Tips for Designing Good Emails: Design and Text
Good email design can be tricky. There are many email providers and email readers on the market, not to mention different browsers, making designing an email that consistently looks good (i.e. how you designed it) can be challenging. It also requires quite a bit of time and testing. Mustang List takes some of the guesswork out of email design by offering many templates suitable for a variety of email communications free of charge. Or you can engage Mustang List’s design services to create an email template that matches your website. But if you want to design your emails in-house, here are a few things to keep in mind.
- Images Off. Remember to take into account Images Off when designing your email. See past blogs for design tips for Images Off.
- Create a positive impression. Remember that your design should be welcoming and that it represents your company. You want it to reinforce your brand and compel subscribers to read the email further or take action.
- Design around an obvious focal point. Make this focal point “above the fold” and viewable in the preview pane so that your offer appears even to readers who don’t scroll.
- Use tables. You must use tables in your email if you want it to look like you designed it to look. The various email readers your subscribers use can render your email wonky if you don’t use tables. Plus, when the images are turned off, the email still renders properly and looks good.
- Make the email easy to read. Keep the fonts legible, not fancy. The email should be easy to scan and quickly read. Add white space between elements. This helps give the eyes a rest and gives the mind a micro-pause before moving onto the next idea.
- Keep the font for your company name the same. Just like you keep your logo the same from email to email, keep the fonts for your company name the same.
- Consider the amount of copy. Use more copy for newsletters as people sign up for newsletters to read and learn. When you’re sending an email about a sale, special promotion, or an invitation to an event, keep the copy short and to the point with a strong, clear call to action.
- Avoid using too many exclamation points. Spam filters don’t like exclamation points and the likelihood of your email going into the spam folder can increase.
- Avoid red type. Although red is a good color for call to action buttons, red text can be difficult to read.
- Avoid white letters. Using reverse type in small graphic elements can look good and be very useful. But it’s very hard to read white letters on a black or colored background, so it’s best to avoid using reverse type throughout your email. Plus if the background color is stripped by the email reader or browser, your readers will be looking at white text on a white background.
- Use color for emphasis, not because you can. Color should draw attention to an offer or focus the reader on a call to action.
- Use colors that support your brand. This doesn’t mean you have to create an email that matches your logo, but using colors that look good with your logo and using a logo color as an element in the email creates a visual connection between the email and your company. Can you imagine Southwest Airlines sending an email that doesn’t include red and/or orange? No.