In email, simplicity and consistency are what make campaigns that customers engage with every time. We're big advocates of emails that feel like a natural extension of your brand's website: clean, modern layouts where the content is rendered in code, rather than heavily designed creative that only works as a flattened image.
Keeping image use to a minimum is one of the best ways to produce emails quickly and at scale, and to get more engagement from every send. Here are four reasons to make live text the foundation of your email design, with practical tips for each.
1. Accessibility: make sure every recipient can read your email
At least 2.2 billion people worldwide live with some form of vision impairment, and many of your recipients will experience your emails through a screen reader. Screen readers read out the content in your email's code. Any words embedded in an image are invisible to them unless you've written accurate alt text, and even then the experience is second best.
When your content is live text, it can be read aloud, resized, translated and adapted to dark mode. That makes it accessible to the widest possible audience, and more people being able to read your email means more people engaging with it.
Our top tips for email accessibility:
- Add
role="presentation"to every layout table so screen readers skip the structural code and go straight to your content. - Use proper heading styles (H1, H2 and so on) to give your content a clear hierarchy.
- Write descriptive, accurate alt text for every meaningful image, and leave alt text empty for purely decorative ones.
For further reading, Litmus has a great guide: Accessibility in Email Marketing: 7 Simple Tricks to Make Your Code More Accessible.
2. Deliverability: improve your chances of reaching the inbox
Designing an entire email as one large image is tempting. It's the quickest way to turn a design into an email, and it looks exactly like the mockup. But it's also one of the easiest ways to look like spam. Spam filters need to read your content to judge it, and an email that's almost entirely image gives them very little to go on.
Building with live text, supported by images rather than replaced by them, lets mailbox providers like Gmail understand your content and trust it. As a rule of thumb, aim for a healthy balance of text to imagery in every email rather than a single hero image with a button.
Our top tip for email deliverability:
- Start with live text and code in a simple layout, then add imagery to support the content, not the other way around. Content first.
For an in-depth look at text-to-image balance, see Email on Acid's article Supercharge Your Email Campaigns with Images.
3. Visibility: live text is always seen
Not every recipient sees your images. Many Outlook setups and corporate email environments block images by default, some recipients switch them off to save data or protect their privacy, and images can simply fail to load on a poor connection. When your message is baked into an image, all of those people see a blank space instead of your offer.
Live text is always there. It also pays off in production: updating a line of coded copy takes seconds, whereas changing text in an image means editing the design, exporting it again and re-uploading it, often for every language or market you send to.
Our top tips for email visibility:
- Never use an image for your call-to-action. It's the most important part of your email, so make it a live-code button that always renders.
- If the text in an image matters, such as a headline set in custom typography, repeat it in the live copy too, so the message never relies on the image alone.
Litmus covers this well in Experts Say: Why You Shouldn't Send Image-Only Emails.
4. Consistency: a seamless experience from inbox to landing page
Every email is part of a bigger digital experience. If you looked at every email you've sent this year side by side, would they feel like one brand? Do they connect visually with your landing pages and website? Do your buttons look the same everywhere? If not, you're missing out on engagement, brand recognition and trust.
Live text makes consistency much easier, because typography, colours and buttons can be defined once in code and reused in every email, exactly as they are on your website.
Our top tips for email consistency:
- Style your email buttons to match your website's as closely as possible, for a seamless journey from email to landing page. It lifts engagement on both.
- Let your website guide your email's look and feel: keep headers, footers and graphic treatments such as rounded corners consistent.
- Use your website's fonts, sizes and line heights for headings and body copy, so type looks the same in both channels.
Email on Acid's Email Branding: Create a More Consistent Inbox Experience is a useful read on this.
Keep it simple
Prioritising live text over images makes emails simpler to design and faster to produce, and it brings real benefits:
- Accessibility: your content reaches every recipient, whatever their abilities.
- Deliverability: mailbox providers can read and trust your email.
- Visibility: your message lands even when images don't.
- Consistency: your emails feel like part of one brand, from inbox to website.
Make live text and code your foundation, with imagery in a supporting role. It's exactly how we approach every email design system we build. If you'd like your emails to work this way, book a free consultation.