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Before we can talk about pros and cons of using navigation bars in marketing automation, we must first clarify what they are. The nav bar is the area immediately after the preheader in an email. It usually contains multiple links to different areas of your site for navigational purposes, hence the name.

Pros

There are some obvious advantages to having these categories front and center in an email. Any time marketers can direct potential purchasers to their specific goals – to “kitchen goods,” for example, rather than the homepage in general – they put them that much closer to making a purchase, and lower bounce rates. Nav bars also mean that even specific emails which hold no appeal to a particular customer still have a chance of gaining click-throughs or even conversions, since they are reminded of other things offered by the same brand.

The fact that the categories on a nav bar are most often similar to those on the main site helps to establish consistency between your email and website. In addition, it presents a clear and recognizable way for users to interact with you.

Cons So, with all of the obvious benefits, what would be the downside to having a nav bar? For starters, the nav bar will eat up valuable space in the header. Customers may get too distracted by the nav to ever make it down to your main call to action. The nav bar can also make the email too busy, thereby overwhelming readers. This may cause a reader to close the email before ever taking in your main message. The nav bar could lead to ‘false positives’: you may see an increase in overall click-through rates, but this element may take away click throughs to the main message. Ask yourself: which is more important to you? Keep in mind also that more and more often, customers are reading your emails on their mobile devices, where both your images and links will be substantially smaller. If consumers aren’t able to select a nav link, they certainly won’t be heading to that section of the website, and their subsequent frustration might cost you a sale.

Best practices

There are some collective “best practices” employed when it comes to nav bars.

• Include your logo either right above or to the left of your navigation, for branding consistency
• Make sure to only include 4-5 navigation links so as not to overwhelm your readers.
• Try to keep these navigation links consistent across emails so readers know what to expect.
• Create your nav links in HTML if possible. As we’ve discussed previously (see: Marketing automation tip: the image/text debate), many email platforms block images automatically, and you don’t want your categories to get lost.
• Make sure the bar doesn’t push your important text out of the way! If it does, consider whether or not it’s necessary to the email.

If customers are looking for additional categories, hopefully they’ll be able to find them on your website; the point of the email itself is to drive them there.

The results?

It’s all well and good to hypothesize the pros and cons of a theoretical nav bar, but how do they actually perform in practice? One survey found that 15% of marketers with site navigation in email found it more effective at driving clicks than the main content of the same email, and 11% of those same marketers found their navigation converted better than the main content of their email.

As with so many things in email design, the issue of nav bar conversions comes down to one thing: test, test, test. What works for one industry, one company, or even one email may not work for another. The only way you’ll be able to discover what your customers prefer is to put all the options before them and see which they respond to best. Have you used nav bars in the past? Do you swear by them? Stay away from them? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

For more information on nav bars, email headers, and other design elements, see our recent presentation on Cracking the Code: Keys to Email Creative Success.