Using the right colours and fonts for effective email marketing

Posted by Chris Donald on November 27th, 2019

Remember that book you picked up because you loved the cover? The words were inked beautifully, and the choice of hues in the image attracted you to pick it and go through the synopsis.

Good content and defined context remain unread without proper packaging. Same goes for your emails too. You need to make sure that the emails are properly designed with the right colours and fonts to make them attractive. Also, millennials tend to prefer email marketing over other marketing channels which makes it more important to focus on these aspects.

Within 90 seconds of the initial interaction with the product, the user makes up their mind. Around 62-90% of these people offer their evaluations based on colour alone.

Good typography has a positive impact on your mind and helps you tune to the task better. In fact, customer engagement increases as a result of good typography, and you can enable them to take an action.

Emotional connect is an important criterion if you want more opens and click-through rates, with your email marketing. It happens only when you use the right fonts and colours.

Here, we will take you through the process of choosing the right fonts and colours for an effective email marketing strategy.

Fonts for your Emails

When choosing a font, you need to be clear about one thing- the font should match the message you are trying to convey through the email. If there is a mismatch, you might have to pay with unsubscribe or reduced engagement.

There are a few attributes of fonts that you need to consider when choosing them.

#1 The font type

All fonts are categorized into Serif and Sans Serif.

• Serif are font types with short lines along the edges. They are more formal and add a business-like personality to your emails. Apart from that, they are quite legible and easy to scan through.
• The Sans Serif fonts are informal and add a casual personality to your emails. They gel well with the body of the emails.

Apart from these two major categories, you have the decorative font types as well as the script font types. Script are more intimate and should be used for the announcement type of email structure, while the decorative fonts are incredible for emails when they are combined with either Serif or Sans Serif font types.

So, you should ideally use Serif for the headings and the Sans Serif for the body of the emails.

#2 Font Size

The next thing to take into account when choosing the fonts for your email is the font size. The body content should be smaller than the header font.

In case you are using two fonts, then you need to make sure that the font used in the body is not smaller than the font used to make the announcement. The fonts should not be too different, as far as sizes are concerned, from each other.

If you are planning email design for the desktop, using 14px sizes. However, if you are planning for the mobile devices, use the 16px sizes.

#3 Spacing between Fonts

Readability is an important part of choosing the fonts for the email. You need to choose fonts that are legible and easy to scan through.

The font height is an important consideration at this point.

The ideal height should be somewhere between 22px and 24px.

There should be enough space between the characters. When you use Georgia or Times New Roman, the spacing is narrow, and the readability is high. However, with the Courier fonts, you get good spacing, and that’s the reason they seem to be used more often.

The line spacing as well as font spacing is important if you want more readership for the email. You need to make sure that the space between images is also good.

Colours for the Emails

The colour psychology is an important consideration before you draft a design for the email you are planning to send to the target audience.

As we have already discussed, colours spark an emotion within you. As Marie Kondo puts it, keep those things that add joy to your life. It is true for emails too. You would like to keep emails that spark some joy within, and that joy is added with colours.

It is important to follow some of these pointers when choosing the colours for the email

#1 The colour scheme

It is important to have the brand colour along with one or two more colours added to the based. You can even go with a single-colour option to design the entire email.

• One of the primary colour schemes that a lot of people opt for is the achromatic scheme, wherein you don’t use any colour. The email is typically designed black and white. The white text over black background gives the perfect artistic feel to the email.
• You can opt for monochromatic scheme wherein you use hues and shades for the same colour to design the email. It helps recreate a clean and polished email for the view.

• Analogous colour scheme is wherein you choose the secondary colour that is placed next to the base colour in the colour wheel. You won’t have a non contrasting effect as a result.

• Triadic colour schemes are when you use opposing or contrasting colour schemes to define the email. You choose colours from opposite sides of the colour wheel.

#2 The psychology behind colours

It is important to understand that each colour is seen differently. You can have a signature colour and use it to define your emails.

The signature colours help boost visual appeal for the emails, and helps you stay consistent. Here are a few emotions that are associated with the colours.

• Red is generally used to depict passion or danger. However, in some Asian countries it is viewed as the symbol of luck.
• Blue is often associated with two highly contrasting emotions- depression and peacefulness.
• Orange is the colour of warmth in Northern America, while it is related to fertility in Columbia.
• Yellow is all about optimism and happiness. It is a depiction of good fortune in Egypt.

The colours communicate the brand’s value and the proposition to the customers. You need to choose colours that not only sync with the brand’s purpose, but also the culture of the target audience.

Design Best Practices for Fonts and Colours

• When choosing the CTA button colour, it is a good idea to go with the brand’s colour. You should also choose the brand’s colour to define any links that you attach within the content. Make sure you have an anchor text dominating the link, and the text’s font is similar to the email fonts that you have chosen. A lot of people tend to choose a colour scheme that goes with the email. However, you will see a lot of brands opt for blue coloured CTA as it is popular with both males and females. It is attractive, strong and bold, which makes it stand out.
• The target audience can be using any email client. You need to use web or email fonts that go with every email client. Before sending in the emails, make sure you do a A/B test for the fonts as well as colours.
• When creating email banners, you should use decorative fonts that stand out, and use words that motivate the users to read on. The idea is to highlight the brand’s identity. Choose fonts that sync with the rest of the fonts that you will use in the email.

Summing up

Along with the font’s size and type, you also need to take into account the font’s weight when determining the font for the email.

• Georgia and Times New Roman are fonts that are too narrow while Courier New is spaced out well.
• The colour blue attracts attention and should be part of the CTA button while, the colour red should not be used in the CTA.
• The colours used for the links should be ideally same as the brand color or hues that help differentiate the links. You should use complementary fonts for the anchor texts representing the links.

When designing an email, include a good amount of white space, and keep the distractions at bay. Make sure the representation is such that both the content and context can be understood immediately.

Author Bio

Chris Donald is the Director of InboxGroup, A professional email marketing agency that specializes in providing result-driven email marketing services. He has worked directly with Fortune 500 companies, retail giants, nonprofits, SMBs and government bodies in all facets of their email marketing services email audit and marketing automation programs for almost 2 decades. He enjoys sharing his distinctive thoughts and insights into email marketing best practices at his blog.