Easy Ways to Create Memorable Visuals for Email and Social Media

Creating captivating email and social media visuals can do wonders for your audience engagement, website traffic, and conversions.  

The catch is, it can take a lot of time, energy, and resources to build visual content.

After all, creating compelling images and videos (among others) is more than just following the latest social media and email design trends to get people to notice your brand and act on your offers.    

The good news is, there are simple ways to create memorable email and social media marketing visual content.

This guide takes you through some simple tactics to create email and social media visuals that can influence and entice your audience to follow, subscribe, engage with, and ultimately, buy from you.

Various types of email and social media visuals

Make your social media and email visuals stand out like a peacock to help reel in followers, subscribers, and ultimately, paying customers by incorporating various visual content types.

Some of the captivating social media and email visuals you can create include:

• Videos. Use videos to share service and product demos, Facebook and Instagram Live and Stories, About Us clips, customer testimonials, How-to tutorials, and repurpose your relevant articles and ebooks. Videos are some of the most effective visuals, with 86% of businesses using videos as a marketing tool. This is because video formats are highly engaging and easily shareable.  
• Branded images. High-quality, branded images help break up long texts, such as in your email newsletters, provide more context, and increase brand awareness.  
• Photo animations. Animated photos offer a more creative way of sharing pictures and images on social media without exerting the effort it takes to create videos and clips. It’s a great way to catch the attention of audiences who might find videos too long and regular photos too flat.
  
• Data visualizations. Make it easy to convey complex information with compelling visuals. Beautiful charts and infographics tell rich stories at a glance, so people love clicking on them and sharing them.
• GIFs and memes. Include GIFs and memes in your email and social media visual content to entertain and share quick messages and inside jokes with your audience. Throwing in some memes and GIFs to your regular content can also add humor to your messages and social media posts, allow your brand to hop on viral trends to spread awareness, and help make your company more relatable.

Use whatever visual content that works best for your social media and email campaigns. You can even mix and match various types and formats as long as they support your message and help you achieve your campaign goals.

Tips for creating social media and email visual content

It’s not the best idea to use a cookie-cutter approach when creating visuals for various platforms. After all, you need to adjust your visual content to the specific platform and your audience mindset.  

However, there are general tactics to creating visual content that can apply both to your social media and email video content creation efforts.  

1. Use a reliable and easy-to-use graphic creation tool.

A robust graphic design tool can make your social media and email visual content creation process effective and efficient. The right tool makes it possible for you to create stunning and professional-looking visuals even if you don’t have a ton of graphic design skills or experience.

Leverage graphic creation tools with features and functionalities that best fit your needs. Consider other key factors such as the tool’s ease of use, email and social media marketing integrations, the level of tool and project customization it allows, and if it’s free or paid.

For instance, Motionleap (formerly Pixaloop) by Lightricks is an app that lets you edit and animate your photos easily. You can create 3D photo animations, giving you endless creative possibilities and bringing your pictures to life. Animate one photo element or two and draw attention to the parts of your pictures that you want.  

This user post using Motionleap is a great example of how you can use the app to bring stills to life.

The app’s features include easy-to-use, powerful editing tools such as 3D motion, background changer, effects, filters and overlays.

Edit your photos into animated 3D pictures using arrows to add movement, replace backgrounds, select a speed, and control which elements in the photo move with anchors. The app’s photo effect tools are based on artificial intelligence (AI), making it extremely easy to fine-tune for better control and define entire picture areas.  

Bring your images to life through animation and make creative moving photos to help you engage and connect with your followers and contacts better.

2. Build templates

One of the best ways to make email and social media visual content creation faster and easier is to use email marketing templates. Build customizable templates like email templates, banner templates or poster templates you can easily modify to create many of your visuals, from email newsletters, photos for social media posts, and infographics to videos.

This can save you a lot of time, so you won’t need to start from scratch every time you need to create visual content for your desired platforms and channels. Many graphic design tools provide highly customizable templates you can build on and make your own for your email and social media marketing campaigns.

Creating templates can take a bit of time and effort initially, but it will pay off in the long run. If you don’t know where to start, you might want to try a “mood board,” to get a sense of what your brand’s mood is all about, before you determine how to iterate on your brand visuals with templates specific to channels or use cases.

While you can get affordable logo design packages and other visual content creation services from graphic design service providers, it’s always a good idea to learn to build your visuals yourself and add it to your skillset.  

3. Uncover your audiences' pain points

To make your visuals memorable, they need to speak directly to your audience. The first two tips already give you the info you need to create your visual content. This tip is learning what visuals to make and their themes and angles to make sure they’re "sticky" and captivating to your target audience.

First, you’ll need to know to whom you are speaking, by identifying your target audience and creating buyer personas.

Your visuals and multichannel brand experience should align with your branding and goals, such as using the right WordPress theme for handmade craft eCommerce stores if that’s the niche you’re in. In the same way that optimizing your website design for sales requires understanding what your audience is after, building and refining customer personas over time can help you conceive of visual marketing assets that will catch their attention.

Online tools such as HubSpot’s Make My Persona generator let you create personas of your ideal buyers.

You can build your buyer persona’s demographic traits, employment, job characteristics, the social media networks they’re active in, and the tools they use in their work, such as email and other CRM software. Once you know who your target audiences are, you’ll have a better idea of their interests, needs, and problems, helping you create content that speaks to all these.  

You can also use tools such as AnswerThePublic to further drill down on the kind of topics and questions your target audiences search online.

Discover and understand who your ideal buyers are and what they want to help you build email and social media content that resonates with your audience and addresses their pain points.

This helps you connect, engage, build relationships with your social media followers and email subscribers to ultimately turn them into paying and loyal customers.    

What’s next?

Creating stunning and unforgettable email and social media visuals doesn’t have to be rocket science.

With the right approach and a reliable set of tools, you can create professional-looking visual content that will propel your campaigns and help you achieve your marketing goals.