Creating an effective design of digital marketing assets that boosts customer engagement can be challenging for many businesses. Whether it’s your website, or you use blogs and emails in your marketing strategy, the design of these pieces impacts the overall success of your marketing efforts.
As a Senior Digital Marketing Strategist at KWSM, I have worked with dozens of clients on their digital marketing plans. I have seen firsthand how great design directly impacts the results our team obtains in our marketing campaigns.
I recently participated in KWSM’s Mentorship Program, and I wanted to explore the best practices of design and test ways to improve the blogs and emails I was already creating for my clients.
In this blog, I’ll share how the mentorship program helped me boost my design skills and get results for my clients.
KWSM’s Mentorship Program
The KWSM mentorship program is an annual event where individuals on our team master a new skill in digital marketing by pairing up with another team member to be mentored. As part of the program, teams of two or three mentors and mentees work together during a 12-week training curriculum..
This annual program is something I look forward to and have had the opportunity to participate in for the past four years. In my past partnerships, I was able to focus on social media ads, public relations, and Google ads. I have grown immensely in my expertise during each round of the program and this year was no different.
For my focus this 2023 program year, I teamed up with Creative Director Angie Smith to learn how to make effective visual designs. During this training, I identified several goals to tackle:
- Understand WordPress and web design best practices
- Develop a new blog template to improve engagement
- Develop a new newsletter template to improve engagement
Here’s a look at what I learned during my mentorship and how I applied this knowledge to my client work.
Why is Design Important?
Before getting started with rebuilding designs for my clients, I needed to understand the basics of design including why it was so important.
The Interaction Design Foundation defines graphic design as the craft of “applying visual hierarchy and page layout techniques, designers use typography and pictures to meet users’ specific needs and focus on the logic of displaying elements in interactive designs, to optimize the user experience.”
Studies show that the human brain processes images faster than text. And as the quote above states, design plays a vital role in this processing and the user experience for any type of marketing. Taking into account basic design elements such as shapes, colors, form, line, and value an effective design should be both visually appealing and move users through content to take action. This is the specific piece of design I aimed to apply to my client’s work.
How to Improve Blog Engagement with Design
For the first part of the mentorship program, Angie and I reviewed several recent blogs for one of my clients. What we found was users were not staying on the site very long or completing the form at the bottom of the blog. Instead, they were coming to the blog and immediately clicking on a Service page or Contact Us link in the main navigation menu that sat directly above the blog title. We also noticed that important pieces of the blogs such as quotes and stats were getting lost in the rest of the copy.
Our goal was to improve the time users were spending on the blog, highlight quotes and stats, and ultimately drive form fills to the service form at the bottom of the blog. To do this we started with a few questions.
- Can we add color to the hyperlinks to make them stand out?
- Can we add more headings and subheadings to help with readability?
- Can we adjust the blog image to elevate the display and make it feel less flat?
- Should we embed Reels?
- How do we display authority quotes?
- Should we add an anchor to the top of the blog to take people to the contact form at the bottom?
Based on these questions, we were able to develop a design that highlighted the most important elements of the blog and was visually stimulating. Our new design included graphic touches to images, form fill anchors, bolded quotes, and pop our sections for different paragraphs in the blog. Here’s a look at our design changes:
We tested this layout on two blogs and saw the following results:
- 50% increase in time on site
- 5 total anchor button clicks
- 11 form starts
This is a great improvement from the traction we were receiving on our previously posted blog.
How to Improve Email Engagement with Design
The second part of our mentorship focused on improving and email newsletter design. One of my clients sends newsletters each month. However, internal clicks have slowly declined in the past several months. Previously, we were driving users to multiple places on the website. However, my client was ultimately looking to gather leads from this newsletter.
Angie and I took a look at the current design of the newsletter and came up with a plan to cut out the copy we didn’t need and create more of an eblast feel. Our goal was to drive email button clicks and help improve the client’s lead generation through these emails.
To do this, we created a service-based graphic that broke down the offerings of the business. We also cut down the number of sections of the email in half to eliminate excessive copy.
Here’s the before and after of our design.
My Takeaways
The KWSM Mentorship Program is such an amazing experience. I began this mentorship with little knowledge of backend design and a passion for improvement. Angie was a fantastic teacher and made understanding these changes simple. She was able to hone in teaching me the skills to improve my blog and email design in a way that helped get real results.
Not only did these lessons help me with the above projects, but they gave me the confidence to apply what I learned to work for my other clients. Now I am already seeing results from this work!
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