5 Tips To Rescue Your Email Design

We all know that feeling when you're at the testing stage of your email design and you find that one email client is having a real strop. To help you bypass that 'tearing your hair out' stage, we've got 5 tips to help you rescue your email design.

1) Create a template to use as a base for all of your emails; by doing that it will ensure that you're always starting each send from a working version. Also as you're using the original version as a base, there will be no unwanted styles telling email clients to display your newsletter differently.

2) Always test your email, ideally using our inbox preview tool as that will show you how your email looks in various devices. Within 2 minutes you will be able to see exactly what your email looks like in over 30 different email clients ranging from the most popular email clients, iPhones, iPads and Android mobiles. This will help to ensure your template is working perfectly so you are giving yourself the best possible start when creating your next email campaign.

2) Don't paste from Word! If you paste from Microsoft Word then it isn't very forgiving regardless of the editor you are using because it's extremely difficult to remove Word specific markup. When you are able to use tools to remove the Word specific markup, you often end up removing some of your wanted styling too. So although we have tools that try their best to do this it's always better if you just copy and paste from Notepad first as that will remove all the unwanted markup.

3) Save your images correctly. To save time, it's best to insert your images at the exact size you need them to be within the email as that way they will be less likely to expand and cause your design to fail. Also as email clients turn off images by default it's best to add 'Alt Text' as that will display before your image loads.

4) Create with mobile in mind. As Litmus reports, over 50% of email opens are done on mobile devices (via Email Client Market Share) it's easy to see why you should try to enhance the experience of those viewing your email on a mobile.

Here are 5 additional tips to help you design for mobile:
- Start with a responsive template, we provide over 80 free templates within each account so why not signup to a free trial or take a quick look at our responsive templates.
- Make better use of spacing as it will help to attract the eye to the next section of content.
- Use sub-headings to allow your subscribers to scan read your emails while on the move.
- Add clear call to actions; HTML buttons are best as they will display immediately and can be styled to fit in with your design. We have created our own Button Creator which you can use, try our tool here.
- Make use of pre-header text as that is another great opportunity for you to entice your subscribers to open your email. You can use our Preview Tool which shows you how the subjectline and snippet text display in major email clients, try our tool here.

5) Include a good ratio of text to images, by doing this not only will you be reducing the spam score (to ensure your email doesn't land in the junk folder) but you will also be able to track what your subscribers are interested in. As you'll have reduced text, it's beneficial to include a 'read more' button after each section as that will allow you to drive traffic to your website or blog and also track what your subscribers are interested in via the click reports.

If you'd like some more tips on email design and all other aspects of email marketing then you can download our free eBook, 'The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing'.