The Ultimate Guide to Email Design and 13 Best Practices

 By 2022, the number of email users around the world is expected to hit 4.3 billion.

Among all of those users are members of your target audience, a.k.a. quality leads and prospects you can work to reach and convert via email.

To ensure your emails stand out and grab the attention of these audience members, your email design needs to be on point.

In this guide, we'll talk about what email design is, cover 13 best practices, examples of successful email design, and offer some tools you may be interested in experimenting with. Let's get started.

Click here to download our free lookbook that's packed with our favorite email newsletters.

  1. What Is Email Design?

  2. Email Design Best Practices

  3. Email Design Tools

  4. Email Design Examples

Email Design

Email recipients often scan information and abandon emails that don't offer them value or simply appear to be too dense. That’s why having great email design is so important — it'll help you capture the attention of, and engage, your email recipients. 

What is email design?

Email design is the process of strategically designing and creating an email that resonates with your business’s target audience, specifically your current email subscribers and customers.

Your email design should be attention-grabbing, aesthetically-pleasing, and on-brand, among other things — let's dive into those things next with these 13 best practices for email deign.

Email Design Best Practices

  1. Craft a strong subject line.
  2. Write an attention-grabbing pre-header.
  3. Be concise.
  4. Keep your email on-brand.
  5. Think about your layout.
  6. Personalize every email.
  7. Incorporate unique visual content.
  8. Don’t be afraid to use emojis.
  9. Use a responsive design.
  10. Optimize your email with calls-to-action.
  11. Add an “unsubscribe” button.
  12. A/B test your design.
  13. Design an email signature.

1. Craft a strong subject line.

Your email subject line is the first thing anyone sees when you send them an email. It’s the brief statement that’s supposed to pique the interest of your recipients. It should capture their attention so they want to open your email and continue reading.

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