The digital and technological landscape is constantly changing — new products and technologies are popping up every day. Designers have to keep track of what is trending and where creative opportunities are. A great designer has the vision to analyze new technology, identify its potential, and use it to design better products or services.

Among the various technologies that we have today, there’s one that gets a lot of attention: Augmented Reality. Companies like Apple and Google realize the potential of AR and invest significant amounts of resources into this technology. But when it comes to creating an AR experience, many designers find themselves in unfamiliar territory. Does AR require a different kind of UX and design process?

As for me, I’m a big fan of learning-by-doing, and I was lucky enough to work on the Airbus mobile app as well as the Rokid AR glasses OS product design. I’ve established a few practical rules that will help designers to get started creating compelling AR experiences. The rules work both for mobile augmented reality (MAR) and AR glasses experiences.

Glossary

Let’s quickly define the key terms that we will use in the article:

• Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) is delivering augmented reality experienced on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets);
• AR Glasses are a wearable smart display with a see-through viewing an augmented reality experience.

1. Get Buy-In From Stakeholders

Similar to any other project you work for, it is vital that you get support from stakeholders as early in the process as is possible. Despite being buzzed about for years, many stakeholders have never used AR products. As a result, they can question the technology just because they don’t understand the value it delivers. Our objective is to get an agreement from them.

“Why do we want to use AR? What problem does it solve?” are questions that stakeholders ask when they evaluate the design. It’s vital to connect your design decisions to the goals and objectives of the business. Before reaching stakeholders, you need to evaluate your product for AR potential. Here are three areas where AR can bring a lot of value:

• Business Goals
  Understand the business goals you’re trying to solve for using AR. Stakeholders always appreciate connecting design solutions to the goals of the business. A lot of time business will respond to quantifiable numbers. Thus, be ready to provide an explanation off how your design is intended to help the company make more money or save more money.
• Helpfulness For Users
  AR will provide a better user experience and make the user journey a lot easier. Stakeholders appreciate technologies that improve the main use of the app. Think about the specific value that AR brings to users.
• Creativity
  AR is excellent when it comes to creating a more memorable experience and improving the design language of a product. Businesses often have a specific image they are trying to portrait, and product design has to reflect this.

Only when you have a clear answer to the question “Why is this better with AR?”, you will need to share your thoughts with stakeholders. Invest your time in preparing a presentation. Seeing is believing, and you’ll have better chances of buy-in from management when you show a demo for them. The demo should make it clear what are you proposing.

2. Discovery And Ideation

Explore And Use Solutions From Other Fields

No matter what product you design, you have to spend enough time researching the subject. When it comes to designing for AR, look for innovations and successful examples with similar solutions from other industries. For example, when my team was designing audio output for AR glasses, we learned a lot from headphones and speakers on mobile phones.

Design User Journey Using “As A User I Want” Technique

One of the fundamental things you should remember when designing AR experiences is that AR exists outside of the phone or glasses. AR technology is just a medium that people use to receive information. The tasks that users want to accomplish using this technology are what is really important.

“How to define a key feature set and be sure it will be valuable for our users?” is a crucial question you need to answer before designing your product. Since the core idea of user-centered design is to keep the user in the center, your design must be based on the understanding of users, their goals and contexts of use. In other words, we need to embrace the user journey.

When I work on a new project, I use a simple technique “As a [type of user], I want [goal] because [reason].” I put myself in the user’s shoes and think about what will be valuable for them. This technique is handy during brainstorming sessions. Used together with storyboarding, it allows you to explore various scenarios of interaction.

In the article “Designing Tomorrow Today: the Airbus iflyA380 App,” I’ve described in detail the process that my team followed when we created the app. The critical element of the design process was getting into the passenger’s mind, looking for insights into what the best user experience would be before, during and after their flight.

To understand what travelers like and dislike about the travel experience, we held a lot of brainstorming sessions together with Airbus. Those sessions revealed a lot of valuable insights. For example, we found that visiting the cabin (from home) before flying on the A380 was one of the common things users want to do. The app uses augmented reality so people can explore the cabin and virtually visit the upper deck, the cockpit, the lounges?—?wherever they want to go?—?even before boarding the plane.

App also accompanies passengers from the beginning to the end of their journey — basically, everything a traveler wants to do with the trip is wrapped up in a single app. Finding your seat is one of the features we implemented. This feature uses AR to show your seat in a plane. As a frequent traveler, I love that feature; you don’t need to search for the place at the time when you enter the cabin, you can do it beforehand — from the comfort of your couch. Users can access this feature right from the boarding pass — by tapping on ‘glass’ icon.

Narrow Down Use Cases

It might be tempting to use AR to solve a few different problems for users. But in many cases, it’s better to resist this temptation. Why? Because by adding too many features in your product, you make it not only more complex but also more expensive. This rule is even more critical for AR experience that generally requires more effort. It’s always better to start with simple but well-designed AR experience rather than multiple complex but loose designed AR experiences.

Here are two simple rules to follow:

• Prioritize the problems and focus on the critical ones.
• Use storyboarding to understand exactly how users will interact with your app.
• Remember to be realistic. Being realistic means that you need to strike a balance between creativity and technical capabilities.

Use Prototypes To Assess Ideas

When we design traditional apps, we often use static sketches to assess ideas. But this approach won’t work for AR apps.

Understanding whether a particular idea is good or bad cannot be captured from a static sketch; quite often the ideas that look great on paper don’t work in a real-life context.

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Thus, we need to interact with a prototype to get this understanding. That’s why it’s essential to get to prototyping state as soon as possible.

It’s important to mention that when I say ‘prototyping state’ I don’t mean a state when you create a polished high-fidelity prototype of your product that looks and work as a real product. What I mean is using a technique of rapid prototyping and building a prototype that helps you experience the interaction. You need to make prototypes really fast — remember that the goal of rapid prototyping is in evaluating your ideas, not in demonstrating your skills as a visual designer.

3. Design

Similar to any other product you design, when you work on AR product, your ultimate goal is to create intuitive, engaging, and clean interface. But it can be challenging since the interface in AR apps accounts both for input and output.

Physical Environment

AR is inherently an environmental medium. That’s why the first step in designing AR experience is defining where the user will be using your app. It’s vital to select the environment up front. And when I say ‘environment’, I mean a physical environment where the user will experience the app — it could be indoors or outdoors.

Here are three crucial moments that you should consider:

1. How much space users need to experience AR? Users should have a clear understanding of the amount of space they’ll need for your app. Help users understand the ideal conditions for using the app before they start the experience.
2. Anticipate that people will use your app in environments that aren’t optimal for AR. Most physical environments can have limitations. For example, your app is AR table tennis game but your users might not have a large horizontal surface. In this case, you might want to use a virtual table generated based on your device orientation.
3. Light estimation is essential. Your app should analyze the environment automatically and provide contextual guidance if the environment is not good enough. If the environment is too dark or too bright for your app, tell the user that they should find a better place to use your app. ARCore and ARKit have a built-in system for light estimation.

When my team designed Airbus i380 mobile AR experience, we took the available physical space into account. Also, we’ve considered the other aspects of interaction, such as the speed at which the user should make decisions. For instance, the user who wants to find her seat during the boarding won’t have too much time.

We sketched the environment (in our case, it was a plane inside and outside) and put AR objects in our sketch. By making our ideas tangible, we got an understanding of how the user will want to interact with our app and how our app will adapt to the constraints of the environment.

AR Realism And AR Objects Aesthetics

After you define the environment and required properties, you will need to design AR objects. One of the goals behind creating AR experience is to blend virtual with real. The objects you design should fit into the environment — people should believe that AR objects are real. That’s why it’s important to render digital content in context with the highest levels of realism.

Here are a few rules to follow:

• Focus on the level of details and design 3D assets with lifelike textures. I recommend using multi-layer texture model such as PBR (Physically Based Rendering model). Most AR development tools support it, and this is the most cost-effective solution to achieve an advanced degree of detail for your AR objects.
• Get the lighting right. Lighting is a very crucial factor for creating realism — the wrong light instantly breaks the immersion. Use dynamic lighting, reflect environmental lighting conditions on virtual objects, cast object shadows, and reflections on real-world surfaces to create more realistic objects. Also, your app should react to real-world changing of lighting.
• Minimize the size of textures. Mobile devices are generally less powerful than desktops. Thus, to let your scene load faster, don’t make textures too large. Strive to use 2k resolution at most.
• Add visual noise to AR textures. Flat-colored surfaces will look fake to the user’s eye. Textures will appear more lifelike when you introduce rips, pattern disruptions, and other forms of visual noise.
• Prevent flickering. Update the scene 60 times per second to prevent flickering of AR objects.

Design For Safety And Comfort

AR usually accompanied by the word ‘immersive.’ Creating immersive experience is a great goal, but AR immersion can be dangerous — people can be so immersed in smartphones/glasses, so they forget what is happening around them, and this can cause problems. Users might not notice hazards around them and bump into objects. This phenomenon is known as cognitive tunneling. And it caused a lot of physical traumas.

• Avoid users from doing anything uncomfortable — for example, physically demanding actions or rapid/expansive motion.
• Keep the user safe. Avoid situations when users have to walk backward.
• Avoid long play AR sessions. Users can get fatigued using AR for extended periods. Design stop points and in-app notifications that they should take a break. For instance, if you design an AR game, let users pause or save their progress.

Placement For Virtual Objects

There are two ways of placing virtual objects — on the screen or in the world. Depending on the needs of your project and device capabilities, you can follow either the first or second approach. Generally, virtual elements should be placed in world space if they suppose to act like real objects (e.g., a virtual statue in AR space), and should be placed as an on-screen overlay if they intended to be UI controls or information messages (e.g., notification).

‘Should every object in AR space be 3D?’ is a common question among designers who work on AR experiences. The answer is no. Not everything in the AR space should be 3D. In fact, in some cases like in-app notifications, it’s preferable to use flat 2D objects because they will be less visually distracting.

Avoid Using Haptic Feedback

Phone vibrations are frequently used to send feedback in mobile apps. But using the same approach in AR can cause a lot of problems — haptic feedback introduces extra noise and makes the experience less enjoyable (especially for AR Glasses users). In most cases, it’s better to use sound effect for feedback.

Make A Clear Transition Into AR

Both for MAR and AR glass experiences, you should let users know they’re about to transition into AR. Design a transition state. For the ifly380 app, we used an animated transition — a simple animated effect that user sees when taps on the AR mode icon.

Trim all the fat.

Devote as much of the screen as possible to viewing the physical world and your app’s virtual objects:

• Reduce the total number of interactable elements on the screen available for the user at one moment of time.
• Avoid placing visible UI controls and text messages in your viewport unless they are necessary for the interaction. A visually clean UI lends itself seamlessly to the immersive experience you’re building.
• Prevent distractions. Limit the number of times when objects appear on the user screen out of the blue. Anything that appears out of the blue instantly kills realism and make the user focus on the object.

AR Object Manipulation And Delineating Boundaries Between The ‘Augment’ And The ‘Reality’

When it comes to designing a mechanism of interaction with virtual objects, favor direct manipulation for virtual objects — the user should be able to touch an object on the screen and interact with it using standard, familiar gestures, rather than interact with separate visible UI controls.

Also, users should have a clear understanding of what elements they can interact with and what elements are static. Make it easy for users to spot interactive objects and then interact with them by providing visual signifiers for interactive objects. Use glowing outlines or other visual highlights to let users know what’s interactive.

When the user interacts with an object, you need to communicate that the object is selected visually. Design a selection state — use either highlight the entire object or space underneath it to give the user a clear indication that it’s selected.

Last but not least, follows the rules of physics for objects. Just like real objects, AR objects should react to the real-world environment.

Design For Freedom Of Camera

AR invites movement and motion from the user. One of the significant challenges when designing or AR is giving users the ability to control the camera. When you give users the ability to control the view, they will swing device around in an attempt to find the points of interest. And not all apps are designed to help the user to control the viewfinder.

Google identifies four different ways that a user can move in AR space:

1. Seated, with hands fixed.
2. Seated, with hands moving.
3. Standing still, with hands fixed.
4. Moving around in a real-world space.

The first three ways are common for mobile AR while the last one is common for AR glasses.

In some cases, MAR users want to rotate the device for ease of use. Don’t interrupt the camera with rotation animation.

Consider Accessibility When Designing AR

As with any other product we design, our goal is to make augmented reality technology accessible for people. Here are a few general recommendations on how to address real-world accessibility issues:

• Blind users. Visual information is not accessible to blind users. To make AR accessible for blind users, you might want to use audio or haptic feedback to deliver navigation instructions and other important information.
• Deaf or hard-hearing users. For AR experience that requires voice interaction, you can use visual signals as an input method (also known as speechreading). The app can learn to analyze lip movement and translate this data in commands.

If you’re interested in learning more practical tips on how to create accessible AR apps, consider watching the video talk by Leah Findlater:

Encourage Users To Move

If your experience demands exploration, remind users they can move around. Many users have never experienced a 360-degree virtual environment before, and you need to motivate them to change the position of their device. You can use an interactive object to do that. For example, during I/0 2018, Google used an animated fox for Google Maps that guided users to the target destination.

Remember That Animation Is A Designer’s Best Friend

Animation can be multipurpose. First, you can use a combination of visual cues and animation to teach users. For example, the animation of a moving phone around will make it clear what users have to do to initialize the app.

Second, you can use animation to create emotions.

One second of emotion can change the whole reality for people engaging with a product.

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Well-designed animated effects help to create a connection between the user and the product — they make the object feel tangible. Even a simple object such as loading indicator can build a bridge of trust between users and the device.

A critical moment about animation — after discovering the elements of design and finding design solutions for the animation base, it’s essential to spend enough time on creating a proper animated effect. It took lots of iterations to finish a loading animation that you see above. You have to test every animation to be sure it works for your design and be ready to adjust color, positioning, etc. to give the best effect.

Prototype On The Actual Device

In the interview for Rokid team, Jeshua Nanthakumar mentioned that the most effective AR prototypes are always physical. That’s because when you prototype on the actual device, from the beginning, you make design work well on hardware and software that people actually use. When it comes to unique displays like on the Rokid Glasses, this methodology is especially important. By doing that you’ll ensure your design is implementable.

My team was responsible for designing the AR motion design language and loading animation for AR glasses. We decided to use a 3D sphere that will be rotated during the loading and will have nice reflections on its edges. The design of the animated effect took two weeks of hard work of motion designers and it looked gorgeous on high-res monitors of our design team, but the final result wasn’t good enough because the animation caused motion sickness.

Motion sickness often caused by the discrepancies between the motion perceived from the screen of AR Glasses and the actual movement of the user’s head. But in our case, the root cause of the motion sickness was different — since we put a lot of attention in polishing details like shapes, reflections, etc. unintentionally we made users focus on those details while the sphere was moving.

As a result, the motion happened in the periphery, and since humans are more sensitive to the moving objects in the periphery this caused motion sickness. We solved this problem by simplifying the animation. But it’s critical to mention that we won’t be able to find this problem without testing on the actual device.

If we compare the actual procedure of testing of AR apps with traditional GUI apps, it will be evident that testing AR apps require more manual interactions. A person who conducts testing should determine whether the app provides the correct output based on the current context.

Here are a few tips that I have for conducting efficient usability testing sessions:

• Prepare a physical environment to test in. Try to create real-world conditions for your app — test it with various physical objects, in different scenes with different lighting. But the environment might not be limited to scene and lighting.
• Don’t try to test everything all at once. Use a technique of chunking. Breaking down a complex flow into smaller pieces and testing them separately is always beneficial.
• Always record your testing session. Record everything that you see in the AR glass. A session record will be beneficial during discussions with your team.
• Testing for motion sickness.
• Share your testing results with developers. Try to mitigate the gap between design and development. Make sure your engineering team knows what problem you face.

Conclusion

Similar to any other new technology, AR comes with many unknowns. Designers who work on AR projects have a role of explorers — they experiment and try various approaches in order to find the one that works best for their product and delivers the value for people who will use it.

Personally, I believe that it’s always great to explore new mediums and find new original ways of solving old problems. We are still at the beginning stages of the new technological revolution — the exciting time when technologies like AR will be an expected part of our daily routines — and it’s our opportunity to create a solid foundation for the future generation of designers.

(cc, yk, il)

I find it interesting that Google has pushed so hard for web designers to shift from designing primarily for desktop to now designing primarily for mobile. Google’s right… but why only focus on designing websites to appeal to mobile users? After all, Gmail is a leader within the email client ranks, too.

Email can be an incredibly powerful driver of conversions for websites, according to a 2019 report from Barilliance.

On average, emails convert at a rate of 1.48%. That includes all sent emails though — which includes the ones that go unopened as well as the ones that bounce. If you look at emails that are opened by recipients, however, the average conversion rate jumps to 17.75%.

Let’s go even further with this:

Recent data from Litmus reveals that more emails are opened on mobile than on any other device:

Many sources even put the average mobile open rate at well over 50%. But whether it’s 43% or 50%+, it’s clear that mobile is most commonly the first device people reach for to check their emails.

Which brings us to the following conclusion:

If users are more likely to open email on mobile and we know that opened emails convert at a higher rate than those that go unopened, wouldn’t it make sense for designers to prioritize the mobile experience when designing emails?

Mobile Email Design Tips to Increase Conversions

Let’s explore what the latest research says about designing emails for mobile users and how that can be used to increase opens, clicks and, later, your website’s conversion rates (on mobile and desktop).

Design the Same Email for Mobile and Desktop

Although email is often ranked as the most effective marketing channel for acquiring and retaining customers, that’s not really an accurate picture of what’s going on.

According to Campaign Monitor, here’s what’s actually happening with mobile email subscribers:

The open rates on mobile are somewhat on par with the Litmus data earlier.

However, it can take multiple opens before the email recipient actually clicks on a link or offer within an email. And guess what? About a third of them make their way over to desktop — where they convert at a higher rate than those that stay on mobile.

As the report states:

Data from nearly 6 million email marketing campaigns suggests the shift to mobile has made it more difficult to get readers to engage with your content, unless you can drive subsequent opens in a different environment.

I’ve reconstructed the graphic above and filled it with the number of people who would take action from an email list of 1,000 recipients:

At first glance, it looks as though mobile is the clear winner — at least in terms of driving traffic to the website. After the initial mobile open, 32 subscribers go straight to the website. After a few more opens on mobile, 5 more head over there.

Without a breakdown of what the user journey looks like when opened on desktop, though, the calculation of additional clicks you’d get from that portion of the list isn’t so cut-and-dried.

However, let’s assume that Litmus’s estimate of 18% desktop opens is accurate and that Campaign Monitor’s 12.9% click-through rate holds true whether they open the email first on mobile or desktop. I think it’s safe to say that 23 desktop-only email opens can be added to the total.

So, that brings it to:

37 clicks on mobile vs 26 on desktop.

Bottom line: while mobile certainly gets more email subscribers over to a website, the conversion-friendliness of desktop cannot be ignored.

Which is why you don’t want to segment your lists based on device. If you want to maximize the number of conversions you get from a campaign, enable subscribers to seamlessly move from one device to the other as they decide what action to take with your emails.

In other words, design the same exact email for desktop and mobile. But assume that the majority of subscribers will open the email on their mobile device (unless historical data of your campaigns says otherwise). Then, use mobile-first design and marketing tips to create an email that’s suitable for all subscribers, regardless of device.

Factor in Dark Mode When Choosing Your Colors

You don’t want there to be anything that stands in your users’ way when it comes to moving from email to website. That’s why you have to consider how their choice of color and brightness for their mobile screen affects the readability or general appearance of your email design.

There are a number of ways in which this can become an issue.

As we hear more and more about how harmful blue light from our devices can be, it’s no surprise that Dark Mode options are beginning to roll out. While it’s prevalent on desktops right now, it’s mostly in beta for mobile. The same goes for email apps.

That said, smartphone users can hack their own “Dark Mode” of sorts. This type of color inversion can be enabled through the iPhone’s “Accessibility” settings.

Essentially, what this does is invert all of the colors on the screen from light to dark and vice versa.

Unfortunately, the screenshotting tool on my iPhone won’t allow me to capture the colors exactly as they appear. However, what I can show you is how the inversion tool alters the color of your email design.

This is an email I received from Amtrak last week. It’s pretty standard with its branded color palette and brightly colored notices and CTA buttons:

Now, here is what that same email looks like when viewed through my iPhone’s “Smart Invert” setting:

The clean design of the original with the white font on the deep blue brand colors is gone. Now, there’s a harsh mix of colors and a hard-to-read Amtrak logo in its place.

You can imagine how this kind of inconsistent and disjointed color display would create an off-putting experience for mobile users.

But what do you expect them to do? If they’re struggling with the glare from their mobile device, Dark Mode (or some other brightness adjustment) will make it easier for them to open and read emails in the first place. Even if it means compromising the appearance of the email you so carefully designed.

One bright spot in all this is that the official “Dark Mode” being rolled out to iPhone (and, hopefully, other smartphones) soon won’t alter the look of HTML emails. Only plain-text messages will be affected.

However, it’s important to still be mindful of how the design choices you make may clash with a surrounding black background. Brightly colored backgrounds, in particular, are likely to clash with the surrounding black of your email app.

How do you solve this issue? Unfortunately, you can’t serve different versions of your email to users based on whether they’re viewing it in Dark Mode or otherwise. You’ll just have to rely on your own tests to confirm that potential views in Dark Mode don’t interfere with your design or message.

In addition to the standard testing you do, set your own smartphone up with Dark Mode (or its hack counterpart). Then, run your test email through the filter and see what happens to the colors. It won’t take long to determine what sort of colors you can and cannot design with for email.

Design the Subject Line

The subject line is the very first thing your email subscribers are going to see, whether it shows up as a push notification or they first encounter it in their inbox. What do you think affects their initial decision to click open an email rather than throw it in the Trash or Spam box immediately? Recognizing the Sender will help, but so will the attractiveness of the subject line.

As for how exactly you go about “designing” a subject line, there are a few things to think about. The first is the length.

Marketo conducted a study across 200+ email campaigns and 2 million emails sent to subscribers. Here is what the test revealed about subject line length:

Although the 4-word subject line resulted in the highest open rate, it had a poor showing in terms of clicks. It was actually the 7-word subject line that seemed to have struck the perfect balance with subscribers, leading 15.2% of them to open the email and then 10.8% of them to click on it.

While you should still test this with your own email list, it appears that seven words is the ideal length for a subject line.

Next, you have to think about the buzzwords used in the subject line.

To start, keep this list of Yesware’s Spam Trigger Words out of it:

If you want to increase the chance the email will be opened, read, clicked on and eventually convert on-site, you have to be savvy about which words will appear within the subject line.

What I’d suggest you do is bookmark CoSchedule’s Email Subject Line Tester tool.

Here’s an example of how CoSchedule analyzes your subject lines and clues you in to what increases and decreases your open rates:

As you can see, CoSchedule tells you which kinds of words increase open rates as well as those that don’t. Do enough of these subject line tests and you should be able to compile a good set of wording guidelines for your writers and marketers.

Further down, you’ll get more insight into what makes for a strongly worded and designed subject line:

CoSchedule will provide recommendations on how to shorten or lengthen the character and word counts based on best practices and results.

Finally, at the very bottom of your subject line test you’ll see this:

This gives you (or, rather, your writer) a chance to see how the subject line will appear within the “design” of an email client. It’s not a problem if the words get cut off on mobile. It’s bound to happen. However, you still want everything that does appear to be appealing enough to click on.

Also, don’t forget about dressing up your subject lines with emoji.

When you think about it, emoji in mobile email subject lines make a lot of sense. Text messaging and social media are ripe with them. It’s only natural to use this fun and truncated form of language in email, too.

Campaign Monitor makes a good point about this:

If you replace words with recognizable emoji, you’ll create shorter subject lines for mobile users. Even if it doesn’t shorten your subject line enough to fit on a mobile screen, it’s still an awesome way to make it stand out from the rest of your subscribers’ cluttered inboxes.

The CoSchedule test will actually score you based on how (or if) you used emoji, too:

As you can see, CoSchedule considers this a competitive advantage in marketing.

Even just looking at my own email client, my eye is instantly drawn to the subject line from Sephora which contains a “NEW” emoji:

Just be careful with which emoji you use. For starters, emoji are displayed differently from device to device, so it may not have the same effect on some of your subscribers if it’s a more obscure choice.

There’s also the localization aspect to think about. Not every emoji is perceived the same way around the globe. As Day Translations points out, the fire symbol is one that could cause confusion as some countries interpret it as a literal fire whereas some may view it as a symbol for attraction.

That said, emoji have proven to increase both open rates and read rates of emails. Find the right mobile-friendly emoji to include in your subject line and you could effectively increase the number of subscribers who visit your website as a result.

Wrap-Up

There are so many different kinds of emails that go out from websites:

• Welcome message
• Post-purchase transaction email
• Abandoned cart reminder
• Promotional news
• Product featurette
• New content available
• Account /rewards points
• And more.

In other words, there are plenty of ways to get in front of email subscribers.

Just remember that the majority of them will first open your email on mobile. And some will reopen it on mobile over and over again until they’re compelled to click on it or trash it. It’s up to you to design the email in a way that motivates them to visit your website and, consequently, convert.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

• Everything You Need To Know About Transactional Email But Didn’t Know To Ask
• The Current State Of Email Marketing Programming: What Can And Can’t Be Used
• Level-Up Email Campaigns With Customer Journey Mapping
• How Mail.Ru Reduced Email Storage From 50 To 32 PB