Email Design in 2019: A Look Back

Did you catch our live Twitter chat with Email on Acid this week? We sat down with many #emailgeeks to talk all things email and design!

We got some great answers and wanted to share our key take-aways.

What email trends took off in 2019? Which were your favourite, and why?

🎉 Interactivity and GIFs

🌚 Dark Mode

🎨 Illustration

⚡AMP

What were some of the best designs you saw in your inbox and why?

There were many brands mentioned here, but the top we saw were:

• BBC
• Moo
• Harrys
• Canva
• Spotify
• Grammarly

Have email design best practices changed in 2019? What do email marketers need to know now?

❌ Don’t hide unsubscribe buttons

❌ Don’t use image-only emails

✅ Include alt-text throughout your emails

✅ Have fallbacks for designs that don’t work within every client

✅ Accessibility

✅ Optimize for mobile

✅ Make it easy to scroll

✅ Test, test, test!

How has accessibility influenced design trends this year?

It’s evident that accessibility has been the most important and influential thing that has come out of email in 2019. From a design perspective it has:

• Put a focus on colour contrast
• Alt-text is a must 
• Left align text to make it easier for those with dyslexia
• Underline or indicate that a link is within the body copy
• Font size should be a minimum of 14px

How can email marketers use interactive elements, and is it actually effective?

• Click to reveal – Discount codes, quizzes 
• Hotspots – Product details, reveal more information
• Radio buttons – Change typography and colours within an email

AMP for email has enabled marketers the chance to really push the boundaries of email. What have you found the pros and cons to be when putting it into practice?

Pros:

• Emails that function like websites
• Interactive content
• Content refreshes

Cons:

• ESP support
• New code language to learn
• AMP code will break if the content isn’t clean

Bex Highfield
Marketing Manager @ Action Rocket