You will be able to choose between plain text and designed templates and check that your email works on a small screen.
You open a newsletter on your phone and see a large grey box with a small icon in the middle where a picture should be. Under it, text so small you have to pinch to read it. Three columns squeezed into a strip of screen. A button too close to another button, so you tap the wrong one. You close it, and you probably do not open the next one.
That email may have looked fine on the designer's laptop. This lesson is about making sure yours works where most people read it: on a phone, sometimes with images off, sometimes in dark mode.
There are two broad styles of marketing email.
A plain text email looks like a message from a person. It has little or no formatting, perhaps a link or a simple button, and maybe a logo. Strictly speaking, most email tools send these as lightly formatted emails rather than true plain text, but they look plain to the reader. They feel personal, they load fast, and they display much the same everywhere. For a newsletter built around one idea from one person, such as Priya's fortnightly maths tip, plain is usually the better choice.
A designed template has a header, colours, images, buttons and sometimes several sections. It suits businesses whose product is visual or who need to show several items. Mei Ling's monthly email, with a photo of the new design, works well in a simple template. A shop showing new arrivals needs one.
Neither is better in general. Choose by what the email needs to show. If it is mostly words from you, keep it plain. If people need to see the product, use a template, and keep it simple.
Phone screens are narrow, so design for one column. Content stacked top to bottom reads naturally as the reader scrolls. Side-by-side columns either shrink to unreadable or rearrange in ways you did not plan. Most modern templates in email tools stack on phones automatically, but check, because older templates may not.
Make the text big enough to read without zooming. Your email tool's default body size is usually a sensible starting point. If you find yourself squinting at the preview, your readers will too.
Make buttons and links easy to tap. A button should be big enough for a thumb, with space around it, so the reader does not hit the link next to it by mistake. Put the main button where people will reach it without hunting, and if the email is long, repeat the same link near the top and the bottom, as lesson 5.3 allowed.
Many email apps block images until the reader chooses to show them, and some readers keep images off to save data or protect their privacy. So the email must make sense with no images at all.
Two habits handle this. First, never put important words only inside an image. A banner that says "Two Saturdays left in December" as a picture is invisible to someone with images off. Put that sentence in the text. Second, give every image alt text: a short description that the email app shows when the image does not load, and that screen readers read aloud for people with visual impairments. Your email tool has a field for it on every image. "Corgi-shaped birthday cake with a red bow" tells a reader something. A blank alt field, or "image1.jpg", tells them nothing.
Test this. Most email apps let you turn images off in settings. Look at your email that way at least once, and make sure the message, the offer and the button all survive.
Many people set their phones to dark mode, and email apps then change your colours, sometimes in ways you would not choose. Dark text on a transparent background can vanish against a dark screen. A logo with a white box behind it can appear as a bright rectangle. Light grey text can become hard to read.
Plain emails usually survive dark mode best, because there is little to go wrong. With a template, preview it in dark mode on a real phone, look for text that disappears or images with ugly boxes, and adjust. A logo saved with a transparent background, and text colours with good contrast, solve most problems.
Your email tool's preview is a useful first look, but it only shows an approximation of how the email will look, and real apps vary. Before every send, send a test to your own phone. Open it in the app you use every day. Scroll the whole email, tap every link and button, switch to dark mode and look again, and if you can, open it in a second email app as well.
Priya does this on her phone during her lunch break before each send. In her first month it caught a button that was too small to tap and a link to the wrong worksheet. Both took a minute to fix.
In the activity below you will run that check on your own newsletter: send a test to your phone, look at it in light and dark mode, and write down anything that breaks or reads badly.
Send a test of your newsletter to your own phone, check it in light and dark mode, and list anything that breaks or reads badly.
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