The average marketing email appears to have developed a profound fear of empty space. It arrives carrying a logo, navigation bar, hero image, introductory paragraph, three product cards, two testimonials, a "latest from the blog" section, social icons, four calls to action, legal copy and, somewhere near the bottom, an invitation to follow the company on six platforms you've already made a conscious decision not to follow it on.
All of this has been carefully designed, of course. Very little of it has necessarily been designed to be read.
It's an important distinction because email occupies a rather peculiar place in modern marketing. A website can reasonably expect visitors to explore, a shop can place several departments under one roof and a magazine can accommodate dozens of unrelated stories because buying it represents some degree of commitment to the experience. An email, however, gets no such luxury. It arrives inside a private environment containing messages from colleagues, clients, friends, schools, banks, delivery companies, landlords, airlines and somebody you accidentally gave your address to in 2017 in return for 10% off a pair of socks. It has to compete with all of those things before the recipient's even seen the design.
And yet, somehow, most discussions about improving email marketing eventually descend into lengthy debates about the colour of the button.
The trouble is that good marketing email design begins slightly earlier than most designers and marketers would care to admit. Before typography, imagery, modules or calls to action, there's a more fundamental question worth asking: why would somebody actually be pleased that this email arrived? If you haven't got a convincing answer, no amount of art direction is going to rescue you.
Why Some Emails Get Read While Others Get Ignored
M&C Saatchi
There's a reason some emails get opened immediately while others spend three weeks gathering digital dust before being swept into the bin. It rarely comes down to the sophistication of the design, because the first decision happens before anybody's even seen it. All the recipient has to go on is the sender's name, subject line and preview text, and those three elements have to make a convincing case for why the message deserves their attention.
Relevance is the biggest advantage an email can have. A retailer letting you know that something you've been waiting for is back in stock already has a compelling reason to exist. A publisher recommending a genuinely interesting article or a brand offering something useful at precisely the right moment has a similar advantage. "Our latest company newsletter", meanwhile, isn't going to inspire quite the same enthusiasm, particularly if the last six contained little more than corporate announcements and thinly disguised sales pitches.
This is why subject lines and preview text deserve considerably more thought than they're often given. Mailchimp's guidance recommends being descriptive, keeping the audience in mind and testing different approaches rather than relying on generic promotional language. A subject line should create curiosity without resorting to clickbait, while the preview text should add something useful rather than simply repeat the headline.
But there's another factor that's harder to manufacture: trust. When a brand consistently delivers something worthwhile, people begin recognising its name as a reason to open rather than another intrusion to dismiss. That relationship isn't built through clever subject lines or increasingly aggressive personalisation. It's earned over time, one useful, interesting or entertaining email at a time.
And ultimately, that's the difference between an email people read and one they ignore. The former offers something the recipient actually wants. The latter is simply something the business wanted to send.
Winning attention before the design even appears
Jerome White
- Make the sender worth recognising. People decide whether to open an email long before they see your carefully considered typography. A familiar name, a consistent voice and a reputation for sending something useful will do more heavy lifting than an elaborate template ever could.
- Treat the subject line as a promise, not a sales pitch. Curiosity is useful; clickbait is expensive. Give readers a reason to care without making them feel they've been tricked into opening another advert.
- Don't waste the preview text. That little snippet beneath the subject line is valuable editorial real estate. Use it to add context, introduce a twist or complete the thought, rather than allowing it to default to “View this email in your browser”.
- Write for someone, not everyone. An email about a genuinely relevant problem will usually feel more compelling than a beautifully designed message aimed at an imaginary average customer. Relevance is a creative decision, not just a targeting exercise.
- Earn the next open with the last email. Attention is cumulative. If your previous five messages were forgettable, a clever subject line won't magically restore the relationship. Every send teaches subscribers what to expect from you.
The first piece of email design isn't technically inside the email at all. It's the small collection of information surrounding it in the inbox: the sender's name, subject line and preview text. Between them, these elements have to make a fairly significant argument on your behalf, establishing who the message is from, what it might contain and why opening it could be worth a few seconds of somebody's increasingly divided attention.
This is where elaborate email design ideas can occasionally distract from something considerably simpler. The strongest reason to open an email is generally that the sender has something relevant to say. A retailer announcing that something you've been waiting for is back in stock has relevance built in, as does a software company explaining an important change to a feature you use regularly. A publisher delivering the kind of story you actively subscribed to receive is offering something recognisably valuable. "Here's our February newsletter", on the other hand, has rather more work to do.
The same principle continues once the message has been opened. An email needs to establish fairly quickly why it deserves the next few seconds, though that doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be extremely short. There's no universally ideal length for a marketing email because reading behaviour depends on the relationship between sender and recipient, as well as the subject and purpose of the communication. A thoughtful essay from a writer somebody actively follows might comfortably sustain ten paragraphs, whereas an abandoned-basket reminder requiring the same level of commitment should probably trigger an internal investigation.
Length becomes a problem when the message takes longer to explain why it matters than the reader is willing to give it. That's ultimately an editorial problem rather than a technical one, and it's why an effective email is often the result of what somebody decided to leave out.
Interestingly, the technical environment surrounding email is increasingly reinforcing that principle of respecting the recipient. Google's sender guidelines require businesses sending large volumes of messages to personal Gmail accounts to meet standards covering authentication, spam complaints and straightforward unsubscribing. Senders reaching the threshold of 5,000 messages a day must support one-click unsubscribe for marketing and subscribed messages, while the broader guidance recommends communicating with people who've genuinely opted in.
That might sound like a deliverability issue rather than a design issue, but the two aren't as separate as they initially appear. Sender identity, frequency, subscription expectations and the ease with which somebody can leave your mailing list are all parts of the experience you've designed. Making escape deliberately difficult isn't a particularly sophisticated retention strategy. It's the email equivalent of locking the restaurant door until customers order dessert.
There's also little commercial value in maintaining an enormous database of people who no longer want to hear from you, however impressive the subscriber count might look in a quarterly report. An audience that's happy to receive your communication is worth considerably more than one that's simply failed to find the unsubscribe button.
The editorial art of knowing what to leave out
Enrico Buratto
- Give each email one proper job. A product launch, a company update, three blog posts and a seasonal promotion might all deserve attention. They probably don't deserve to share the same email. Decide what matters most and build everything around it.
- Stop designing miniature websites. Navigation bars, competing banners, endless content blocks and a forest of buttons give readers more decisions than they wanted to make. An email should create momentum, not offer a guided tour of your entire business.
- Make every image earn its place. Photography, illustration and animation can communicate things words cannot. But if an image is merely filling space or making the template look more expensive, it's probably getting between the reader and the message.
- Use hierarchy to make reading feel effortless. A strong opening, short paragraphs, meaningful subheadings and generous white space can make even a relatively long email feel approachable. Good email design isn't necessarily about making something shorter; it's about removing the effort required to understand it.
- Leave the reader with one obvious next step. Whether that's exploring a product, booking a conversation or reading the full story, the call to action should feel like the natural conclusion of the email, not a button that somebody remembered to add at the end.
One of the easiest ways to improve an email is to remove half the reasons it was sent in the first place. A remarkable number of company newsletters aren't really one message at all, but six or seven unrelated announcements forced to share accommodation because somebody decided everything the business has done this month deserves an audience.
There's the new product, the upcoming event, a customer case study, the latest blog post, somebody who's just joined the team, an industry award and an invitation to a webinar. Also, the sale ends Sunday. Rather than communicating one worthwhile idea, the email becomes a miniature company noticeboard with a promotional banner stapled to the bottom.
This usually happens because businesses construct email campaigns around their own activity rather than the interests of their audience. Marketing gathers everything the organisation has produced since the previous send and attempts to squeeze as much of it as possible into the available template. Readers, unfortunately, approach the situation rather differently. They're interested in whether something is useful, entertaining, relevant, urgent or economically advantageous to them, and they have very little interest in the internal departmental politics that resulted in seven equally important content modules.
The best email marketing design therefore begins with editorial judgement. What's the most important thing we're trying to communicate? Who specifically needs to hear it? What do they already know, and what would we like them to understand or do differently? Answering those questions might mean postponing the recruitment announcement, giving the customer story its own campaign or selecting one genuinely interesting article rather than presenting the entire company blog in miniature.
It's also where audience segmentation becomes valuable, provided it's approached with a little more imagination than inserting somebody's first name at the top of an otherwise generic message. Meaningful personalisation changes the content according to something relevant about the recipient, whether that's their interests, purchasing behaviour, previous interactions with the business or the information they've explicitly asked to receive.
Personalisation without relevance can actually feel more intrusive than personal. "Hi Benjamin, we noticed you exist" isn't quite the breakthrough in customer relationship management that some marketing platforms would have you believe.
Copywriting is equally important, though it doesn't always receive the same attention as the visual elements. A subject line should generate interest without making promises the email fails to deliver, while the preview text should extend the proposition rather than simply repeat it. The headline needs to reward the decision to open, and the introductory copy should continue the conversation rather than launching into an entirely new explanation of what the subject line already established.
There's a temptation to equate attention with manipulation, particularly when pressure to improve open rates encourages increasingly dramatic language. But Google's current guidance explicitly warns against misleading sender identities, deceptive subject lines and false "Re:" or "Fwd:" tactics that make marketing messages appear to be existing conversations.
It's sensible advice creatively as well as technically. You might be able to trick somebody into opening one email, but you can't trick them into looking forward to the next one.
What if the best email design barely looks designed?
Email Squad
This brings us neatly to Simon Manchipp, Founder of SomeOne, whose opinion on the matter is characteristically restrained:
"The inbox is a war zone, and your marketing email is just another piece of digital shrapnel unless you break the rules of engagement. Designing emails that look like miniature websites packed with navigation bars and "read more" buttons fails completely, nobody wants to browse your newsletter. The best email design is aggressively anti-design: text-heavy, brutally personal, and completely devoid of stock imagery. Make it look like a direct threat or a secret confession from the CEO to the customer. When you strip away the glossy HTML templates and the polished corporate veneer, you force the reader to actually read the words—and if the words aren't good enough, no amount of colorful buttons will save you."
Manchipp's argument is deliberately provocative, but there's something rather persuasive about it. Email has spent years borrowing enthusiastically from website design, to the point where plenty of marketing messages now resemble compressed homepages rather than communications that were actually intended for somebody. Modern platforms provide columns, cards, banners, buttons, image modules and increasingly sophisticated templates, so it's understandable that marketers feel compelled to use as many of them as possible. After all, if the software provides six different content blocks, why wouldn't you fill them?
Because the recipient already has access to your website. The email needs to give them a reason to visit it.
What's particularly interesting about Manchipp's suggestion is that anti-design is still very much design. A plain-looking email involves decisions about typography, line length, spacing, hierarchy, emphasis and pacing. Somebody still has to decide which information comes first, where paragraphs should break and what deserves a link. The design becomes less conspicuous, but it certainly doesn't disappear.
In fact, stripping away the visual embellishments can expose the quality of the underlying communication rather brutally. Without an enormous photograph, animated GIF or brightly coloured promotional panel to distract the eye, the words have to do considerably more work. That's uncomfortable for brands accustomed to using visual polish as a substitute for having something interesting to say, but it can also be liberating.
Of course, this doesn't mean every business should immediately abandon HTML and begin sending 1,200-word emails from the CEO as though an organisational crisis is underway. Different messages have different requirements, and good design should respond to those requirements rather than follow a rigid aesthetic ideology.
A message from a founder, salesperson or account manager might become considerably more persuasive when it feels genuinely personal. An ecommerce launch, meanwhile, could depend upon beautiful product photography, while a fashion brand has every reason to treat its visual presentation as part of the brand experience. Travel companies have an obvious advantage in being able to show rather than simply describe a destination, and retailers selling highly visual products would be foolish to ignore that.
The question isn't whether plain text is inherently better than HTML. It's how much design the particular message actually needs.
A strong marketing email layout gives readers a clear route through the content, usually establishing one dominant thought, providing enough explanation or evidence to make it credible and offering an obvious next step. Longer editorial newsletters can absolutely accommodate multiple sections, but they still need a hierarchy that helps readers understand what's worth their attention.
What should generally disappear is the visual furniture that's there because the template happened to have room for it. Unnecessary navigation bars, elaborate category menus, decorative stock imagery and repeated calls to action all compete for attention, often without making the central message any clearer.
Every additional element asks the reader to do a little more work, and eventually the email starts demanding more attention than it's earned.
Designing for the inbox people actually use
- Start with the small screen, not the desktop mock-up. Emails are often read in narrow, interrupted moments. Prioritise a clear reading order, comfortable text sizes and buttons that don't require the precision of a watchmaker.
- Assume your beautiful images might never appear. Some email clients block images or load them unpredictably. The central message, essential information and call to action should still make sense without them. Useful alt text helps, but it isn't a substitute for a well-structured email.
- Remember that your design doesn't control the environment. Dark mode, different fonts, varying screen widths and the eccentricities of email clients can all change how a message appears. What looks immaculate in a design file may look rather less convincing in someone's actual inbox.
- Make accessibility part of the design, not the final inspection. Clear contrast, readable typography, descriptive links, logical heading structures and meaningful alt text make emails easier to use for people with disabilities — and often more pleasant for everybody else.
- Test the real thing before declaring victory. Send previews to different devices and email clients. Check links, buttons, image loading, dark mode and the plain-text version. Then look beyond open rates to clicks, conversions, replies and unsubscribes. An email that looks beautiful but achieves nothing is still a missed opportunity.
There's another problem with treating emails like miniature websites, and it's one that becomes painfully apparent somewhere between design approval and the first person forwarding a screenshot from an elderly desktop mail client to ask why the beautifully crafted button has turned into a blue sentence.
A beautiful Figma frame isn't necessarily a functional email, and designers working in this field have to contend with technical restrictions that would make many contemporary web developers weep.
Email remains a more constrained environment than the modern web because different clients support markup, styling and layout techniques in different ways. Even Gmail, which supports standard CSS, style blocks and media queries, acknowledges in its developer guidance that unsupported properties and selectors may simply be ignored. What looks perfectly composed in one inbox can behave very differently in another, particularly when images are blocked, fonts are substituted or the recipient is viewing the message in a different display mode.
This makes resilience an essential part of good marketing email design. The message should remain comprehensible when images fail to load, typography renders differently or certain visual effects disappear. Calls to action shouldn't depend entirely on decorative styling, while important information should generally remain actual text rather than being permanently baked into a graphic.
Accessibility adds another layer of responsibility, but also an opportunity to make the communication better for everyone. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines emphasise readable text, sufficient colour contrast and alternatives for information presented visually. For email designers, that means using meaningful alternative text for informative images, making links understandable and ensuring the structure allows people using assistive technology to navigate the message.
It also means resisting the temptation to create an entire email as one enormous image and consider the job finished. If your campaign announces "40% OFF EVERYTHING THIS WEEKEND" exclusively inside a hero graphic and the image doesn't load, you've accidentally designed an extremely minimalist promotion.
Accessibility can also be a useful creative constraint because it forces teams to consider whether their message genuinely makes sense without the visual decoration. When words need to work independently, vague propositions become harder to defend. When links have to explain their destinations, "click here" starts looking as lazy as it always was. When the layout needs a coherent reading order, unnecessary modules and decorative interruptions become much less appealing.
Mobile introduces a similar discipline. The answer isn't simply to shrink everything until it fits a smaller screen, but to think carefully about reading order, headline wrapping, image cropping, touch targets and how quickly the proposition becomes apparent on a narrow display. A design that relies on a dramatic widescreen composition might need an entirely different approach when most of its content is being stacked vertically.
This is why testing should be considered part of the design process rather than something performed reluctantly after the creative work is complete. A campaign needs to be experienced across different devices, inboxes and display settings, ideally with images disabled as well as enabled. Email platforms such as Mailchimp recommend testing across email clients precisely because apparently minor differences in rendering can change how a message is understood.
There's also the less glamorous question of whether the email arrives at all. High-volume senders need to pay attention to authentication methods such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, alongside complaint rates and unsubscribe requirements. These might not be subjects likely to generate enormous excitement at the next creative awards ceremony, but they're essential to the success of the work.
Make friends with whoever understands deliverability, in other words. The most beautifully art-directed campaign in history becomes surprisingly ineffective when it spends Tuesday afternoon in the junk folder.
What great email design looks like in practice
Looking through the email design work showcased by the Creativepool community, it's striking how differently designers approach the medium depending on the brand, audience and commercial objective. There's no single recognisable aesthetic that represents good email design, and some of the strongest examples are interesting precisely because they demonstrate the importance of building systems rather than producing isolated creative executions.
Jason Holt's La Roche-Posay Email Design & Development work
Take Jason Holt's La Roche-Posay Email Design & Development work for L'Oréal UK. Rather than approaching each message as an entirely separate design exercise, Holt describes using a modular system across desktop and mobile formats, combining image-based content with live text elements and techniques for incorporating background imagery.
The significance of this approach is that mature email marketing programmes aren't collections of one-off posters. They're ongoing communication systems that need to accommodate different types of content while preserving a recognisable brand identity. Designers have to establish enough consistency to make production efficient without forcing every campaign into precisely the same visual structure.
That's a delicate balance, particularly when businesses rely upon reusable templates to manage the demands of frequent sending. Consistency should make the creative process faster and more reliable, but it shouldn't result in every email looking as though somebody has changed three sentences in the same PowerPoint slide.
Richard Kean's email design work for Toyota and Lexus Fleet Services
Richard's email design work for Toyota and Lexus Fleet Services demonstrates another important consideration: the relationship between creative execution and commercial performance. The brief was explicitly focused on generating exposure and revenue through email marketing, and a campaign originally expected to run for six months was still being produced 18 months later. Richard handled both the design and coding, underlining how closely the two disciplines are connected when creating work that needs to perform in real inboxes.
It's easy to underestimate that relationship because email can look relatively straightforward compared with more elaborate digital experiences. Yet an attractive concept that can't survive HTML production, mobile rendering and the restrictions of different email clients isn't really a finished design. Understanding the implementation environment allows designers to make creative decisions that are ambitious without being impractical.
Cristina Chacón's Email Marketing Designs
Cristina Chacón's Email Marketing Designs began with a different challenge, involving a custom welcome email for prospective clients alongside a series of informational newsletters. Welcome emails deserve particular attention because they arrive at one of the relatively rare moments when a recipient is actively expecting to hear from a brand. They've just subscribed, expressed interest or taken an action that suggests they're open to further communication, which creates an opportunity to establish the relationship on the right terms.
Unfortunately, plenty of businesses respond to this moment of unusually fresh enthusiasm with a spectacularly unhelpful "Thanks for signing up", followed by absolutely nothing of value. A thoughtfully designed welcome email can do considerably more, establishing the brand's personality, explaining what subscribers can expect and directing them towards something immediately useful. The aim should be to demonstrate that subscribing was a good decision rather than simply confirm that the database has successfully acquired another entry.
Jessica Olorenshaw's Digital Email Marketing Designer
At the other end of the scale, Jessica Olorenshaw's Digital Email Marketing Designer project demonstrates what happens when email becomes a substantial ongoing operation. The work involved more than 500 emails over 15 months, encompassing design, scheduling, product selection, editorial direction, animated GIFs and promotional banners. The project description reports an average increase in ecommerce sales of more than 850% during the engagement. While that's a figure reported by the project creator rather than an independently verified result, it nevertheless illustrates the commercial ambition behind the work.
More importantly, the project shows how email design can become an iterative process in which visual identity, customer retention, content strategy and user experience are continually refined rather than treated as separate concerns. It also involved developing material for different international markets, adding another level of complexity to a programme already producing a significant volume of communications.
Panagiotis Vergopoulos' Airfasttickets Newsletter Frenzy
Panagiotis Vergopoulos' Airfasttickets Newsletter Frenzy offers a related example, with an archive of promotional email work created for markets including Greece, Germany, the UK and the US. At that scale, modular thinking becomes particularly important because language, copy length, audience expectations and promotional priorities can vary considerably between territories. A design system that works beautifully in English might struggle once its headlines are translated into longer phrases, while imagery and commercial offers can also require local adaptation.
The best email systems therefore need to be flexible enough to accommodate differences without sacrificing the consistency that makes the brand recognisable. They should survive translation without experiencing a nervous breakdown.
Across all these examples, the underlying lesson is much the same. Good marketing email design isn't about creating one attractive template and rolling it out indefinitely. It's about developing a repeatable relationship between message, brand, audience and production, with enough room for the creative approach to evolve as the needs of the business change.
How to Design Your Emails
Hatch
Designing an effective marketing email isn't about cramming as much information as possible into an attractive template. It's about understanding what the reader needs, presenting it in a way that feels natural and making the entire experience as effortless as possible. Whether you're creating an editorial newsletter, promotional campaign or product announcement, these eight principles can help make sure your email actually does its job.
Start With a Message Your Reader Cares About
Before opening your email design software, establish exactly what you're trying to communicate and why anybody should care. Too many marketing emails begin with the company's priorities rather than the recipient's interests, resulting in newsletters that read like an internal noticeboard with a promotional banner attached. Consider what your audience wants to know, what problems they're trying to solve and what would make receiving your message feel worthwhile. If you've got several unrelated announcements fighting for attention, they might be better off as separate emails. A clear, relevant proposition will always give your design a stronger foundation than an elaborate template desperately searching for something interesting to say.
Create a Headline and Opening That Keep Readers Interested
Getting somebody to open an email is only half the battle. The headline and opening sentences need to justify that decision almost immediately, giving readers a compelling reason to continue. Avoid wasting the introduction on corporate pleasantries or repeating everything you've already said in the subject line. Instead, establish the value of the message, introduce an interesting idea or get straight to the problem you're helping to solve. A good headline should communicate something meaningful rather than simply announce "Our Latest News". Think of it as the beginning of a conversation rather than another opportunity to shout about your brand.
Use Layout and Visual Hierarchy to Guide the Reader
The best email layouts make it immediately obvious where the reader should look and what they should do next. Establish a clear hierarchy using headline sizes, spacing, imagery and carefully considered placement, with the most important information receiving the greatest emphasis. For a straightforward promotional message, a single-column layout with one dominant headline and call to action will often work better than a complicated collection of competing modules. More substantial newsletters can accommodate multiple stories, but they still need an obvious reading order. White space is particularly valuable here, giving important elements room to breathe rather than forcing everything together. If every component is shouting for attention, the reader's unlikely to hear anything.
Make Email Copy Easy to Read and Scan
Most people aren't settling down with a cup of tea and thirty uninterrupted minutes to contemplate your latest marketing email. They're reading between meetings, waiting for a train or pretending to listen to somebody explain the quarterly figures. Make their lives easier with clear language, manageable paragraphs and useful subheadings that allow them to find the information they care about. Avoid unnecessary jargon, complicated sentences and the kind of elaborate corporate language that somehow manages to say very little in an extraordinary number of words. That doesn't mean your copy has to be boring or aggressively brief. Personality, humour and storytelling can all help sustain interest, provided the writing respects the reader's time and gives them something worth reading.
Choose Images, Colours and Typography That Support the Message
Visual design should reinforce what you're communicating rather than compete with it. Strong product photography might be essential for a fashion launch, while an editorial newsletter could benefit from a more restrained typographic approach. Choose imagery that adds information, creates interest or establishes an emotional connection, rather than inserting stock photography simply because there's a conveniently sized rectangle waiting to be filled. Typography should be readable across different devices, while colour can establish hierarchy and reinforce brand identity without sacrificing contrast or accessibility. It's also worth keeping important information as live text rather than embedding it inside images, particularly when recipients might have images disabled. Beautiful design matters, but not when it makes the message harder to understand.
Make Your Email Work on Mobile and Across Email Clients
An email that looks magnificent in Figma but disintegrates when somebody opens it on their phone isn't a particularly successful piece of design. Different email clients interpret HTML and CSS differently, so layouts need to be flexible enough to survive the journey from the design software into an actual inbox. Prioritise responsive layouts, readable type, appropriately sized images and buttons that can be tapped comfortably without accidentally opening three other links. Think carefully about how content stacks on narrow screens and whether the message still makes sense when images aren't displayed. It's also worth testing dark mode and checking how the design behaves in Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail.
Guide Readers Towards One Clear Call to Action
Every marketing email should have a clear idea of what it wants the recipient to do next. That might mean reading an article, exploring a product, registering for an event or making a purchase, but the action should follow naturally from the message rather than appearing as an unrelated instruction. Avoid overwhelming readers with a dozen equally prominent buttons encouraging them to shop, subscribe, follow, browse and discover simultaneously. Multiple links can make sense in an editorial newsletter, but promotional campaigns generally benefit from one obvious primary action. Make the wording specific, the button easy to identify and the destination relevant to what you've promised. If somebody clicks "Book Your Place" and arrives at a generic homepage, you've made the final part of the journey unnecessarily difficult.
Test and Refine Your Email Before Sending It
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is that you don't have to rely entirely on guesswork. Before sending, check how the campaign appears across devices and email clients, test every link, proofread the copy and make sure any personalisation works correctly. Then use the results to improve future campaigns. Subject lines, layouts, calls to action and content approaches can all be tested, although it's worth changing one meaningful variable at a time if you want to understand what's making the difference. Open rates can provide some context, but clicks, conversions and other actions are often more revealing measures of success. The aim isn't to discover some mythical perfect email template. It's to learn what your particular audience responds to and make each campaign a little more effective than the last.
Good email design comes down to making deliberate choices. Every headline, image, paragraph and button should earn its place, and the finished communication should feel like something designed for an actual person rather than assembled to satisfy a marketing calendar. Get that right and you won't need quite so many bells and whistles to earn somebody's attention.
Making the next step feel obvious
Iris
Of course, persuading somebody to open and read an email is only part of the challenge. Most marketing messages also want the recipient to do something afterwards, which is where calls to action become important.
Unfortunately, email sometimes answers the perfectly reasonable question of "What do you want me to do now?" with the digital equivalent of shrugging enthusiastically. Shop now, read our story, meet the team, view collection, read more, follow Instagram, explore sustainability, book an appointment, watch the video and discover the range. All presented with roughly the same visual urgency.
That isn't necessarily giving the reader a generous amount of choice. Quite often, it's simply transferring the business's inability to prioritise onto the person receiving the message.
There are perfectly legitimate editorial newsletters with several stories and destinations, but campaign emails generally become stronger when the primary action is unmistakable. More importantly, that action should emerge naturally from the content rather than appearing as a sudden instruction disconnected from everything that came before.
If the email has explained how a new product solves a particular problem, "See How It Works" might be a natural next step. If somebody has abandoned a checkout, "Complete Your Order" communicates precisely what will happen. And if you're inviting people to an event, "Reserve Your Place" is considerably more useful than the generic "Learn More" that seems to have become the default response to any situation requiring a button.
The design hierarchy should make the purpose clear before the call to action appears, with the button acting as the logical conclusion to the argument. This is also why the destination matters as much as the email itself. A campaign promising 50% off that directs customers to a homepage where the offer is nowhere to be found has failed to complete the experience. Likewise, a beautifully personalised message pointing towards a generic landing page immediately sacrifices much of the relevance it worked so hard to establish.
The destination should feel like the next sentence in the conversation, not an unrelated interruption.
There's also the question of how often that conversation should take place, which is one of those subjects marketers desperately want to reduce to a satisfying numerical answer. Every Tuesday? Twice a month? Exactly 2.7 emails per fortnight, preferably after breakfast?
Unfortunately, the ideal frequency depends on the relationship, the expectations established when somebody subscribed and whether the business has something worthwhile to say. A daily publication and an architectural consultancy aren't entering the inbox under the same terms, and a retailer might have perfectly legitimate reasons to send transactional, lifecycle and promotional messages at different intervals.
A professional-services business manufacturing three artificial reasons to communicate every week, meanwhile, may simply be training its audience to ignore it. What's important is that subscribers have a reasonable understanding of what they're signing up for, and that the business pays attention when its communications stop generating interest.
Google's sender recommendations encourage list owners to consider whether disengaged subscribers still want to receive messages, which is sensible beyond the technical implications. A smaller audience that genuinely welcomes your emails is often a considerably more useful creative opportunity than an enormous database whose main response to your campaigns is to look for the exit.
Testing what works rather than what looks best in the meeting
The Armoury Agency
One of email's biggest advantages over many other forms of marketing is that the results can be measured and used to improve future communications. Rather than relying entirely on whether somebody in a review meeting thinks a hero image feels more premium, businesses can test whether audiences actually respond differently to changes in content, structure or presentation.
Subject lines can be compared, calls to action refined and different content approaches tested against each other. Platforms such as Mailchimp allow marketers to run A/B tests involving variables such as sender names, subject lines, content and send times, with the results helping to establish what works for the particular audience rather than what somebody assumes ought to work.
The important part is deciding what success actually looks like, which is where email marketing can become unnecessarily fixated on the wrong numbers. Open rate remains a useful contextual indicator, but it's become less reliable as a direct measure of attention because privacy protections can interfere with the tracking methods used to determine whether messages have been opened.
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, for example, prevents senders from reliably identifying whether protected recipients have opened their messages. That's a useful privacy feature for users, but it also means marketers need to be careful about treating open-rate figures as definitive evidence of success.
Clicks can provide information about whether recipients engaged with the content, while conversions reveal what happened after they left the inbox. Ecommerce businesses might track orders, revenue and repeat purchases, while service companies could be more interested in enquiries, bookings or demonstrations. Publishers might prioritise reading behaviour and longer-term engagement, while retention programmes may need to evaluate customer activity over several months.
Unsubscribe and complaint rates tell a story too. Sometimes an unsubscribe is simply somebody spring-cleaning their inbox, but a sudden spike following a particular campaign can also be the audience offering unusually direct creative feedback.
The metric should follow the objective. If an email exists to sell a product, the question isn't simply how many people opened it, but how many subsequently bought something. If it's intended to generate event registrations, then registrations matter. If the purpose is to communicate an important service change, reach and comprehension might be more valuable than any immediate commercial response.
Testing also requires a degree of discipline. Completely redesigning an email, changing the subject line, introducing a new offer and moving the send time before declaring that version B performed better doesn't necessarily teach you very much. It's far more useful to isolate meaningful variables so you can understand which changes had an effect, then apply those lessons to future campaigns.
That's ultimately what separates genuine email marketing best practice from passing design trends. Best practice isn't a permanent collection of visual commandments about the perfect button colour or ideal number of words. It's a process of learning how to make communication more relevant, understandable and useful to the particular audience you're trying to reach.
Finding the right creative people for the job
Mr Fox agency
One of the reasons businesses struggle with email design is that they frequently underestimate how many disciplines are involved in creating something that appears relatively simple. A successful programme might require copywriting, visual design, HTML development, CRM strategy, segmentation, automation, analytics and deliverability expertise, with each influencing the effectiveness of the finished communication.
Sometimes one exceptionally versatile specialist can cover several of these areas, while larger programmes may require a team of people working together. Either way, businesses commissioning email design need to understand which problems they're actually trying to solve before deciding who to hire.
Creativepool's Email Designer directory provides a starting point for exploring different specialists, though the most useful consideration is generally portfolio relevance rather than job title. Somebody who identifies as an email designer might be an exceptional visual creative with considerable ecommerce experience, a technical specialist focused on HTML production or someone who combines design with CRM automation and lifecycle strategy.
Those distinctions matter when you're commissioning work. If you need to build a scalable ecommerce programme, you'll want to see evidence of experience managing ongoing campaigns. If you're developing an editorial newsletter, typography, hierarchy and content judgement might be more important. And if your existing designs look wonderful but disintegrate every time somebody opens them in Outlook, you may need a technically experienced email developer more urgently than another art director.
The platform's Email Marketing company directory also allows businesses to explore agencies and specialist companies, compare portfolios and approach potential partners with a structured brief. The most useful briefs establish the commercial problem, intended audience, desired outcomes, timeline and practical constraints before asking anyone to start designing.
"We need a new newsletter template" might describe the eventual deliverable, but it doesn't explain very much about the problem. Are people opening the emails but failing to click through? Is the content difficult to navigate on mobile? Does production take three days every week? Has the brand disappeared inside a generic CRM template, or is the team simply struggling to understand which messages are working?
Each problem calls for a slightly different combination of creative and technical skills, and identifying it early makes it much easier to commission the right work. As with most design disciplines, email becomes unnecessarily expensive when businesses repeatedly commission the wrong output because they haven't properly understood the problem they're trying to solve.
The privilege of being invited into somebody's inbox
Kelsie Singleton
Perhaps the most useful thing to remember about email is that somebody has permitted you to enter a relatively private space. That's easy to forget when an audience becomes a number on a dashboard, with 67,000 subscribers, 183,000 contacts or 1.4 million email addresses gradually beginning to resemble infrastructure rather than individual people.
But the message doesn't arrive in a database. It arrives on somebody's phone between a request from their boss and confirmation that their parcel is finally going to be delivered at some entirely unpredictable point between 7am and 9pm. It appears during a commute, between meetings or in the final exhausted minutes before somebody decides they've had enough of looking at screens for the day.
That should change the creative standard we apply to it. An email doesn't deserve attention simply because a company spent three days producing it, or because the marketing department has a calendar to fill. It earns attention by respecting the recipient's time and delivering something that justifies the interruption.
Sometimes that's a beautifully art-directed product launch, with striking photography and a perfectly judged visual identity. Sometimes it's a genuinely useful piece of editorial content, a particularly well-timed offer or a single photograph accompanied by four carefully chosen lines of copy. And sometimes, as Simon Manchipp argues, it's a matter of getting rid of almost all the decorative design and allowing the words to behave as though one human being has actually sat down to write something worthwhile to another.
The right answer will be different for every brand, but the underlying principle isn't especially complicated. Have something worth saying, make it easy to understand and give the recipient a clear reason to do something with it. Remove the unnecessary distractions, make sure the experience works and then pay attention to how people respond.
That's the real foundation of good marketing email design. It has very little to do with whether your newsletter resembles a miniature version of the website, whether somebody managed to fill every available module or even whether the client described the finished creative as "really premium".
The best marketing emails produce a small but increasingly valuable reaction when they land in somebody's inbox. Not the weary resignation of "Oh God, here's another one", but something considerably more encouraging.
"Oh. I'll actually read that."
