Design Toolkit

The Email Design Toolkit

Design tips, code, and data for better email design.

The perfect marketing email should do three things:

Look Good.

Email Design Basics

Work Well.

Email Coding Fundamentals

Get Results.

Data for Designers

Email Design Basics

A crash course in the essentials of email design

Email design is like nothing else. Here's how it's different.

First, subscribers open emails in three stages, and they decide at each stage whether or not to proceed with reading. They initially see your envelope content; then, if they open, they see the body content, and ultimately the landing page if they click. Each element must in equal parts stand on its own, work with the next element, and work holistically with the other two elements to convey a single message and create a unified experience.

Next, email clients add another layer of complexity to how you code (and how subscribers view your message). The number of inbox providers is growing in an environment where there are no standards for email coding. That makes it extra challenging to have your emails render and function the way you intend.

Additionally, emails render differently on subscribers' different devices, and they may even have images blocked. The majority of emails are now read on mobile devices, which is fundamentally changing email design and spurring adoption of mobile-aware and responsive email design. All of these combined factors mean you have a host of details to consider every time you create an email.

The 3 Stages of Email Interaction

Before an email is opened, subscribers see the envelope content, which is the from name, subject line, and, in some cases, snippet text.

Stage 1

Envelope Content

From

The from name is the text that says who sent the email. The from name has the greatest impact on whether your emails get opened, deleted, or reported as spam, so your from name should be instantly recognizable by subscribers. Usually, this is the name of the brand the subscriber signed up to hear from.

Subject

The subject line tells subscribers what your email is about. Although creativity has its place (check out our round-up of 100 Inspiring Subject Lines), the most effective subject lines are straightforward and predispose openers to engage with the content of an email. They should be 20-40 characters long ideally, but testing is highly advised.

Snippet

Snippet text appears right after or below the subject line in several email clients—most notably the iPhone’s native email client, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail—and is comprised of the first characters of HTML text in the email. Most often, it’s pulled from preheader text, which is HTML text that comes before the header of the email. This text should extend or reinforce the subject line, giving subscribers more information about the content of the email.

The 3 Stages of Email Interaction

When an email is opened, subscribers then see the body content of the email. Most marketing emails are a mix of text and images, with promotional messages being more image-heavy and transactional messaging more text-heavy. Also, lifestyle brands tend to lean toward images, while value brands tend toward text.

Stage 2

Body Content

Generally speaking, emails consist of:

  1. Preheader text, which is HTML text that acts like a second subject line

  2. A header, which includes your brand’s logo

  3. A navigation bar, which includes a few links to major entry points to your website

  4. A primary message block, which contains the main message of your email

  1. A secondary message block for an additional call-to-action or two

  2. A social media bar, with links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks

  3. A footer, which includes an unsubscribe link and your postal address for CAN-SPAM compliance, disclaimers, and other administrative links and text

Keep in mind that subscribers don’t read emails. They scan them. So pay extra attention to headlines; use bullet points and sentence fragments to communicate quickly; and make call-to-action links and buttons clear and obvious. At a glance, subscribers should know what you want them to do next and what’s in it for them.

Preheader text

Header

Navigation bar

Primary message

Secondary message

Social media bar

Footer

The 3 Stages of Email Interaction

Landing pages are the web pages where subscribers arrive when clicking on the calls to action in your emails.

Stage 3

Landing Page

Landing Page
Devices

Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Lotus Notes, and Beyond

Website developers have it relatively easy. They only have to deal with a number of environments equal to the number of device types times the number of operating systems times the number of browsers.

Email designers and coders have all of that, times the number of email clients—of which there are an increasing number. That means email coding is an extreme exercise in finding the lowest common denominator coding that works across all platforms.

Because your emails could potentially look different in Gmail using Firefox and Gmail using Internet Explorer, we recommend using a rendering tool or setting up test accounts and viewing emails in the most common device-OS-browser-client combinations.

No Standards

Email remains a unique challenge because of the way the email “client” or “reader” (AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc.) accepts HTML code. There are no consistent standards across these clients, so email design and code need to acknowledge these differences. It’s important to know what’s supported and keep testing over time to keep tabs on any rendering errors or changes.

The Challenge of Mobile Design

Representing the pre-mobile status quo, desktop-centric email design is optimized for viewing on large monitors and has small, tightly clustered links and buttons well suited to mouse clicks, not fingertips. These designs require mobile users to zoom and swipe left and right as well as up and down to interact with emails.

Mobile-aware design uses basic techniques to create a single email that functions well across a range of screen sizes, but is deferential to smartphones.

Making your email template mobile-aware involves three key elements:

  1. Employing a single-column layout (two-column product grids are okay)
  2. Using large text, images, and buttons
  3. Spacing out links and buttons—including those in navigation, social, and administrative bars—so they can be accurately tapped

See examples of mobile-aware design from the Email Swipe File:

Responsive design has become a general term for a basket of advanced techniques that serve up versions or renderings of an email that are optimized for particular screen resolutions or email clients.

Whether it’s fluid, liquid, scalable, adaptive, or truly responsive design or powered by live content, all of these techniques involve extra email design and coding—and often the creation of two or more versions of an email. But the result is email messaging that looks good and functions properly on a range of devices.

See examples of responsive design from the Email Swipe File:

 

Select another device to view how Desktop-Centric Design displays on other devices

Dealing with Image Blocking

A significant number of inbox providers still block the images of emails by default. That means that subscribers have to enable or turn on images—either for each individual email or for all the emails from a particular sender—for the images in your emails to be displayed. Thankfully, there are several defensive design tactics you can use to ensure the graceful degradation of your emails when images are blocked.

1.

When text is part of an image, use HTML text rather than graphical text.

2.

Use alt text for your images. A common practice is to use the graphical text of an image as alt text. Keep in mind that alt text can be styled.

3.

Select a background color for table cells. This can help group text and even create buttons.
Pay more attention to defensive design when creating transactional emails, welcome emails, winback emails, and re-permission emails. Since these are emails that are more likely to be viewed with images blocked, more HTML text in particular should be used.

See examples of defensive design from the Email Swipe File:

Email Coding Fundamentals

A general guide to writing HTML for email

Code Essentials for Layout

  • Control the layout using standard HTML tables and avoid CSS for layout (DIV, float, etc).

  • Use HTML tables, but don’t stack them. Nest all content and tables inside one structural table.

  • Add inline CSS to the <td> tag.

    <td style=”font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans- serif; font-size: 12px; color:#666666; padding-bottom: 5px;” align=”center”>
  • Instead of CSS margins, use CSS padding or spacer GIFs to create spacing between elements.

  • Specify accurate table widths: errors in math will cause incorrect display. Also, specify accurate colspans and rowspans, as extra values will create extra spaces. Avoid rowspans if possible, as they may not render correctly in some email clients.

  • In Outlook 07/10/13, CSS padding applied to the top or bottom of one cell in a multi-column layout will be applied to all columns in that table, causing the layout to render incorrectly.

  • To fix email alignment and background color issues in non-IE browsers, insert the following CSS code:

    <STYLE type=”text/css”> 
    ReadMsgBody{width: 100%;}
    .ExternalClass{width: 100%;}
    </STYLE>
  • Indent code to allow for easier troubleshooting and code-sharing across multiple resources. To turn on code-indenting in Dreamweaver, go to Edit > Preferences > Code Format and check the “Indent” box. To apply this setting to existing files, click the “Format Source Code” button and then click “Apply Source Formatting.”

  • Empty <td> cells won’t render properly in Outlook 07/10, Outlook.com, and Lotus Notes. Use a 1x1 spacer GIF in empty table cells instead of a &nbsp; (non-breaking space) to prevent empty cells from collapsing and breaking the layout. To remove the extra space (line-height) added to spacer GIFs, use style=”font-size:0%;”.

  • Avoid using tables with multiple columns and multiple rows. Instead, nest tables so that a single three-column table holds a multiple column table in the center, allowing the right and left columns to control padding for the entire page.

    Use this nested table structure: Instead of this:
    Use this Instead of this

Master Your Mobile Marketing

Text EMAIL to 38767 for weekly tips, trends, and strategies.

Text, Links, Images, Videos, and Forms

  • Use inline CSS to force links to display with or without an underline.

    <a href=”” alias=”” target=”_blank” style=”text-decoration: underline;”></a>
  • Use inline CSS to specify a link color other than default “web” blue.

  • Block level elements such <p> and <h1> are stripped out or behave unexpectedly, which can affect your layout. Enclose all text within <td> cells instead and use inline styles to control the text.

  • Since some email clients block images by default, make sure important images contain an alt attribute. Use alt tags on all images, even if you don’t want one displayed. If no alt tag is needed, insert a blank tag: <img alt=”” src...>. Alt should come before source (src) to aid with mobile rendering on Blackberry. Include font, font size, and color properties in your <img> tag to style your alt text.

  • Set border=“0” in an img tag to prevent a blue border around linked images and add style=“display: block; to prevent rendering issues in Outlook.com and Gmail in Firefox.

    <img alt=”” src=”spacer.gif” width=”1” height=”20” border=”0” style=”display:block” />
  • Use absolute URL references for the image path rather than relative paths.

    <img style=”display: block;” alt=”ExactTarget Marketing Cloud“ src=”http://image.jpg” width=”20” height=”10” />
  • Don’t rely on background images for primary content, but include them only as secondary elements.

  • To ensure usability in all environments, avoid rich media like Flash.

  • Use animated GIFs knowing that only the first frame will display in Outlook 07/10/13. If video is desired, show a screenshot of the video, linking to your website or other channels where it can be easily played and tracked more robustly.

  • Background images don’t render in Outlook 07/10/13 without a special code fix. If you use a background image, treat it as a secondary design element, using an appropriate background color to make sure any displayed text is legible (i.e., not white text on a white background).

  • Image dimensions in HTML should match the actual image’s dimensions. If not, image distortion and pixellation can occur. Additionally, inline sizing is ignored by some older email clients, so this precaution will ensure consistent rendering.

  • Avoid using shorthand in inline CSS. Be sure to use the full six digits for HEX color codes (#000001 rather than #000) and avoid RGB colors. Write each CSS property separately instead of combining them into one single shorthand declaration.

    Use this: Instead of this:
    <td align=”left” style=”font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000001; font-size: 20px;”>
    <td align=”left” style=”font: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif #000001 20px;”>

  • The hex code #000000 (black) on href tags is not recommended because some clients (primarily Gmail) will override it with blue. To show black, use the hex code #000001, which appears almost exactly the same.

  • Alt tags should not contain the greater than (>) symbol >. In AOL, this tag can cause HTML to be displayed until the next closing tag in the code.

  • Images less than body line-height, usually 18-20px, need to contain style=”line- height:0px; font-size:0px;” or something similar to force email clients to not add space around the image equivalent to the text line-height.

  • Outlook 07/10/13 and Outlook.com don’t support forms. Instead of a form, provide a link to complete the form on a landing page. If you choose to use them in an email anyway, be sure to include clear instructions on how to view the email on a web page so subscribers can complete the form.

  • Use <body style=”-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;”> to control iPhone text rendering, if desired. iOS Mail doesn’t natively show any fonts smaller than 13px, so this will disable the auto-scaling of HTML text.

Looking for additional code, testing, and analytics resources?

To deepen your email coding education, bookmark these helpful links:

Mobile Rendering

Your subscribers want emails to work just as well on their mobile devices as they do on their larger screens. To enhance the way an email looks and works on a smaller screen, you can adjust the standard version of the email with a few code enhancements. This may include specifying larger text sizes, resizing images, showing or hiding sections of the email, or making one side drop below the other side, to name a few. This approach is called responsive design, and these techniques are generally controlled by CSS.

A few responsive design notes to remember:

  • When coding a responsive design for email, @media queries are used to activate the mobile version of the email.
  • Classes are used to adjust, hide, or introduce elements of the email on mobile.
  • Mobile email apps (like Gmail and Outlook.com) as well as native email apps (like iOS Mail and Android email) behave differently.
  • For some techniques, responsive code must be placed in <style type="text/css"> as well as inline.

Email clients are always evolving, so it’s important to continually keep tabs (no Gmail pun intended) on how your emails render in every inbox. You can consult these coding fundamentals anytime as you build and test emails. No matter what kind of email you’re creating, remember that your code framework and QA process both need to meet the specific needs of your brand and subscribers.

Troubleshooting Common Rendering Errors

  • Gmail
  • iOS Mail
  • Yahoo
  • Outlook 07/10
  • Outlook.com
  • Lotus Notes
  • Multiple Clients
Error Fix Email Clients Affected
Extra space below images Add style=“display:block;” to <img>
Embedded CSS not displaying properly Use inline CSS
CSS-based layout not displaying properly Use tables for layout; “clear” and “float” attributes are not always supported
Link color not displaying properly Nest a <span style=“color: #CCCCCC;”>Link</span> within the <a>
Blue border appearing around linked image Add border=“0” to image tags
Animated GIF not displaying Ensure first frame of the GIF conveys enough, as only the first frame will display in Outlook 07/10/13
Background image missing Use an HTML background instead of the CSS background image property
Content misaligned Specify accurate widths and align attributes on all <table> and <td> tags
Layout broken Verify correct syntax and no missing closing tags
Email length truncating: generally occurs when downloading the message over cellular data (not Wi-Fi) if the email’s HTML is larger than 15k Remove redundant HTML, hard returns, and spaces in the code; reduce the amount of content; convert some text and image content to just images

Data for Designers

Using data to inform design decisions

Device-Based Inputs

What devices are people truly buying and using around the world? This data impacts your design and code workflow, as well as your audience profile. For example, if you have an Outlook audience, you’ll adjust for the preview pane and image-blocking. If you have a predominantly iPhone or Android audience, you’ll adjust for screen size, pixel density, the touch experience, and so on, accordingly.

  • Android
  • iPhone
  • Other

Track and consider device-based data at a global and a brand level. Worldwide data may be different than your current audience data, but the global numbers may indicate shifts and trends that you’ll need to design for soon.

1 Research data: IDC Worldwide / 2 Research data: Quantcast, Piper Jaffray
3 forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2013/11/15/android-dominates-market-share-but-apple-makes-all-the-money/

Performance-Based Inputs

Performance-based data can help you make decisions and increase conversions based on how your emails are performing, but be sure your brand knows exactly what results you’re seeking to get from email marketing, or else performance-based data won’t be as useful.

Hotspots

One excellent way to visualize performance-based data about your email program is a click overlay. A click overlay is like a heat map showing you the hottest areas where subscribers actually click. With each send, you should look at click overlays to discover if subscribers clicked (or tapped) where you designed them to take action.

This visual will also help get you buy-in from your team to make informed design decisions. Follow these steps to create one:

  • After a send, go into tracking for that email, view the click overlay, and export or take a screenshot of the data.
  • Determine what parts were most trafficked and which parts were overlooked.
  • Visualize your click overlay. Draw circles or use brush sizes in Photoshop to place color over the links to visually depict where people are clicking. For example, use a 40px brush size to show 40% of clicks, and so on. Are those the areas you intended?

User Experience and Human Behavior

While designing, remember a few essentials about human behavior in regard to email.
Keep in mind that there's no magical industry benchmark.

For one brand we studied, 16% of click-throughs were from people who didn’t even open or download images! People don’t open later on desktop. Unfortunately, mobile triage is a myth, according to our data. Just 2-3% of emails are opened on two different platforms—so the first open is your one chance to impress. Peak mobile times are early morning and late evening. For a mobile-heavy subscriber base, this might bear heavily on your send times. People generally click less on mobile devices than they do on desktop. Many factors contribute to this: usability, trust, and time, to name a few.

How People Use Mobile Devices

Subscribers’ relationships with their mobile devices are constantly evolving, but ponder these early learnings and the implications for your emails.

  • Desktop
  • Mobile
  • Andriod
  • iPhone
  • Other

4 Research data: emailclientmarketshare.com, Litmus
Note: Percentages may not equal 100% due to rounding.
According to one retailer and one send, with a one-million-plus dataset, we found the following email behavior and mobile breakdown by device.

Platform Affinity

We’ve found that many subscribers interact with a given brand’s email program over time only in one (mobile) or the other (desktop). But when subscribers do happen to open that email during their lifecycle on both mobile and desktop, they tend to prefer desktop for clicking.5

60%

of people who open emails are opening only on mobile, according to data based on one customer’s daily sends for 30 days.

5ExactTarget Marketing Cloud research: one customer, one-million-plus dataset, daily sends over 30 days

Making Decisions with Your Expertise

Your experience with your brand and subscribers is something no stat can replace. Certain decisions don’t need to be tested; they’re clear to you, based on your experience with the brand, email industry, and design profession.

Some elements that good email designers can execute without testing and data include:

Making Decisions with Data

Of course, while some decisions are clear to you without research and outside statistics, other choices should be driven by data—either to confirm an approach, or change something wholesale.

Common testable elements include:

When making a design decision, consider the difference between optimization and design innovation, as explained by Joshua Porter6:

Optimization means:

What works best in the current model?

Design innovation means:

What is the best possible model?

6Metrics Driven Design: Joshua Porter, slideshare.net/andrew_null/metrics-driven-design-by-joshua-porter

Ready to Start Testing?

Before you run off to test every element in your email design, wait a moment—there’s a better way. Follow these steps to create a truly strategic testing plan.

Recall that you have a large dormant audience.

This dormant audience is masking the true impact of improvements and will dilute your results. For some brands, this dormant subscriber segment can be as large as 1/3 or 2/3 of the total subscriber base.

Test with new subscribers.

New subscribers are the perfect petri dish for testing, because they haven’t been tainted by past messaging and marketing efforts. A welcome email campaign is a great place to start, as statistically those readers are the most engaged during that phase of an email program’s lifecycle.

Keep testing; change occurs over time.

Your subscribers need to be retrained when big changes are implemented, and that doesn’t happen instantly or with a single redesign. When you’re talking about testing, you’re talking about a long-term change in the way your emails are experienced. Give it time, and don’t expect immediately obvious results.

View the full expierence on Desktop & Tablet

Or download the Design Toolkit PDF

Email Design Basics

A crash course in the fundamentals of email design

Email design is like nothing else. Here’s how it’s different...

Subscribers interact with emails in three stages. First, they see the envelope content. Then if they open, they see the body content. Then if they click, they see the landing page. Each element must in equal parts stand on its own, work with the next element, and work holistically with the other two elements to convey a single message and create a unified experience.

Email clients add another layer of complexity to coding and design. The number of inbox providers is growing in an environment where there are no standards for email coding. That makes it extra challenging to have your emails render and function the way you intend.

Emails render differently in different environments, especially on mobile. The majority of emails are now read on mobile devices. That’s fundamentally changing email design and spurring adoption of mobile-aware and responsive email design.

The images in your emails might be blocked. A picture is worth a thousand words...but often the images in your emails aren’t enabled by subscribers That means your emails can’t rely solely on images to communicate your message.

Email Coding Fundamentals

A general guide to writing HTML for email

HTML standards have long been in place for web design, but email remains a unique challenge because no universal standard exists—and subscribers increasingly open emails on more devices and in more environments. In this guide, we provide some useful tips to help you develop the fundamentals for writing HTML for email. Keep these guidelines in mind when designing your next marketing emails. Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll discover:

  • Code essentials for layout
  • Text, links, images, video, and form usage tips and tricks
  • Notes on how to tackle mobile rendering
  • Ways to troubleshoot common rendering errors

Data for Designers

Using data to inform design decisions

Email designers are the gatekeepers for how people consume emails worldwide. As an email designer, you’re constantly making decisions that affect subscribers’ emotions and ability to use and experience emails. Whether you’re handling branding elements and photography, or controlling how legible, clickable, and useful an email is, you directly impact revenue with these decisions.

Of course, this is a hefty responsibility, which requires plenty of research and data before you even open Photoshop. That’s why we’ve compiled these strategic resources to help you take a data- based approach to the way you design.

To enhance your left-brain perspective on your emails, begin asking questions like:

  • What inputs do I have available to me, and how was the data gathered? Is this survey-based data or open data?
  • Is this statistic in its proper context? What else about the send or situation was noteworthy?
  • When it comes to validity, is the data apples to apples when I compare it to my specific brand? Am I making a big decision based on someone else’s A/B test?

Pull up a seat to the strategic table, and begin honing your analytical skills along with your email marketing expertise. Let’s dig into the data.