Email design best practices for 2025

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Your marketing emails only have seconds to capture your readers’ attention and encourage them to take action, making email design best practices essential to avoid being ignored and deleted.

Poor email design hurts your conversions and sender reputation, and threatens your deliverability. Each poorly designed campaign erodes the trust you’ve built with subscribers, making it harder to stay in their inboxes.

To stay ahead in 2025, the customer expects more than basic communication. It’s imperative to use email design best practices that keep your messages engaging and impactful. Modern email design combines proven principles with innovative techniques that anyone can master, regardless of their design experience.

In this post, we’ll discuss email design best practices to help you create campaigns that stand out and build stronger connections with your subscribers.

What is the importance of email design?

A good email design flows naturally and feels intuitive, striking the perfect balance between delivering information and driving engagement. Adhering to email design guidelines ensures your email is visually appealing, functional, and user-friendly. Here’s why email design is important for driving email marketing ROI:

Enhances user engagement

Good email design ensures readability, easy navigation, and a seamless experience across devices. A responsive design with clear fonts, concise content, and well-placed CTAs encourages interaction, reduces bounce rates, and minimizes unsubscribes.

Communicates brand identity

Consistent colors, fonts, and imagery help reinforce your brand identity, making emails instantly recognizable. The right branding builds trust and strengthens connections with your audience.

Drives conversions

A structured email layout with contrasting CTA buttons, whitespace, and scannable sections makes it easier for users to take action. According to 2025 stats by WiserNotify, personalized CTAs perform 202% better than basic CTAs.

Below is an example of a good email design vs. a bad one. Notice how the better one has a properly aligned image with high-contrast text that’s short and easy to read. It also includes an easy-to-click link. The other version lacks proper alignment, features inconsistent font sizes, and includes a link that looks spammy, discouraging action:

What are the key elements of good email design?

Creating a high-performing email requires including key elements that make your email easily readable yet capture your audience’s attention. Here’s a breakdown of the components:

1. Layout and structure

A well-organized email format enhances readability and ensures your message is easy to follow. Start by adding a captivating header first, concise body content, and a compelling call to action towards the end. 

Use sections or blocks to separate content, making the email visually scannable. A single-column layout often works best, especially for mobile devices, as it keeps the design clean and ensures readability.

Below is an example by Cometeer that follows the correct layout. The heading “Earn free coffee…” is followed by the main body content and has a CTA at the end:

2. Font readability and typography

Typography helps make text easier to read and reinforces your brand image. Choose legible email safe-fonts and email clients, such as sans-serif options like Arial or Verdana, which are clean and easy to read on any screen.

Apple’s email communications exemplify this perfectly. It consistently uses the San Francisco font family across all communications:

3. Color schemes

Using the same color palette across emails, websites, and social media creates a cohesive brand experience. In email design, the right color choices can make your messages feel more inviting, urgent, or trustworthy, depending on the mood you want to convey.

Maintaining a consistent color scheme creates a strong, unified brand presence that nurtures trust, enhances user experience, and drives better engagement in your email campaigns.

This email by Netflix only has black color in the background and uses white for the content, giving a very striking visual:

4. Use of visuals and imagery

Images can elevate your email design by making it more engaging and memorable. Choose high-quality photos, illustrations, or icons relevant to your content and align with your brand’s identity. They help break up text, clarify messages, and improve the user experience. 

Avoid overloading your emails with too many images, as this can slow down loading times and frustrate readers. Use alt text for images to ensure the message remains accessible even if visuals don’t load.

Uber Eats designs its promotional emails with high-quality food photography as hero images. These pictures are clear and look enticing, making the users want to order from it:

5. Responsiveness for mobile devices

Your design needs to be optimized and responsive on mobile and other devices, too. Keep file sizes lightweight, adopt a single-column layout, and make elements like links, buttons, and CTAs large enough for easy interaction.

Instagram’s notification emails showcase a perfect mobile-first design. Its single-column layout automatically adapts to any screen size, buttons are perfectly sized for tapping, and images scale beautifully across devices:

6. Accessibility considerations

Accessibility means ensuring everyone, including people with disabilities, can engage with your content. To create an inclusive experience, consider various impairments, including visual, auditory, and cognitive disabilities. 

Adhering to email design best practices involves adding sufficient color contrast for text and providing clear image descriptions. It also involves avoiding overly small font sizes to maintain readability.

This email by SurveyMonkey uses solid contrasting colors with clearly readable fonts. It features well-spaced content with CTAs in vibrant colors on a clean white background, making it easy to read and navigate: 

10 effective email design best practices for email marketing

Understanding how to apply email design best practices is just as important as knowing the key elements. To build upon these core concepts, let’s discuss the email design best practices that can help you launch unique and captivating campaigns:

1. Use a clear hierarchy

A structured hierarchy is one of the best practices for email design that directs readers’ attention to the most essential elements — heading, content, and CTA. Prioritize the most important content at the top of the email to capture interest immediately. 

Use bold text and contrasting colors strategically to draw attention to key elements. Break up content with bullet points or dividers to make it skimmable. A good email marketing example is Dropbox’s structure of its feature announcement emails. 

It begins with a bold headline announcing the new feature, followed by a smaller subheading. Feature details are then presented in clear sections with icons and descriptive headlines, making it easy for readers to grasp the key points quickly:

2. Keep your design simple

A cluttered email with multiple design elements can distract the users from the main content. In a simple email design, we focus on elements that guide readers through your content.

Each component — an image, button, or block of text — should contribute directly to your email’s primary goal. It should either drive sales, share information, or build relationships. 

Airbnb’s booking confirmation email is an excellent example of one of the best email designs. It conveys all necessary information without overwhelming the recipient. The clean layout and effective use of white space make it easy for the reader to process and act on the information:

3. Optimize for mobile devices

For a responsive email, opt for a single-column layout for easy readability and ensure that clickable elements, like links and buttons, are large enough to tap (minimum 44×44 pixels).

Keep your email width between 600-640 pixels and use responsive design techniques to ensure images and text scale properly across devices. For optimal readability, set body text to at least 16px and headlines to 22px.

Finally, always test your emails on multiple devices and email clients to ensure mobile-friendliness and functionality. Tracking performance metrics like click-through rates on mobile can help you refine your designs and improve engagement with mobile users.

4. Use consistent branding

Another key email design best practice is maintaining consistency in branding across your emails. Your email design should match your brand’s look and feel. Maintain consistency in your color palette, typography, logo placement, and overall style across all communications. 

Create a style guide specifically for your email marketing to ensure every campaign aligns with your brand standards. When recipients instantly recognize your emails in their inbox, you’re doing the branding right.

Spotify exemplifies this, showcasing beautiful email design with its distinctive green and black color scheme across its emails:

5. Include one strong call to action (CTA)

Your CTA should be both inviting and impossible to miss. Focus on one primary action you want readers to take and ensure that the button or link stands out through strategic use of color, size, and placement of email design best practices. 

While you can include secondary CTAs, ensure they don’t compete with your main goal. The language should be action-oriented and create a sense of urgency without being pushy. Position your primary CTA above the fold for immediate visibility.

Notice how Netflix consistently uses a bright red “Play” button as its primary CTA to reinforce the action it wants the reader to take:

6. Choose high-quality visuals

If you’re using images in emails, they need to complement your message and be related to the email. When designing email campaigns, ensure your visuals reflect your brand’s quality and connect with your audience as well.

When your newsletter designs have more than one image, always optimize image sizes to allow for quick loading times without sacrificing quality or engagement. 

Adding GIFs sparingly can build interest, but keep them under 1MB to avoid delivery and loading issues.

7. Follow accessibility guidelines

Accessibility is a cornerstone of email design best practices, ensuring your content reaches all users, including those with disabilities. Use sufficient color contrast (at least 4.5:1 for normal text) and add CTAs in colors that don’t merge with the background colors of the email.

Keep text at a reasonable size, typically at least 11 or 12pt, with logical reading order and a proper heading structure. 

As part of responsive email design best practices, keep your links descriptive and understandable out of context. Use semantic HTML to consider users who rely on screen readers. 

8. Leverage A/B testing

Guesswork in email marketing can cost your resources and hurt your campaign ROI. 

A/B testing before rolling out your campaigns is one of the most important email design best practices. It allows you to test subject lines, CTA placement, image choices, and send times to understand what resonates with your audience.

While communicating with global audiences, adjust the demographics and test your emails in that area for accurate results.

Keep detailed records of your tests and implement learnings in future campaigns. What works for one segment might not work for another, so consider testing across different audience groups. 

9. Maintain a good text-to-image ratio

Finding the right balance between text and images helps ensure deliverability and engagement. To avoid triggering spam filters, aim for a ratio of 60% text to 40% images. 

Some email clients block images by default, so your message should make sense even without them. Structure your content so that key information appears in HTML text rather than embedded in images. Use images to support and enhance your message, not replace essential content, ensuring your email remains effective even without visuals.

10. Test before sending

Thorough testing is your ultimate safeguard against email marketing mishaps. Check your emails across multiple email clients, devices, and screen sizes. If you’re opting for email automation, verify that all links work, images load properly, and personalization tokens function correctly. 

Test your email’s rendering in both light and dark modes, as more users opt for dark mode viewing. Send test emails to team members to get a fresh perspective on your content. Consider using tools that provide email previews across different clients to identify and resolve potential issues before they reach your audience.

How Omnisend can help you create stunning emails

Creating professional emails incorporating all these best practices can be challenging, but Omnisend’s comprehensive toolkit makes the process simple and efficient.

The platform’s drag-and-drop editor simplifies designing by allowing you to structure your layout and hierarchy. It lets you focus on creating a clear, visually appealing message without getting bogged down by technical details.

Omnisend offers a library of pre-made email design templates with excellent hierarchy, compelling layouts, and mobile-responsive design. These templates serve blueprints that follow email marketing best practices while remaining customizable to your brand’s unique needs.

The platform’s built-in mobile preview feature lets you see how your email will appear across different devices. The interface provides real-time feedback on your design choices, helping you make informed decisions about image sizes and button placement. This ensures your design adheres to email template design best practices.

Omnisend’s A/B testing tools simplify the process of experimenting with various design elements, monitoring their performance, and identifying the elements that resonate with your audience. 

Watch this short video to learn how to create stunning, high-converting emails with ease:

Conclusion

When you implement these email design best practices thoughtfully, you’re not just checking boxes. You’re building trust with your subscribers, improving user accessibility, and creating a foundation for successful email marketing campaigns.

Excellent email design is a continual process of refinement and optimization. Each campaign provides an opportunity to learn more about what works for your specific audience.

By following these email design best practices and leveraging tools like Omnisend, you can consistently create emails that capture attention, maintain interest, and inspire action.

Email design best practices FAQs