Best Practices

How To Design The Best Emails

Email Marketing, Digital marketing, Graphic Design

Written by: Elise Yost

25-30% of a businesses’ revenue

should come from email. Is your email program generating that much business? Here are some tips to optimize your emails to get more clicks and conversions.

Deliverability

  • Design mobile-first (for most brands).
  • Check your ESP (email service provider) to get all the information on what devices and email services your customers are using and test emails accordingly.
  • Test email deliverability on tools like https://www.gmass.co/inbox
  • Balance the use of images and text. Code text into your email or use ESP text blocks to help deliverability
  • Mix in text-only emails to hit the inbox, rather than the promotions tab
  • Make sure to include Alt text for all images in case of slow load time, and for accessibility
Wandering Bear email designs in a black iPhone

Design

  • Always be testing – test product vs lifestyle creative, copy focused vs image-focused, still vs gif
  • Keep the CTA (call-to-action) “above the fold,” within the first scroll on mobile
  • Use animated gifs to make a simple email splashy
  • “Slice” image-heavy emails to create sections that link to separate pages
  • Play with different email layouts – but stick to brand style, colors, and imagery

Design Trends We love

  • Product super zoomed in as a background
  • Colorblocking
  • Matching background color to product color
  • Clever copy placement
  • Shape cut outs

Email Design sources

Use Really Good Emails or Milled to check out competitor emails and stay on top of design trends.