Email Design Best Practices: Tips for Marketers

Email marketing is the best way to communicate with consumers on the web. Email design refers to planning, designing, testing, and executing the visual look and email layout of your email marketing campaign. Pretty emails are not enough — excellent email design is usable and meaningful and draws engagement. In the latter part of 2023, email marketing had the highest ROI of $36 for every $1 spent on this type of marketing. By 2026, it is forecasted that there will be 5 billion active email users, giving marketers a mass whose interest they might want to catch.

However, being able to send out a strong message doesn’t help much in email marketing without having an attractive design. If your email doesn’t look like the 121 emails today’s working professional is getting on average daily, it will be deleted. The visually appealing functional design, which ensures that your email stands out and is easily readable while driving reader click-through rates, increases.

In this guide, we will examine how and why email design matters, discuss good practices, and finally examine the possible design trends for 2025.

Why Is Email Design Important?

Good email design is more than just aesthetics. It actually impacts your email’s crucial performance markers, such as open rates and click-through rates. Poorly designed emails—the ones with cluttered layouts or unreadable fonts—are too likely to be marked as spam.

Let’s see how:

• Mobile responsiveness: On average, 58% of email opens occur on a mobile device and require an adaptive approach.
• Readability: Over 70% of recipients delete emails if they aren’t displayed.
• Retention: Emails rich in personalized, visually engaging content increase retention by up to 82%.

These stats show that unless your emails are designed well, they’re not just pleasing to the eye but necessary for driving engagement and conversions.

The Top Email Design Practices Explained

Specify Your Sender Name

Your sender name is vital in establishing credibility, and it matters: first impressions are essential.

Don’t use generic names like 'noreply@company.com’, as they sound impersonal. Avoid this approach; select something professional and approachable, like “Emma from MarketingPro.”

This is a proven strategy for getting recipients to view your email because they will immediately recognize who it’s from.

Grab Attention with Your Subject Line

Firstly, recipients notice the subject line. Getting your emails off the ground means crafting a great subject line.

• Make it brief: Keep it under 50 characters.
• Use power words: Phrases like ‘exclusive’ and ‘free' and any repeated words do very well.
• Add urgency: The openings of subject lines without a sense of urgency (e.g., “last chance to save 50%!”) are increased by up to 22%.

Another effective way to gauge what’s working with your audience is subject line A/B testing.

Customize Your Preheader Text

Preheader text, or the snippet next to the subject line, offers a chance to reinforce your message. A strong preheader complements the subject line and provides additional context.

For example:

• Subject line: “Your VIP Discount Awaits!”
• Preheader: “Save 20% today—click to shop our top picks.”

Without optimizing this snippet, you miss a prime opportunity to entice recipients to open your email.

Get Personal with Your Content

Personalization isn’t as simple as dropping in the recipient’s name. Dive deeper by:

• Focusing on segmenting audiences by behavior or preferences.
• Including recommendations for products in case of past purchases.
• Recognitions like birthdays and anniversaries.

Despite this, 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences, and companies that excel at this see as much as a 40% increase in revenue.

Design Your Emails Using Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy helps your readers move through your email naturally. Here’s how to achieve it:

• Bold headlines: Feature message copy with large, clear fonts.
• Whitespace: Instead of crowding it up, let your content breathe.
• CTA placement: Your call to action (CTA) button should be close by, and you should use bright, catchy colors to attract visitors.

Say it’s a retail brand, and the headline is ‘Shop Our New Arrivals,’ e.g., with a big bold ‘Shop Now’ button below it and a product preview.

Use an Email Template

Templates are useful for time savings but guarantee consistency across your campaigns. Modern templates are designed to be:

• Responsive: Works beautifully on desktop and mobile screens.
• Customizable: It allows for tweaking of layouts, colors, and images.
• Optimized for dark mode: For the 81.9% of users that use dark mode on at least one device.

A practical way to keep your brand identity while speeding up the email creation process uses templates.

Top 2025 Trends in Email Design

As email design evolves, staying ahead of trends is critical for maintaining engagement.

AI-Powered Personalization

Advanced personalization is possible using artificial intelligence, in which user behavior is analyzed, and preferences are predicted. Brands leveraging AI tools to personalize emails have 41% higher revenue growth than non-users of these tools. We can use AI to optimize send times, recommend products, and even automate A/B testing.

To maximize your campaigns, pair great design with an email lookup service to target the right audience and increase ROI. Combining strategy with innovation will help you stay ahead in the competitive world of email marketing.

Interactive Elements

Interactive emails featuring embedded polls, quizzes, or shopping carts offer an engaging experience. According to Litmus, interactive emails boost click-to-open rates by 73%.

Minimalism

Simplicity is key. When done by a minimalist, the designs are minimalistic, too—with clean layouts, readable fonts, and subtle imagery. For professional audiences, this is a particularly effective trend.

Micro Animations

Animations like pulsating buttons or hover effects can grab the attention of CTAs or the elements readers need to focus on without overwhelming them. These subtleties will increase engagement, and e-commerce emails love these touches.

Dark Mode Optimization

As the dark mode is constantly rising, optimizing email designs to be elegant and beautiful in as many light and dark themes as possible is necessary. With a well-designed organization, even the user’s preferences will not compromise readability and branding consistency.

Conclusion

The success of any email marketing campaign hinges on email design. Using templates and best practices, such as personalizing your content and optimizing for mobile, will help you increase your engagement and conversions. Staying updated with emerging trends such as AI-powered personalization and interactive emails will ensure that your strategies continue to be relevant in 2025 and well beyond.

And one final email design tip — test everything. A few minutes of testing will make sure everything is where it should be, and your subscribers (and you!) deserve to see your emails exactly how (you hope) you worked so hard to achieve it.