Email Design Best Practices: 20 Tips By Experts To Follow

When you are crafting an email, it’s tempting to skip the boring parts and jump right to creative and fun. It can be creating the subject line, eye-catching graphics, etc.

Not just it affects the reader’s perception but you as a sender too. And the service providers even mark your emails that have spammy layouts and designs. To avoid this, here are some tips from experts that might help you.

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What Are The Email Design Best Practices Tips You Should Follow?

But before that, you need to set yourself up to create the email temple, which serves as the foundation of all messages in email marketing, instead of serving an individual campaign.

Also, here is the list of don’ts that you need to avoid while designing the email :

Don’t change the design of your email template too often; it becomes harder to recognize.

Don’t use corporate color as the main color, especially if it’s too bright and bolds

Don’t use complex or bright backgrounds for text.

Don’t hesitate to consider a professional to help in designing the email for you.

Don’t use a lot of hyperlinks together, as it will lead to cluttering

Don’t make the CTA button way too small, so it becomes hard and frustrating to zoom in every time.

Don’t use a font that is smaller than 14 px for the email body and 20 px for email headlines.

Don’t use to plate for small fonts, as it will make it difficult to read

Don’t create emails that are text-based, along with no headlines, paragraphs, or highlighted key points.

Don’t mix a lot of fonts, colors, and sizes, as it will end up making the email look sloppy.

Don’t add too much gradient; it decreases the visibility and makes it look unprofessional.

Don’t overwhelm readers by using a lot of colors.

Don’t add a lot of information into the header, as it makes it confusing

Don’t use images that don’t have good quality in the header or in the email; it will make your design look mature.

Don’t overwhelm the footer by adding general information, it will look confusing and messy.

Don’t hide the link for subscribers or make it look small or hardly visible.

Don’t create emails that consist of more than 43% of images.

Don’t choose the images which are larger, as it is recommended for the email.

Don’t hide the single call to button at the email end or first scroll

Don’t make your reader guess what they have to do, and provide a clear call to action.

Don’t hide the hyperlinks, instead, make them easy to find and read.

Apart from this, you should know the right way of designing the template and email, so it has a most effective result, and in order to boost that, here is the list of tips shared by the experts from the market to consider :

Follow The Rule Of 80/20

Your template needs to follow the 80 and 20 rule, as it should have 80% of text and 20 % 0f images.

When your emails have too many images, it makes it difficult to load fast and increases the chances that your customer might just delete the email.

Some email applications even filter these emails as spam, so it’s best to rely on HTML and text elements.

Make Sure You Do Consistent Render

Your customers might be using a wide range of inboxes; it can be from Outlook to Gmail. Not just that, they might be using a desktop, phone, tablet, or all of the devices to open email.

That’s why you need to see if the templates are rendering properly or not.

Also, you need to render it properly, double-check the custom font, and if it fails to render, you need to find a solution.

Avoid Using Images Over Text

When you are choosing the images, make sure it is under limitation. Also, don’t depend on images too much instead of text.

It includes reasons such as :

There are chances that due to some error, images won’t display.
Mailbox marks those emails which consist only of images as a spa.
It might be difficult to place the promo code on images.
You have to change the template manually every time you require to add the text

Test Separate Elements For A/B Test

A/B tests are important for knowing what is working for the email and what is not.

So when you are holding on, it’s best to do the separate element test instead of the whole email.

This will help in knowing the details which are more or less effective. Also, the style is recognizable to the targeted audience.

Use The Dynamic Content For Adding Personalization

Personalization is the key to successful campaigns, and your emails should have a message which is personal by adding the data of customers.

It should not just be the first name personalization, and that’s why birthday campaigns are also considered popular.

Keep Templates Simple And Pleasing To Eye

When you are designing the template, you need to make it pleasing to the eyes.

It should not be distracting, as the focus should be on relaying the message to your readers.

Also, focus on the color contrast of your template and content blocks. so your message stands out and is easy to read.

You can start with neutral colors. It can be the color palette of your company.

Use the light and dark shades balance, for example, if the template you are choosing is light-colored. Choose the dark with creativity, or it can go vice versa.

Images Need To Render Proportionally

Regardless of the device your customer might be using, the image needs to render proportionally.

Set image sizes based on the screen percentage instead of pixels.

For this, you can use the universal image ratio within the product catalog.

Prepare The Title Length Of Your Product

Well, the idea you can choose is at 16px, the average line should be 20 px in height, and the longest title should be four lines.

The dynamic title height should be 80 Px.

This way, you can create the title length without making the template go wrong and skewing the rest of the creativity.

Put CTA And Important Information On the Top

Place the most crucial information that you need the audience to read along with CTA in the first scroll.

Not just that, keep the balance of the emails. see if the headlines and description are neatly designed, the CTA is eye-catching, and the images are of high quality.

Use Basic And Easy To Render Fonts

Use fonts that can be rendered easily. Also, you can choose basic based on Yahoo, Outlook, and Gmail.

If they don’t recognize the typeface, they will replace it with another font which will affect the email design template.

The safest font you can choose are:

Arial
Lucida Grande
Tahoma
Verdana
Trebuchet
Georgia
Palatino
Time New Roman
Courier New
Impact
Courier

Consider The Color Theme According to your Preferences

Well, according to Kissmeytocs reported, most of the men reported preferring contrast colors, whereas women prefer to have softer color palettes.

That’s why you should try the A/B test and change the color of a couple or single elements to see the accuracy.

Make Your Theme Header Special Spending Seasons

When you are using the headers, make sure you choose the design according to the holidays, sales season, etc.

Also, it can suit the mood and set up the feeling before the recipient even starts to read. You can also vary the headers depending on the type of email including transactional and digest emails.

Make Images Clickable

Well, you can make the images clickable as people often click on images to see them.

Not just that, to see if it’s true or not, you can consider checking your email click map.

Use this to your advantage to lead people to social media or websites.

Choose Bright And Visible CTA

CTA is important, and so are visibility and placement. Not just place the CTA at the first scroll, but also choose the button which is bright and visible.

Also, it should contrast with elements such as text, background, etc., of your email.

If your email length is long, you can add a couple of CTA too.

Stay Relentlessly on The Brand

Well, when you are creating the email design, make sure that you are aligning with the brand.

It should be relentless to follow the brand; even when you remove the brand’s logo and name from the email, it should still be easy to recognize your customers. And that’s why it will lead to your email being printed successfully.

Experienced Then Imitate And Experiment, Then Experiment

Starting with email design tends to be overwhelming; there are so many options and ideas, so you need to understand what makes your work easy.

The best way is to imitate in case you are a beginner. As you develop the skills needed, you can also try new things.

Also, here you need to be bold, as a lot of times you might like to add the navigation bar because the computer has one.

This creates a cycle where you do what others are doing and vice versa.

So once you have the experience, start doing the experiment to create something that stands out.

A/B Test For Design As Well

The benefit of doing the A/B testing for the subject lines as well as CTAs is known.

However, it’s not just limited to the content but also useful for the design.

You can do the A/B testing of the designs to make sure it’s working on adding the benefits and improving the overall effect.

Make Your Font Bigger

As a designer, you might find that the big font is a bit clucky.

And even though your heart is not saying yes but the font should be larger than 16 pixels; it betes to keep the pixels at 16 minis; however, for the desktop, you can keep it 20 pixels as it’s good for readability.

The large line height makes it easy as well as comfortable for people to read emails.

Consider Adding The Big Buttons

People are using their thumbs to push the buttons; they can be big, clumsy, and pudsy thumbs. So you need to make sure that the buttons are large enough to use easily and enough to accommodate.

Also, the guidelines, according to apple, say that it should be 44. at the same time, Google says 48 pixels.

Join The Email Design Community

Especially for those who are new, but even if you have experience, it is still an ideal choice to choose the community in email design and join.

Such communities are usually small but mighty, friendly, and ready to help when you want one.

It’s also good if you have a lot of questions but nobody to answer, so such groups can help in teaching a lot about email design.

Along with that, you can stay updated with the latest changes, tips, and changes in email design.

Hold What You Can Easily Handle

There is always something going on in the email design industry; for example, interactive emails are on-trend.

However, it’s not that you need them, even though their strands are still hard to implement.

Also, it needs heavy coding and only supports a couple of places.

As the bar of entry in such trends is extremely high, you need to be careful when you need to follow such trends.

Consider iF You Need To Embedding Video

Embedding the HTML5 video is on-trend, but there are limited email clients on which it works.

Also, it consumes data and possibly the pocketbook.

Here you don’t limit the data that gets used for downloading the video on the user’s device.

This is especially important for mobile, and video open in the email automatically will cost the data.

That’s why you need to consider if you really need to embed a video in your email design and for what.