Email Design Best Practices to Enrich Your Subscriber’s Experience [Infographic]

May 22, 2021

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Email Design Best Practices to Enrich Your Subscriber’s Experience [Infographic] | Your email subscribers are busy people and it is obvious that they would not have enough time to “read” your entire email. They are just skimming and scanning through the emails as their inboxes are constantly flooded. Therefore, it becomes of paramount importance that your emails look good and stand out in the subscriber’s inbox.

Imagine an email that renders like this:

Wouldn’t it be a major turn-off? That’s exactly why you must follow all the email design best practices and make sure that your emails look good across all devices and email clients.

That being said, we shall now discuss the most important email design recommendations that you must remember without fail.

Maintain a consistent email layout

Your emails must be designed in such a way that they instantly create a brand recall. Use suitable colors and imagery that reflect your brand personality. For example: If you have used fluid designs on your website, make sure all your marketing communications including emails and social media posts have similar creatives.

Pay attention to the fonts and typography you use

Many marketers prefer to have multiple fonts in their emails, that hampers the subscriber experience. Instead, it is advisable to stick to one or two fonts that are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the email. As an example, if you are sending out a Holiday email to wish the subscribers, you can use fancy fonts with cursive handwriting. On the other hand, if you want to convey an important message, use simple fonts like Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman, or Verdana that reflect honesty. In case you are using fancy fonts, provide a suitable fallback for email clients that might not be supporting them.

Adhere to the visual hierarchy rules

Organize your email template in such a way that it guides the reading flow of the subscriber. The inverted pyramid pattern with a vertical layout works the best.

Invision has totally nailed the usage of visual hierarchy in their email, as shown in the screenshot below.

Use visuals correctly

Considering the fact that humans can process visuals 60000 times faster than text, marketers are now leveraging visuals in their email campaigns.

Here are some tips to consider while using imagery in emails.

Never send an only-image email. It will trigger the spam filters and hamper your deliverability rate.
Optimum text to image ratio is 80:20.
Always provide a suitable Alt-text to all the visual elements so that the readers can understand what they are about, even when the email client has blocked the images.
In case you are using GIFs, the flashing rate of the animations should not be 2 to 55 Hz as it can trigger the condition of photosensitive epilepsy in patients.
While using interactivity or gamification in emails, do not forget to provide a fallback as some email clients would not support these features.

Give enough attention to email accessibility

It is imperative to design accessible emails to cater to all subscribers, irrespective of their disability or visual impairment.

Keep the following points in mind to ensure email accessibility:

Center-aligned email copy is a strict no-no as it can be difficult to read for dyslexic patients.
Take the help of semantic tags so that the screen readers can understand the flow of the content.
Make use of colors and contrast wisely, considering the color blind subscribers. 4.5:1 is the minimum contrast ratio, according to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Here’s a screenshot to explain better.

Use the HTML language attribute as shown below.

Design responsive emails

Responsiveness is the most important aspect as most of your subscribers are accessing emails through mobile devices. Test your emails using a tool like Litmus or Email on Acid to ensure flawless rendering of the emails across all email clients and devices.

To learn more about email design best practices and email inbox best practices, Email Uplers has put together an insightful infographic: Email Design Best Practices: The Key to Enhanced Email Engagement

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Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.