HubSpot email templates – a beginner’s guide

If you are an email marketer, you have probably invested time, money, and effort in creating the best email templates (be it HubSpot email templates or any other), so you’d probably want your message to resonate across a heterogenous segment of audiences, even those who might suffer from visual or auditory disabilities and the like of it. Better email accessibility inevitably translates into enhanced assimilation, click-throughs, and, ultimately, more business. 

In the blog that follows, we will decode the basics of email accessibility, its importance, and ways to ensure that your email campaigns are accessible to all people. 

What is email accessibility?

The core idea behind email accessibility is the thought that the content you put out should be in a form that the intended audience can absorb and act upon; for instance, the content can be read and listened to with assistive technology. 

When you set your mind to crafting accessible emails, you try to put yourself in the “shoes” of those who might not be as blessed as you either physically or mentally and then deploy best practices for writing, coding, and designing HTML emails that everyone, irrespective of their personal challenges can benefit from.

To give you more reasons to curate accessible emails, here’s a fact check from the USA, people with disabilities are responsible for contributing approximately USD 225 billion to the consumer market. When you look at it from a business perspective, making your content accessible is very much worth the investment. 

The Importance of Enabling Accessibility In Email Marketing & The Types of Disabilities One Must Consider

When you overlook the need for crafting accessible emails, you risk the pitfalls and missed opportunities resulting from not catering to those who might face certain challenges. This will not only have business repercussions but also augur not too well for your brand. Let’s look at the benefits of giving your brand the extra human touch. 

1. An accessible design enhances usability for all your subscribers: You never know whether your subscribers face color blindness or have vision issues; it’s better to look out for all in your emails and fix those color contrasts, text placements, button designs, and font sizes. 
2. Your campaign reaches more people, and your emails experience enhanced engagement and retention rates: When you put in the effort to go that extra mile, people notice, and usually, it doesn’t go unrewarded. This can also be a solid differentiator from your competitors and give your brand the winning edge it deserves. If your CTAs are accessible by one and all, the click-throughs will definitely reflect the same emotion. 
3. Minimize legal risks: Yes! The threat of not following accessibility best practices is real. The year 2022 witnessed a 12% increase in the number of website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court. Other than the financial damage on the anvil, the risk of tarnishing the brand’s reputation is a rather large one to ignore. 

As an informed and empathetic marketer, you need to account for a range of visual and auditory impairments, cognitive issues, physical limitations, speech impairments, and neurological conditions. 

Strategies To Make Your Emails Accessible For One & All

1. Write accessible email copy: As a developer, copywriter it is pertinent to look out for the following pointers: 

• Avoid justified copies; left-aligned text works best for most on the web.
• Select the right kind of typeface, one that is not too condensed and is evenly spaced out.
• Deploy semantic markups by correctly using <p> and <h> tags.
• Remember to apply role=” presentation” on All Your Representational Tables.
• Pay attention to tables and layouts
• Keep testing with the A/B method and tools 
• Remember to deploy different Alt Text for each image; even if they are similar, you wouldn’t want the screen reader to describe two images in the same way.
• Refrain from adding the image title text along with the alt text. This will lead to duplicity, as the screen reader will read out both the alt text and the image text resulting in a subpar auditory experience. 
• Ditch long and complex sentences for simpler words and shorter sentences. 
• Copywriters should compose succinct and effective alt text instead of developers doing the job.
• Give your email copy space to breathe. Cluttered copy or extremely fine print can have repercussions for those with visual impairments. 

2. Design email campaigns that render equally well for all:

• Go with a readable font with a large font size (choose a minimum of 16 px).
• Stick to live text instead of relying on graphics alone.
• Ensure that your normal text maintains a contrast ratio of 4:5:1 against the background.
• Refrain from using colors to convey meaning as it’s confusing for those with color blindness, and of course, screen readers cannot discern colors. 
• Avoid using flashy animations that can affect those with triggers for photosensitive epilepsy.
• Employ a good amount of white space to avoid distracting users with ADD/ADHD.

3. Code accessible emails:

• Use em units to code font size instead of px since em is relative and more flexible.
• Stick to coding bulletproof buttons with live text and add alt text for images. 
• When you use <em> instead of <i> to italicize text, <em> tells the screen reader to emphasize, while <i> works better for italicizing the text. The former works best with screen-assisted readers.
• When as a developer, you set tables to role=”presentation”, you let the assisted technology know that the table is used for serving layout purposes instead of simply presenting data. 
• Remember to specify the lang attribute, you ensure that the screen reader pronounces the words correctly. 
• Refrain from making everything a link, as every link will be read out. 
• Resort to a subtle :hover style along with a :focus style so that people know what’s clickable, and it renders equally well when navigating with a keyboard or mouse.
• Never forget to add a Plain Text versio

Summary

While there are a number of tools that can assist you with testing your email accessibility, getting humans to test your emails and give real feedback still rules the roost! If you are an email marketer looking for the best HubSpot email templates or want professionals to craft accessible email campaigns, Email Uplers is here to help! Do drop by to say hi! 🙂

About the Author:

Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.