Email Design Best Practices

It’s tricky to move the needle when it comes to email click-through rates. In fact, many businesses have seen it moving in the wrong direction. That’s a challenge, because business owners, marketers, and creators rely on email to grow and engage their audience. Luckily, there are things you can do to reverse the trend, and they’re all about following email design best practices.

Below, you’ll learn how great email design isn’t just about delivering a message that’s attractive to look at or interesting to read. It’s about clarity, usability, and consistency. Done right, email design directly impacts opens, interactions, and clicks.

Why email marketing is so important

If email marketing is so challenging, then why do so many businesses make it a primary focus? According to Forbes, four out of five businesses say email marketing is one of their core strategies. Close to half of all marketing experts say that email marketing is their most effective channel for reaching customers. 

And your customers prefer you to make contact via their inbox. Three out of four report that they want to hear from you by email.

Email is hands-down the most effective way to reach out to new customers and retain the ones you already have. According to a McKinsey study, email marketing is 40 times more effective at customer acquisition than social media.

All this goes to show that an email strategy is crucial. And a big part of that is nailing email design basics.

Email design fundamentals 

According to marketing experts, you’ve got just three seconds to capture your customer’s attention. It turns out that they scan an email and decide right away whether to delete it, save it for later, or keep reading. It’s the design that keeps them engaged. 

Of course you want your emails to be attractive. Great email marketing design does catch a customer’s eye, but not for the reasons you think. Here are some of the core principals of email design:

• Strong visual hierarchy: This is how design elements are arranged to let readers know what’s important. A headline should be bigger than a subhead, for example. They both should be bigger than body text.

• A versatile layout: Choose a single-column design, which makes your email readable on phones and all other formats. 

• Easy-to-read typography: Sans-serif fonts like Arial are more legible on screens. Text should be large enough and have enough spacing for someone reading on their phone. 

• Smart color usage: Save your brand colors for your logo and display type. Text should be black or dark gray, colors that don’t strain your reader’s eyes. 

Some common email design mistakes are worth mentioning here, such as confusing layouts, an excessive number of fonts and colors, and too many calls to action. Don’t forget about accessibility, like using alt text to describe the contents of a photo.

The layout and primary action

Before they open an email, customers want to know whether they will see a newsletter, an announcement, or a promotion. If it isn’t what they expect from the subject line, or if they have to scroll too far to find what they are looking for, they are likely to close, and probably delete, the email you spent so much time crafting.

That’s why you should be designing around one primary action. If you’re sending out an email newsletter, that primary action is engaging your customers. An announcement should be about informing them, and a promotion is all about selling them your product or service. 

Before they read a single word of copy, customers know the kind of email they’re encountering because of the design. 

Here are three different layouts and why they are perfect for each type of email.

• Inverted pyramid: Resembling the down arrow on your keyboard, an inverted pyramid points to a single action. It’s often a call-to-action button that you want customers to click, which is why this layout works well for promotions.

• Zig-zag: A little more complicated is a zig-zag layout, which guides readers across their screen from one item to another. It’s great for an announcement of several different products or services.

• Single column: When you have a lot of text, like in a newsletter, a single column presents all this information in a clear, logical order.

Avoid design elements that distract from the primary message. In a newsletter, for example, you don’t need the pull of an inverted pyramid or the pizazz of a zigzag. These only confuse readers.

Mobile-first and responsive email design

We've crossed over into an era where more people are checking their email on their phone than their desktop. That’s why a mobile-first strategy is the gold standard for email campaign design. With a mobile-first strategy, an email designed for a phone generally looks equally good on other devices. That’s because it’s easier for a desktop or tablet to adapt to a mobile-first design than the other way around.

What does that mean in practice? A mobile-first strategy is mostly about user experience. It uses what’s known as responsive email design. A responsive layout ensures that your call-to-action button is easy to locate and even easier to tap. Text is easy to read, no matter what type of device it might be loading on. 

It’s also about where your content is placed. You want to make sure that your most important information—whether it’s the main headline in your newsletter or the call-to-action in your promotion—sits in an area that designers call “above the fold.” That means on the first screen a customer sees before they start scrolling down.

Some other responsive elements that you’ll want to integrate into your email design include: 

• Flexible layouts: Instead of being assigned fixed widths, design elements stretch or shrink to fit a screen.

• Stackable content: Designs that are two columns or more switch to a single column on a phone.

• Scalable imagery: Photos and other images are automatically resized so that they are high-resolution on any screen.

Learn more mobile design best practices

Branding and consistency across campaigns

Your logo, your color palette, and the fonts you use are important parts of your brand identity. They are an important aspect of your website and figure prominently into your social media presence. Make sure that they’re a part of your email marketing design as well.

Including these elements in your email campaign design isn’t just about increasing your overall brand awareness. It’s about creating a shorthand so that customers will know who it’s from the second they open your email. 

When it comes to branding, consistency is key. But whether you’re sending out a handful of emails a week or rolling out multiple campaigns simultaneously, how do you make sure that they are all on-message? Here are a few email design best practices:

• Take advantage of templates: There’s no need to start from scratch with every email. Using templates helps speed up the process on your end and ensure that you are building a brand identity.

• Put together a style guide: Your email design and layout shouldn’t live in one person’s head. A detailed style guide means that anyone joining your team can hit the send button.

• Centralize your assets: Things like images, logos, and call-to-action buttons should be consistent from one email to the next. Store these assets together in one location.

Newsletter design best practices

With an email newsletter, you’re not selling anything to your customers. You’re providing them with information that they need. But you’ll still have a call to action, whether that’s to get them to visit your website, read your blog, or sign up for a seminar. A simple “Read More” or “Learn More” button is often a good fit.

Email newsletter design best practices say that you should design a newsletter for easy scanning. Use sections, dividers, and repeatable modules from those templates you put together. Visuals are welcome, but they shouldn’t overpower the information you’re providing.

Campaign design tips

Promotional emails are all about sales. The call-to-action button should be quick to spot, easy to press, and situated “above the fold” where customers can find it without scrolling. 

For promotional emails, everything should nudge customers toward your CTA. Sometimes that means an arrow pointing to the button. Other times it’s more subtle, like people in a photo looking in the right direction. Here are a few other promotional email design tips:

• Use a minimalist style: A cluttered design only draws your customer’s eye away from the CTA.

• Stick to an inverted pyramid: This type of layout is ideal because it directs the reader to the most important element.

• Add images intentionally: Use them only when they serve a purpose, like showing a product for sale. Otherwise, they dilute your message.

Build a prototype and start testing 

Expect some trial and error as you set up your first email campaign. After building a prototype, you should test several different versions before you find one that works. 

There’s always a learning curve as you learn how to design emails, but taking advantage of templates, putting together style sheets, and storing all your assets in one place make this a repeatable process. That means your next campaign will be all the easier.