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Forget flashy banners and overly designed emails. If you want emails that get opened, read, and clicked, you need to focus on what truly matters. Here’s what actually makes a difference—and what doesn’t.

3 Things That Matter Most in Email Marketing Design

When designing your emails, there are three critical areas to focus on:

1. Purpose & Intention

Always start with function over form. Ask yourself:

• What is the specific intention of this email?
• What action do you want your subscriber to take?
• How can you make this action as easy as possible?

Remember to focus on one primary goal per email. While you might include a few extras in the footer, having a single clear focus will dramatically improve your conversion rates.

2. Deliverability Considerations

Your beautiful design means nothing if it lands in the spam folder! Here's what impacts deliverability:

• Image usage: Keep images to a minimum. Too many images increase your chances of hitting spam filters or being sorted into promotion folders
• Loading times: Compress images appropriately to ensure quick loading
• Content engagement: How people interact with your content directly affects future deliverability
• Email length: Avoid emails that get cut off
• Technical elements: Include plain text versions and avoid excess HTML code
• Text content: Include at least 500 characters of text
• Branding: Consistent branding improves recognition and trust

Important note: Never design your entire email as a Canva image! While creating banners or small graphics in Canva is fine, pasting in a full-image email will destroy your deliverability and user experience.

3. Accessibility

This is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of email design. About 18% of Australians have some form of disability, and that percentage can be higher in business circles (43% of disabled people are more likely to be self-employed).

Accessibility considerations include:

• Legibility: Use proper spacing, short sentences, and appropriate headings (not just bold text)
• Typography: Sans serif fonts are generally easier to read; use adequate font sizes
• Colour contrast: Ensure text stands out clearly against backgrounds
• Alt text: Include descriptive alt text for functional images
• Image quality: Balance compression with clarity
• Clickable elements: Make buttons and links obvious and easily clickable on all devices

13 Quick Email Design Checklist Items

1. Clean, spacious, and scannable layout
2. Proper heading tags (not just bold text)
3. Obvious and easily clickable call-to-action
4. High contrast colours
5. Readable font size and common font family
6. Text prioritised over images
7. Images that enhance rather than dominate
8. Compressed but clear images
9. Alt text for functional images
10. Consistent branding for recognition
11. Mobile responsive design
12. Plain text version available
13. Compatible with dark mode

Making It All Easier: The Template Solution

The simplest way to implement all these best practices is to create a master template with all the content blocks you need:

• Start with the overall settings for backgrounds, default fonts and colours
• Create section-level designs for different content areas
• Include various content blocks (text, images, buttons, product feeds, social icons)

Set up your hierarchy correctly:

1. Configure overall template settings first
2. Then adjust section-level designs
3. Finally, personalise individual content blocks

This approach saves tremendous time and ensures consistency across all your emails.

Final Thoughts…

Remember: function trumps form every time. Your top priority is helping subscribers easily understand and act on your message. Design matters, but it should never come at the cost of clarity or accessibility.

By focusing on usability and inclusivity, you’ll not only serve your audience better—you’ll also see stronger results.

If you want to take the guesswork out of creating emails that truly connect, Engaging Emails shows you how. Learn email marketing design tips, as well as how to write, design, and send emails your subscribers actually want to read: yaelkeon.com/engage