Use responsive email templates

Responsive design makes emails render well on a variety of device screen sizes and email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!…). Today, a large majority of emails are opened on a mobile device. If you don't have responsive designs, you’ll be providing a poor user experience to those “mobile openers”, and they won’t be clicking on your email campaigns.

Choose an Email Service Provider (ESP) that offers a responsive email builder to automatically design marketing emails (as well as transactional emails) that display perfectly on the screens and email clients of all your subscribers. You can also take advantage of a tool like Inbox Preview to make sure your email templates look good everywhere. This will help you dramatically improve your click rate.

How to design a responsive email template

With a responsive email builder, you won’t have to worry about things like media queries or CSS. The email builder will take care of these things for you. However, there are other elements that might interfere with the end result, which you should keep in mind:

• Opt for a single-column layout for your email designs. This will ensure that web browsers and major email clients display the content of your email newsletter in the right proportions, and that you won’t have to re-adapt the design to smaller screen sizes.

• Choose appropriate image sizes to make sure they display properly and adapt to any device. In case those images do not render correctly, always add an alt-text (alternative text) to tell users what they’re supposed to see. 

• Make sure your call-to-action (CTA) buttons are clearly visible and big enough so everyone can easily click on them on mobile devices. If you have multiple links or CTAs, space them sufficiently apart from each other. 

• Hierarchize and prioritize content so your emails can be easily read, even on small screens. And opt for a standard font available on any device, like Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman or Verdana.