Email design basics, and the five-second test your last campaign might fail

Good design is as little design as possible.

― Dieter Rams (German industrial designer)

Open your last campaign. Now open a more from your favourite brands and writers. Look at them side by side for ten seconds.

What are the differences?

Colour? Fonts? Fancy graphics? Maybe.

Or is it something harder to pin down? A sense of restraint, hierarchy, and care.

Good email design is often hard to explicitly describe. As the kids might say… it’s sometimes just a vibe.

But how do you give your email a vibe? And a good one at that?

Many marketers treat design as decoration: some polish you add at the end. But design is often what determines whether someone reads your email at all. It can be the difference between an email that gets binned and one that sells.

Now, there are many ugly emails that do well too, thanks to their exceptionally good content.

But even if your content is Godin-level, it won’t hurt to package it up in an email that enticed the recipient to actually read it.

If ugly emails do well, does design really matter?

Three reasons it matters more than people think:

Design is the first read. Before anyone parses a sentence, they often scan the shape of the email. Headers, spacing, image placement — these tell the reader “this is worth my time” or “this is junk.” That judgement can happens in less than a second.

Design carries your brand. Your visual choices say as much about who you are as your copy does. A cluttered email signals a cluttered company. A calm one can signal confidence.

Design drives clicks. Hierarchy is the difference between one obvious next step and a wall of links the reader gives up on.

Five things you can do next week

1. Establish a hierarchy

Most emails should have one thing that’s biggest. And if there is more, ensure you make the second thing the second-biggest, and so on. If everything is the same size and prominence, it’s hard for the reader to know where to land.

2. Use white space generously

Cramming more in doesn’t get usually more across — it gets skipped. Give each section room to breathe.

3. Limit yourself to two fonts (maximum!)

A heading font and a body font is plenty. Three or more starts to look like a ransom note.

4. Pick 2-3 colours, not seven

A primary, an accent, and a neutral. Anything beyond that and you’re competing with yourself, and rainbows.

5. Squint at it

Pull up a test email in your actual inbox. Lean back, and squint until the text blurs. The shapes and contrast that remain are what your reader sees first. If those shapes don’t help to guide the reader, the design isn’t doing its job.

A small challenge

Take your next email and remove one thing. A divider, a button, a section, a colour. See if it actually gets worse. Most of the time, it doesn’t.

Sometimes in life, the solution to a problem is to take something away, rather than to add.

Until next week,

James

P.S. Accessibility, CTAs, email weight, and design. Our most recent issues are all on the theme of creating better emails, something we’re rather obsessed with. We’re working on a completely new way to craft emails in EcoSend that enables you to master all of these areas effortlessly. If you’d like to try it out, let us know.