In other words, avoid the pitfalls of image-only email. Using just one large image in your email will increase your spam score, so the email may not make it to readers' inboxes at all. It also means that your email will not be fully responsive. And if your image doesn't load, readers will only see the ALT text. The solution? Always use a balance between text and images in your email. 5. Design on a Grid Grid-based designs are easier to make responsive. This is because HTML emails are constructed with tables consisting of rows and columns. Email editors that capitalize on modular template design, like our BEE email editor, Automatically help you organize content into a grid while providing great flexibility in content organization. We looked at this infographic from an email from Aveda and drew lines to show how the content broke down into four quadrants: Screenshot 2015-10-21 at 10.44.04 AM The original content was a single image, but by dividing it into 4 separate images on a grid, we made it mobile responsive.
Screenshot 2015-10-21 3:07.33 PM Screenshot 2015-10-21 at 17.57.19 PM 6. Remember the ALT text Be prepared for your images not to load. Some email clients don't automatically upload images and some subscribers don't enable auto-uploading for security reasons. Here's what that original Aveda email above looks like with the images turned off: Screenshot1417 ALT text helps those readers understand your message, even without images. When writing your ALT text, remember to keep the text short. If it spans 2 lines, some email Image Masking Service clients won't display it. If you can, style your ALT text by adding styling to the image (your image won't look any different, but when your ALT text appears, it will be the font, color, and size you specified). 7. Your email is not a website If you follow tips #1 and #2, then you're probably in good shape. A targeted and succinct email should be crafted for clarity and should communicate a single call to action. So there is no need to overload the email or the header, for example, with superfluous links, menus and messages, as in this example from Target: header target Go with simplicity. And don't forget to use the data you have to make customizations . When someone comes to your company's website, you don't know much about that visitor. Your mailing list, on the other hand,
is another story. You have data on your subscribers. Use it to customize versions of your campaign for segmented and targeted portions of your audience to improve conversion rates. 8. Be selective with custom fonts Most email clients will not support your branded custom font. Use them sparingly to make a statement, like in the main header of your email, then incorporate email-friendly fonts for the body of your message. Here's a great example from Mashable: the blue "Mashable / Alerts" header is in their brand font (and is displayed as an image) but the sub-header is plain text with great color HTML background (and the next header under the images is also plain text).