Email Design

Consumers receive hundreds of emails every week. You must create a valuable, relevant, visually appealing, and compelling email design to stand out. This entails selecting fonts, colours, images, and layouts to increase engagement and click-through rates.  The best emails are concise, readable across various email clients and attention-grabbing.

Why is design important?

No matter how good the copy you have written, no one will read it if it is not presented using the an attractive layout, formattings, and colours. People who open a badly designed email will avoid reading further. This will affect your campaign’s performance.

Email Design Best Practice

Email Layout

An email’s layout structures of your email’s content and creates a flow of information from one section to the next. By making your email scannable, it will be easy to read, and improving engagement.

Examples of email design include:

We recommend using a simple single-column or inverted pyramid layout. These layouts are simple it and easy to read. Furthermore, they work well on mobile devices, where most emails are consumed.

Typography

Font Selection

When selecting a font, there are two options:

• Web Safe fonts. These fonts are pre-installed on most operating systems. Examples include Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia, and Times New Roman.
• Web fonts. These are pulled from a web server and may not be installed on all operating systems. If the recipient’s email client does not support a font, a fallback web-safe fonts will be displayed. Example fonts are Baskerville, Courier New, Georgia.

Whilst web fonts will allow you more design flexibility, using a web-safe font is advisable as it will maximise compatibility across devices.

Font Size

For readability, use font size 14px-18px for body text and headline between 20-36px.

Layout

As the reader often scans the email, typography helps direct the reader’s attention to the most important point. You can use the font styles, weight, size, and colour to do this.

Stay on Brand

Email marketing aims to strengthen your brand and build a subscriber list interested in your products or services. Always Include your company logo, colours, name, and anything else that helps solidify your brand.

Include visual elements

Lots of plain text is uninviting, so finding ways to break up your emails and make them a little easier to read is important. Including visual elements such as graphics and videos is a fantastic way to break up the text of an email. However, do not overload your emails with visual elements that hinder readability.

Be clear and concise

Most people receive many emails daily or weekly, so they do not have time to read long emails thoroughly. Keep your emails clear and concise to avoid losing readers’ attention.

Use responsive designs

Responsive-designed emails adapt to fit different devices and resolutions, increasing readability. One easy way to ensure your designs are responsive is to use email templates, which you can customise to fit your content without sacrificing responsiveness.

End with a call to action

At the end every email, you should include a call to action that encourages the reader to act. Best practice:

• Only one call to action per email
• Include this call to action multiple times
• Use a high contrast button

A/B testing

A/B testing involves sending one version of an email to half of your subscriber list and a different version to the other half. You can then analyse the results of each email, looking at metrics such as how many readers opened the email or made a purchase based. A/B testing is important in figuring out what works for your subscribers.