Designing Dynamic Emails
We asked our design team to divulge the details on how to deliver dynamic content in 2023.
Here’s what they shared.
Loretta Doria
Best Practices for Designing Dynamic Emails: 2023 edition
According to a study by McKinsey 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions with brands. In fact, 76% even get frustrated when this doesn’t happen (the other 24% didn’t open the e-mail jk jk!)
The good news is that executing personalized messaging at scale gets more accessible each day. A new breed of platforms, like our partners Klaviyo, Iterable, and Braze, have prioritized tools that turn tricky techniques into turnkey tactics for the average (yet equally ambitious) business.
We asked our design team to divulge the details on how to deliver dynamic content in 2023.
Here’s what they shared.
Tip 1: Design Beyond the Best Case
Understanding the edge cases is an important part of succeeding in dynamic design. A specific example is font usage. There’s a very short list of fonts that are considered to be “email safe” — meaning they render across all devices when used for live type. However, most designers only use brand fonts when creating emails — which leaves the finished product up to guesswork.
We’d recommend choosing email-safe fonts to ensure a consistent experience across all customers, or at the very least, designing for both brand fonts and ‘fallback’ email-safe fonts.
Email-safe fonts,
web-safe fonts, and web fonts:
Arial
Courier New
Georgia
Lucida Sans Unicode
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Tip 2: Keep Products Clear + Categorized
Wouldn’t it be kind of weird if a shoe showroom salesperson showed the same exact shoes to every single person who walked into the store each day? The truth is, this is how many companies operate their email programs.
That’s why incorporating personalized products in emails is really the gold standard of personalization. Two product essentials for getting it right:
Transparent Backgrounds:
Product images with transparent backgrounds allow for the most versatility in email designs since they can be placed over any color background, and will render appropriately in dark mode (no weird white boxes!) It’s simple and makes a huge impact on the finished product.
Clear Categorization:
Tagging products appropriately into collections on the backend sets the stage for rules-based product targeting. Without this, a product-driven personalization strategy will be challenged to take flight.
Tip 3: Have Fun with Styling
Oftentimes we see brands default to boring styling and layouts for dynamic content. We’re here to remind you that dynamic CAN be delightful! Use your brand palette and typographic treatments to make your live text talk to your customer. Shoot your dynamic product images from a range of angles and settings. Remember when we said to have clear categorization? With those tags, we can choose what photo variant to display, and allow for some versatility, preventing design fatigue.
Tip 4: Take the Time to Train
Here’s another scenario that happens quite often. The design looks great in the template but as soon as the marketers start using it — they break it in every way possible (bless their hearts).
A critical component for building a template is defining rules for use cases to remind teams of the intent of various template elements. Be as specific as possible in calling out copy direction, character constraint, and do’s and don’t of particular modules.
This will allow non-designers to demonstrate the best possible judgment in maximizing the potential of a well-thought-through template system.
Need a dedicated design hand to get your program’s personalization off the ground today? Contact us to get your creative audit started.
