps with the look and feel of the email.

On the left here, you can see that I was trying to put a bunch of different call outs vertically or sorry, horizontally. So, the sugars and the calories over there. Um, I just added extra ones in this case to show that if I had more to that I wanted to communicate. Going left to right horizontally is not the right idea.

We want to go down so we can give everything space to breathe. Uh, so you can see on the right the sugar, the protein, the calories are to the left of the protein pastry and we're going down with it. This allows us to design mobile first. This makes everything bigger.

So we can kind of instead of for example the more gains less sugar that headline if we tried to fit that all in one headline we are not like it's just we're going to have to make it super small to make it all fit. But by putting things on two lines we get to make it bigger bigger type bigger buttons we can design down and not ac across. This allows us to be mobile first which is where most of our traffic is going to come from anyway. And this is just a subtle way that we can earn more clicks because we're not cluttering or giving things space to breathe and we can kind of move from there.

The next thing here is readability. So this kind of goes back to our first our previous point, but readability actually drives clicks because if someone cannot scan what they're looking at, they're not going to be able to understand if they're interested or not, and they're not going to put in the work. consumers don't put in the work. Uh you have to put in the work for them to even attempt to be interested.

So the kind of examples you're seeing here are when we keep making the text smaller and smaller. Uh and it just kind of dilutes the message a little bit. When you look at the left versus the right, uh it's just clearer and that's all that matters because when I try to read the body of the second one here, it's I have to actually squint a little bit. And so making things bigger, giving things space, making things scannable, that's important.

Uh, a font minimum that we use on Figma is 34. I'd actually maybe change that to 36. Designing down and making things readable and big and simple, that drives you clicks. When we overdesign and we add a bunch of decoration and we try to fit things in horizontally, it just creates noise.

And when people see noise, they just go somewhere else. And so focus on readability. Make sure things are bigger. Don't design for mobile and design downwards.

This in and of itself will earn you more clicks because people will be able to consume content and consume the content with clarity because they'll be able to scan it. It'll be a clear message. If they're interested, they'll click on email. These people have gone to your website, given you their email, and now have opened an email from you.

These people are interested. You need to make it very clear and scannable for them so that they can navigate to where they want to go to whether it be in that email or when they see an email that pertains to something that they're interested in. The like the fish is on the bait here, but you got to make the bait usable. like you got to be able to reel them in actually and make sure that you know we did all this hard work to get them to this email.

Can we actually reel them in now that they're on the base? And what that means is being clear and making things big enough to scan. The next thing here is going to be about copy and imagery. These have to align because if they don't, you're gonna have a big problem.

you're going to start to give mixed signals and that kills clicks. So before we just talked about clarity and we talked about scannability, but now we need to talk about okay, these people are consuming the signal. Is there congruency? On the left, you can see that we have a vanilla review for a vanilla product.

But on the right, the review is actually about a chocolate product, but everything else is signaling vanilla. I see this all the time, especially with reviews. People will give a review in an email or they'll show a review and then it doesn't it isn't congruent with everything that's around it. And so this very small, but these kinds of things add up.

Make sure the copy and the imagery are aligning so that when people are skimming, they can actually commit to it. Because if I'm skimming the one on the right, I think it's vanilla. But then it says shop milk chocolate. I get confused.

I'm now not interested. I'm going to move on. So be congruent. Be clear.

This is a fun one. CTA copy. So a lot of CTA copy is just like shop now or learn more. And this is kind of boring.

Uh I'm just looking at this screen. There's a lot of orange buttons. That's totally an accident. Uh but looking at these pieces of copy, we do not want to make them generic.

Sometimes we can shop best sellers, but shop best sellers is more specific than shop now. Specificity is sexy and it allows people to either read it and it makes it maybe feel more clickable, sound more clickable, or it actually speaks to what they want. For example, we're able to add urgency to the message. So save before midnight, right?

Hey, if that just said shop now, it's not interesting. Build your necklace, bounce back faster, get the recipe, get pet relief, see the lab results, use my points, you know, read her story. You can kind of read what's on the screen here, but that is all more sexy than shop now. Get better sleep.

If I'm talking about a sleep product, if I say shop now versus get better sleep, like get better sleep is going to earn more clicks. And so a lot of things I'm talking about are small, but together they add up for more clicks and better clicks. We want to be specific and when we can, we want to kind of reduce risk and add that urgency. So, find my perfect bait or save before midnight or shop and save 20% off.

Like, these are specific. They're adding clarity, urgency, and when people are scanning so fast, like shop and save 20% off. Like, having the offer there might be the winner because maybe they don't understand they have a 20% off. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.

Um, maybe they're reading a recipe email and there's like three or four buttons, but one of them is get the actual recipe. not learn more, but get the recipe. We live in such a cluttered world where we're scrolling and we're moving through so much content so fast where although if you look at the marketing material for like 10 seconds yourself as the marketer, it might feel clear that yeah, that learn more button is forget the recipe, people are moving at a whiplash speed and they're trying to get through all this information. Uh there's a stat that says that we scroll through the Empire State Building like the height of the Empire State Building.

That is the length in which we scroll on a daily basis. And so clarity at all costs. We need to be clear, we need to be specific, we need to be fun. Uh on one hand, we need to be clear, but on the other hand, we need to earn that click with a little bit of gest or urgency or outcomebased messaging.

You know, if I say shop now versus get pet relief, you know, get pet relief, that's something that I might really feel that I want to do because if I see my pet isn't in a state of relief, like I want to give that to them. I don't want to shop now. I want to get pet relief, right? So, be clear, earn clicks.

This kind of stuff really matters. Okay. So a lot of what I've talked about is like being clear with the message, how to design clearly, how to give more opportunity to clear click, etc., etc. Now I want to talk about more of the qualitative stuff and what are these clicks like and how do we know if they're good or bad or what can we do with these clicks?

Um, clicks are intent, right? When I click on something, I'm kind of showing that I want that thing. Again, the state that these people are in, they've gone to your website through an ad. They've signed up for your popup.

They've received x amount of emails from you already without unsubscribing. Like, these are people that might be interested. And to start to learn why they're interested, it allows us to personalize to these way in a to these people in a way that's worth it. So, this is what I call a quiz footer.

And so, what you can see on the screen now are different footers. And they could be categorical, they could be usage based, it kind of it can be uh outcome based. Not that it doesn't matter, but having a quiz footer versus not having a quiz footer is a big difference. And then once you have a quiz footer, you can kind of mess with is it categorical based, is it outcome based, is it whatever, whatever.

Um, you can organize by the product, you can organize by the use case, by the persona. But by adding these footers to the end of every email, you have a place for people to declare interest on the top left one. If I click Apple Watch three times as a user over my life uh consuming these emails, you now know that I have an Apple Watch. That's important.

And when we expand our segment for an Apple Watch sale, you know to include me. That talk about earning the click that actually is what earns sales, right? Because that level of relevance is amazing on the one under it, the dogs and cats or the horses or or whatever the case is like for that brand to know who has a horse versus who doesn't. the same way on the above to know who has an Apple Watch versus who doesn't.

That segment is so pure and like I if I know you have a horse and you've clicked that footer two times in your life, I'm going to put you down a flow that nurtures you with only that horse content or only that Apple Watch content. I might know that you're interested in rods and reels or just interested in potentially subscribing to a product because you've clicked on it twice on the footer over a certain period of time. I know I now know maybe the blocks that I'm giving you that we talked about earlier are all subscription based, right? If I know that you're looking for product that solves for skin versus sleep versus pain relief versus stress relief, like I can start to actually bucket you somewhere and that can allow me as I scale to either use the buckets passively by just including them in your segment sense or actually sending people through interestbased flows to earn more clicks from these people that are going to turn into sales.

super bullish on this. Personalization, especially with AI, is going to become a thing. Uh people talk about personalizing, but they really do not like personalization is actually going to become a thing because the cost of production is getting closer to zero with AI. And so now that we can produce messages at a higher scale, who gets what message is going to be the approach that we need to take.

On the ad side, you can make something about sleep and Meta is going to be the person who matchmakes that sleep person with that sleep ad, but on the email side, you have to be the matchmaker. You have to build the segmentation, the flows that actually will put people down the path. Right? If someone's clicking horses, Claio is not going to just start sending them horse content.

on the ad side. If someone's clicking on horses through other content, you have a horse ad, Meta will actually take the horse ad and show it to the person, but not on this side. So, we actually have to lay the pipes so that the water can move correctly through it. And the water is just the people that are declaring interest.

And so everything we've talked about thus far is like how do we be clear single message earn as many clicks as we can just through sheer clarity sheer design and sheer opportunity. But then we need to talk about what happens next and how do we use the these declared interests and these signals to stack the deck in our favor to actually market against the people that are literally telling us what they're interested because we gave them an opportunity to do so in every single email. So yeah, better clicks through zero party data. Every click is going to teach you something.

Tag, save, and turn these clicks into segments. Because then what we can start to do is we can look at the unique clicks and the revenue per the unique clicks and we can actually start to figure out what's working and what do we need to do next. So here's a framework that kind of measures what matters. Uh if you look at any campaign, you can take the unique clicks uh you can take the revenue divided by the clicks and you can start to get your revenue per unique click and you can start to kind of build these graphs of like did it have a lot of unique clicks, did it get revenue per unique click, um when we get a lot of revenue per unique click and we get a lot of unique clicks, these are breakout performers.

These are emails that are driving both volume and value. But if we only get unique clicks, now we're potentially click baiting people because we don't have a lot of revenue per unique click, but we are grabbing people's interests. And so, how do we approach that? Um, you might get not that many unique clicks, but you get a really high revenue per unique click.

That's a niche winner, right? like maybe there's not that many horse people that I can send the email to. But when I send actual horse content to horse people, that revenue per unique click should skyrocket and we can kind of find all these niche winners, build all these niche flows and capitalize on their declared interest. And if we're not getting unique clicks and we're not driving revenue per unique click, that's an underperformer, right?

So breakout performer, people want this. It makes you money. Um, clickbait risk. These are cheap clicks, but the intent is weak.

Niche winners, smaller, but super profitable segments. This is something that's super underutilized. And then underperformers are, you know, no engagement and no return. And so what do we do?

We find our breakout performers. We scale and we templatize. We figure out why is this breaking out? Is it the content itself?

Is it the hierarchy of the email? Is it the subject line framing? Like when you analyze these breakout performers and start to modularly figure out how we can templatize this and bring these learnings forward, sometimes you have a breakout performer because you just added all these opportunities for clicks. So now going forward, let's do that.

Let's raise the average unique click that we earn. Uh if you're at ra risk of click baiting people, let's refine the clarity and the intent. Let's strip the message. make sure the CTA language is super clear and let's make sure it's very clear the message that we're showing people and let's see if there's any postclick continuity or congruence that we can add to it.

Right? If if we're just curiosity based and we're just attracting all these clicks but no buyers, we either need to make the landing page better or we need to realize we're kind of click baiting and maybe we don't want to do that. these niche winners that we find, so these high revenue per unique clicks. Um, we can test widening those segments to see if we can get more people into this or we can just tag these people and dynamically show them blocks or flows that would just lean into them heavier.

So we when we find a niche winner, which means the revenue per unique click is high, but there's not that many clicks, we can widen the audience, or we can just double down on these people and show them what they need to be shown. Uh, if we've seen underperformer, we can either simplify or scrap. Uh, we talked about that with the clickbait stuff where it was like, okay, we're click baiting, but are we actually clearing our message and sending people to the right page? On the underperformer side, it's the same thing.

Um, the only difference between underperformer and a clickbait is one got a lot of clicks, one didn't. And so on the underperformer side, we reduce the noise, isolate one message, retest it, and if the results are staying flat, we're going to kind of retire that angle. um leverage footer clicks. So, we get all these clicks, people are clicking on horse, people are clicking on Apple Watch.

Let's make sure that we're turning that engagement into flows. Uh this could also be on the discount side. Maybe there's an under $50 section that you add to every email in the footer. These could be discount buyers when it comes to Black Friday, like and we have a ton of people that are buying or interested in under $50 items.

Maybe if that bucket is big enough, we make a segment or we make a send for those people that's showing under $50 items, right? So, build the segments and then build these automatic follow-ups that happen. Uh, and then just start to operationalize your learning, right? You know, some people are going to be breakout performers or when I say people, I mean campaigns.

Some campaigns are going to be clickbaity. Some are going to be niche winnings. Figure out why it's a one of these things. Why is this a niche winner?

What's happening? Why is this clickbait? What are they actually interested or is it clickbait? And why is this a breakout performer?

Is the content? Is it the template? Is it, you know, whatever it is? And just stay really disciplined.

Actually try to look at these things, isolate the variables, figure out what's winning, keep it going, and start to compound. And if you do so, you're going to see the volume of clicks go up over time, and then you're going to see the dollars start to follow. This is just like going to the gym. Figure out what is happening.

Am I being clear? Why is this doing well or why is this not doing well? And kind of use this structure to figure out do I scale and templatize what's working? Do I expand the audience or just keep it niche or do I scrap what's happening and just move on to the next?

Um yeah, presend checklist here. You know, does the email have one job or is it trying to do three? Does the CTA look clickable? So, it's not like plain text or design elements.

It actually looks like a button. Does the copy, the image, the CTA, is it all telling one consistent story? And are we tagging our links so that every click is giving us data that we can use to approach these people differently in the future? Because if we compound these learnings, we start to stack the deck in our favor and start to market to these people in a way that follows the signal or the trail that they're giving us.

And finally, when you zoom out, can someone instantly see what matters? Can they scan? Are we guiding their eyes? Are we being clear?

All these things matter at the same So, shout out to Creative OS. Uh you I use this tool every single day. Go to their email section. You can see all these different brands and you can start to see these kind of things that I talked about and you can see them and how people are deploying them and you can start to judge emails and be like does this email follow our present checklist?

Does this is this email overdesigned? Is this simple enough? Is there enough opportunity to click? Are there sections where if they tag those clicks correctly, they can actually do more with them after?

Right? you start to see these things and then if you see an email you like or you see a module you like you can copy paste boom into Figma into Canva wherever it is you can build on top of those blocks and so that's everything. Thank you guys so so much. My name is Bobby Callahan.

If you ever need to reach out to me bobby retentio. Enjoy Creative Con and just stay disciplined with your email design and figure out how you can actually drive more clicks with email.