Rethinking email design
Chances are, you are overthinking email design — and overdesigning your emails.
A lot of art directors, and our other team members as well, make the mistake of approaching email design like it's a microsite, or a brochure. Emails are their own thing, and they're very different from every other digital (or print) tactic in terms of parameters, limitations, and best practices for layout and content. Engagement has to be thought about differently in emails too; on a website, our goal (or, one of our goals) is to keep the user reading, keep them tapping/clicking. In an email, our goal is simply to get them to tap/click, once, as quickly as possible.
Simple is better — no exceptions
Think about how users engage (or don't engage) with marketing emails. They may or may not open it when they see it in their inbox. If they open it, they are unlikely to spend a lot of time reading it. If you're very lucky, they may tap/click one link in the email. They're unlikely to come back to the email and read more or tap/click more. When they're done with the email, they will almost definitely never look at it again.
For all of these reasons, emails should be simple in their design, brief, extremely clear, not cluttered with useless images, and there should be a very clear CTA (call to action) — as prominent as we can make it. Content should be bite-sized and skimmable. Users are unlikely to read thoroughly from top to bottom; they're more likely to skim and scan until a section catches their eye.
Big graphics are generally a mistake, and graphics with text in them are always a mistake, as a large percentage of users have images hidden by default. Don't design a big graphical header with your headline set in your brand font. Design a less tall header graphic, and put your headline in live html text (Arial) under it.
Keep all content stacked; nothing side by side in columns. We quickly skim our way down emails; stacked content is much easier to consume this way.
Big fonts. Nothing tiny. Ever. 17 pixels minimum for body copy, 14 pixels minimum for your tiniest things; footnotes, end matter, etc. Bigger text is always more engaging.
Mobile first
Emails absolutely, positively, must be designed mobile-first. If you're designing desktop first, you're not thinking like a digital professional. A mobile-first approach to emails is critical for two main reasons:
- You will probably find that more than half of the opens for your emails are on mobile devices. If the email is designed in such a way that some things are hard to read on mobile, you've lost these people.
- Mobile users have less patience than desktop users and are more likely to bounce if the experience isn't extremely smooth.
For these reasons, it's imperative that we nail the mobile layout, and then simply extend that for desktop by having the content area become wider, and scaling up the images as needed. That's it; if we're adhering to best practice and designing emails like real digital professionals, we shouldn't do anything fancier than that.
An email is a digital tactic that has an extremely short lifespan, unlike, say, a website. For that reason, we should keep emails as streamlined and efficient (read: cheap!) as possible. When we put a lot of time and effort into an email, we generally make it more expensive for no benefit whatsoever to the user and our client. For email, simple is always better.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.