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To make email marketing campaigns accessible for all customers involves ensuring that everyone, regardless of ability or disability, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with your emails.
Here are some key aspects:
Enhancing the Readability and Structure of Your Email Campaign:
For optimal readability, it's essential to craft content that steers clear of jargon, acronyms, and intricate sentence structures. This ensures your message remains easily understandable and straightforward for your audience.
Consider organizing your content into concise, grammatically sound paragraphs. Embrace bullet points, headers, and subheaders to segment your text effectively, emphasizing key points. Establishing a logical sequence aids screen readers in accurately interpreting your content, fostering accessibility for all recipients.
Choose an appropriate font size and color
To ensure your email campaign reaches all users, it's crucial to consider text color, size, and contrast against the background.
For font size, stick to a minimum of 14px for body text, maintain a clear hierarchy, and opt for high-contrast colors such as black on white to enhance readability. Avoid red-green combinations and use additional cues besides color.
Don't forget to test your emails across various devices and platforms to guarantee readability and accessibility for a broader audience.
Add alt text and captions to your images and videos
Primarily for people who are visually impaired, alt tags provide context to what an image is displaying. Alt tags are also important for SEO and are a key contributing search engine ranking factor since it informs search engine crawlers and allows them to index an image correctly. Include short alt text less than about 100 characters for all informative images.
Adding captions to your videos makes them accessible to more people. It helps those who are deaf or hard of hearing, benefits language learners, and allows viewers in noisy environments to follow along. Captions also boost SEO and broaden your global audience.
Additionally, ensure hyperlinks and buttons in your email campaigns are easily identifiable and clickable. Use descriptive link text that makes sense even out of context, benefiting screen reader users.
Test your email on different devices and browsers
Testing your email campaigns across various devices and browsers is essential to ensure a consistent and optimized experience for all recipients.
Here are some best practices:
Responsive Design Testing: Create emails with responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes. Test on various devices like smartphones, tablets, and desktops to ensure readability and proper formatting.
Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing: Test your emails across popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Ensure consistency in appearance and functionality. There are many affordable Testing Tools you can use to test your email campaigns by simulating how emails render on different devices and email clients. If your emails contain interactive elements like buttons or forms, ensure they work seamlessly across devices and browsers.
Subject Line and Preheader Testing: Preview how your subject line and preheader text appear on different devices to optimize for maximum impact and readability.
Check Rendering Speed: Assess how quickly your emails load on different devices and connections. Optimize images and content to maintain a smooth experience.
Accessibility Testing: Verify that your emails are accessible to users with disabilities by checking compatibility with screen readers and ensuring proper contrast and text sizing.
Follow the accessibility guidelines and best practices
Accessibility guidelines and best practices that apply to email marketing can be found in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Here is the link to the Web Accessibility review page: https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary. You can also download the The Essential Email Accessibility Checklist from the Bureau of Internet Accessibility: https://www.boia.org/essential-email-accessibility-checklist. Compliance with laws such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR (for the EU/EEA), CASL (for Canada), CCPA (for California), and PECR (for the UK) is crucial for email marketing campaigns. These regulations mandate explicit consent, clear identification, and opt-out mechanisms to safeguard user privacy and ensure equitable practices.
Cheers,
Dom LeRoux
Web/E-commerce Project Manager
