Email design can be challenging. How do you make your email stand out from all the rest? If you’re pursuing cold email lead generation, it’s extra difficult because you also need to make sure you’re not setting off spam filters.

 

It’s a bit of a balancing act, because you want a spiffy email that looks good, contains the right information, and reliably hits the inbox.

 

Let’s take a look at 9 ways you can add some flair to your emails.

 

9 Email Design Tips to Make Your Campaigns Stand Out

 

Balance Text and Image Content

Nothing drives away contacts more than an enormous wall of text. In general, it’s a good idea to try to keep your emails as brief as possible, and that goes double for cold email.

 

You should try to have at least a 60/40 split, with 60% text to 40% images. For cold email, you should use as few images as possible – but don’t necessarily omit them totally. Images are one of the primary ways to make your email look more polished.

 

If you don’t have a healthy balance of text to images, with an image-heavy email (whether that’s lots of small ones or one big one), you’ll find yourself getting scrutinized more by spam filters.

 

That’s because spam filters can’t read what’s actually in an image, so spammers began using images of text instead of plain text to dodge filters. Of course, it didn’t take long for that particular tactic to get identified, which resulted in spam filters now taking a close look at image-to-text ratio.

 

Use White Space

A cluttered message is harder to read and makes a bad first impression, which is exactly what you don’t want.

 

Whether you’re using images as a primary design element or not, don’t be afraid to space things out a little. Let your images and text fields breathe a little.

 

This also applies to your text layout itself. Big chunky paragraphs are best avoided – keep them to a sentence or two, three if they’re short sentences. Not only does this keep your message reader-friendly, it’ll be more easily legible on mobile devices too.

 

Follow Content Hierarchy

“Content hierarchy” sounds fancy, but really all it means is making sure you present your content in order of importance.

 

That means ensuring your main points are above the fold. That is, visible without having to scroll. Imagine someone opens your email and all they get to see is whatever’s visible on their screen when they open it. Will it still make an impact?

 

Above the fold can be tricky, though. What’s immediately visible on desktop might not be above the fold on a tablet, and that might not be visible on a phone screen.

 

That makes it extra important to make your main points early on. You can follow it up with supporting arguments, social proof, and an awesome CTA, of course.

 

Optimize for Mobile

Almost everyone checks their email on their phone at least sometimes, and many people do it all the time. That means if your email template isn’t mobile responsive, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

 

Send a proof to yourself and check it on your phone. If you’ve got a tablet handy, check it there too. You want to make sure your images are displaying and resizing properly, your text is wrapping and isn’t too small or too large, and generally make sure the email looks good.

 

Also make sure your most important content is above the fold even on mobile, as mentioned above.

 

Make It Scannable

Send yourself a proof and open it. Don’t read it – just scan over it quickly. Let it catch your eye naturally, but don’t let yourself actually start reading every word.

 

Did you still get a concrete sense of what the email was about? Was that enough information to make you want to click the CTA?

 

If not, you should tweak it. People often don’t knuckle down to really read an email unless it’s interesting to them, which they’ll identify by scanning it.

 

You can make it more scannable by following our spacing and white-space recommendations. Another great way to make sure it’s scannable is to bold your key points. Just a phrase here and there – pick out ones that will interest the reader, highlight the benefits or value they’ll receive, and direct their attention to your CTA.

 

For readability, it’s a good idea to keep body text at 14-16pt and headers at 22-24pt. These are generally the most-readable font sizes across devices.

 

Keep Organized with Headings

If your email has multiple sections, even if they’re fairly small, consider using headings or subheads to make them more distinct.

 

The advantage here is that you can quickly and clearly communicate your main points in the headers, or catch the reader’s attention with them. They also make your content much more scannable.

 

Pass a Background Check

Don’t use an image, a pattern or a dark color for the background of your email content. If you have a dark background behind a lighter background for your main body, that’s fine (though some email clients won’t display it). You want to keep your design as crisp and readable as possible.

 

Some people prefer dark backgrounds with light text. It can be more comfortable to read on a screen. However, many apps (including Outlook for example) have a “dark mode” or “night mode” that does exactly that.

 

Colorful, But Not Too Colorful

It’s good to have a pop of color in your emails. Your logo, for example, and images you use. However, you should keep your body text plain black, and don’t use colored text where you can avoid it.

 

Emails with lots of colored text can easily come across as spammy or unpolished, and will also tend to get more scrutiny from the ever-vigilant spam filters.

 

Use Safe, Readable Fonts

In this case, safe means web safe, fonts that are recognized across systems and email clients. That way you won’t run into problems when an email client tries to display a font it doesn’t recognize.

 

Some typical, safe fonts include Open Sans, Helvetica, Courier, Tahoma, and Droid Serif for example.