Email Marketing Design Best Practices

With overflowing inboxes, it’s important to make sure that your email marketing campaigns aren’t going straight in the trash. Simple email marketing design elements will increase impact and ensure that your emails are read.

FONT USE GUIDELINES FOR EMAIL MARKETING

The fonts you use in your email marketing design should be carefully considered. Make sure that you are using a font of at least 14pt and don’t use white text on a dark background. This is especially important if you have an older customer base. You will also want to avoid using too many font types. Use no more than two fonts and limit using bold and italics. There’s nothing that says unprofessional quite as much as going nuts with colored fonts in your emails. You’ll want to limit your palette to two main colors. Steer clear from fluorescent and bright colors. Don’t go too crazy with fancy fonts. Not all fonts work on all platforms. The following list contains widely supported fonts.

Helvetica, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Charcoal, Lucida Console, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, Tahoma, Geneva, Times, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Monaco.

SAY HELLO

Make sure that when you are creating your emails you address your customer by their first name. Your ESP should have the option to have default name if your customer doesn’t have their name filled out. Use something relative to your industry. For example, if you sell makeup you could say “Hello Gorgeous,” or if you sell hobby supplies “Hello Crafter,”.

BREAK IT UP

Don’t overwhelm your readers by having one big long paragraph. Break up your content into smaller paragraphs or use subheads to make it easy for your customer to digest. This simple tip can convert skimmers to readers and increase true engagement with your message and brand.

IMAGES

Try to use your own high-quality images as much as possible. Using your own images can be a powerful tool to introduce your brand, company culture, and style. This will add credibility and will be something other than the regular old stock photos filling our inboxes.

PREVIEW HEADER

Many common email clients now offer a preview of the email text. This is valuable real estate, don’t waste it. Use this to your advantage and put enticing information that will get your readers to open the email. You will put this as a header at the very top of your email.

CALL TO ACTION

Make sure that your call to action is front and center. We find it most effective to create attractive banners with a clear call to action. The banner is the first thing that your reader will see when they open the email and decide whether it’s something they are interested in. This Toms email is a great example of using the preview header along with an urgent call to action.

If you need help getting the most your of your email marketing campaigns, or with your email marketing design, we are here to help!  Contact us for effective email marketing strategy and design.

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Sara Romine

Digital Marketing Hero at Sharp Commerce

Excels at squeezing every last drop of revenue out of a Digital Marketing Campaign. Sara has worked with a variety of ESP's and many different types of online retail marketing initiatives. Sara has a herd of dogs, enjoys Yoga, and the great outdoors.

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