Effective email marketing requires a balance of compelling copy, high-quality graphics, and coding that ensures your email looks great in the inbox. For enterprise-level companies, best practices for email design go beyond the basics to also include clear brand standards across multiple brands, design strategies for personalized content, and tech stack alignment that supports email marketing design.
Following these best practices for email design and layout helps ensure clear, consistent, and engaging emails that drive results.
Consistent design and clear brand standards
Consistency is key when it comes to best practices in email design, especially for companies with multiple brands within their email program. You need clear brand standards for each brand, including how those brand standards apply to things like email headers and footers, font and color choices, mobile layouts, dark mode coding, brand voice, and more.
Starting with clear brand standards and consistent designs helps keep your internal and external team members on track and ensures your subscribers immediately know the email is from you. For enterprise companies with a global audience, be sure to consider the nuances of your global audience when creating those brand standards.
Clear visual hierarchy
Ever opened an email in your inbox and been overwhelmed by too many colors, font sizes, and images? When an email doesn’t have a clear visual hierarchy, it feels cluttered and people don’t know where to look, much less where to click. Creating a visual hierarchy with a main headline, body text, and call to action for each section of your email helps structure the content and offers so that your subscriber can easily find what they need. It’s a basic component of best practices for email design, but one that companies at all levels sometimes overlook.
Personalization in email design
For enterprise companies, personalization isn’t an option — it’s a necessity. And that means personalization that impacts design, too. Whether you’re incorporating image carousels with personalized product recommendations or creating entirely different email experiences based on your audience segments, it’s critical to thoroughly test personalized emails and have the right fallbacks in place. You don’t want broken personalization elements in your design to create a poor user experience.
Tech stack integration
Tech stack integration is an important part of best practices for email design at enterprise companies because without it, things start to fall apart. If emails don’t render correctly or make it to the right people, engagement and performance both decline. That’s why connecting your customer data platform (CDP), customer relationship management (CRM) tool, content management system (CMS), and email service provider (ESP) are a critical step for enterprise companies. A properly integrated tech stack powers the segmentation and personalization necessary for effective enterprise-level email marketing.
Mobile-first approach to design
Mobile first means designing with mobile devices in mind while also ensuring your email marketing design looks great on desktop. Around half of all emails get opened on a mobile device, though some industries and audiences do still trend higher on desktop opens.
Mobile-first design means thinking about font choices and sizes, color contrast, ease of clicking buttons or text, and having a clear visual hierarchy in the email. The good news? Even if you’re in an industry or have an audience that still trends higher on desktop opens, a mobile-first design will still look great on desktop and be more accessible to any subscribers with a visual impairment.
Readability and accessibility
Many of the best practices for email design overlap, including a clear visual hierarchy, mobile first design, and accessibility. Accessibility is about making sure every user has a consistent experience with the email, regardless of how they’re accessing it. That means using the proper font sizes, ensuring good color contrast between text and background images, and including descriptive alt tags for all images.
Accessibility is a legal and compliance risk for enterprise companies, and not one you should brush aside. If you do, you risk losing customers, hurting your brand reputation, and potentially facing a discrimination lawsuit.
Effective calls to action
The goal of a marketing email is to get the reader to take action. Whether you want the reader to shop now, donate now, get the scoop, or sign up for something, it’s important to think about how you design calls to action. In most cases, it’s a button, though you can have a call to action embedded in the text as well.
Calls to action are a great place to test and optimize for different segments or customer journeys. Test different options to see what leads to the most clicks, but keep font size and color contrast in mind when developing your testing plan.
Final thoughts on best practices for email design
For enterprise companies, effective email design is about more than just aesthetics — it’s also about delivering a reliable, accessible, and on-brand experience every time. A clear, scalable design strategy helps mitigate compliance risks, protects your brand reputation, and drives stronger engagement with your audience.
Need help with email design and layout? Contact the RPE Origin team to chat about our email design services today.
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