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Fonts in Email: Remember These Essential Tips From an Email Monks Expert!

Beefree team
Beefree team
Mar 30, 2018
Fonts in Email: Remember These Essential Tips From an Email Monks Expert!
Fonts in Email: Remember These Essential Tips From an Email Monks Expert!

Effective emails convey information clearly. No matter how simple or ornate the design is, the core message is—above all else—understandable. After all, emails are about communication! And in the spirit of great communication, we're sharing more best practices for using fonts in email. We even tappedEmail Monks' Head of Marketing, Kevin George, to weigh in, too! Plus, we have exciting news about a font-based feature update in the BEE editor.

What should designers keep in mind when choosing fonts in email?

It may sound obvious, but Kevin George offers a good reminder:The purpose of any font is for itto be read.This means designers need to ask themselves questions like, even if a loopy script looks pretty in the header, is it actually legible? If the kerning or line height is adjusted so much that the letters barely look like letters, will readers still get the message?In other words: keep it simple. "Your emails should look easy to read and understand," Kevin wisely advises. As you build your email and choose your fonts, here are some best practices he recommends:

  • Use no more than three fonts in a single email
  • Don't use more than two different colors for your text
  • Limit the use of "fancy fonts" to headers and titles; use simple fonts for body text1.

1. Understand email safe fonts vs. web fonts. vs. custom fonts

We talk a lot on the blog about "plain text" or "live text," which we generally mean to be the email safe fonts(or web safe fonts) that brands use, like Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier, and other default fonts that render on any computer or device. Choosing these fonts for emails is a design best practice because they're so reliable. This doesn't mean all your text needs to be "email safe," but the more that is, the better.Web fonts are designed specifically for the web. They're somewhat less reliable than plain text options, but they're still found on many—if not most—devices. These are fonts like Open Sans, Roboto, Lato, and others. Many popular web fonts are Google Fonts. Litmus offers a useful write-up on web font support.Obviously, there are many other fonts in existence beyond these web safe or web font categories. And many brands have custom fonts—typefaces that have been modified or designed specifically for a brand. These fonts can sometimes be coded into an email, but more often than not they're simply added as an image—commonly in the header, like in this email from Schuh.

Schuh fonts in email

Pro Tip: Don't forget about fallbacks!

Since web fonts and custom fonts can't be relied upon to appear across all mail clients and devices, fallback fonts should be selected as a backup."Email clients render fonts based on their presence in the system," Kevin explains. "If a system does not have a particular custom font, it proceeds to the first fallback, followed by the next fallback."This series of fallback options is called a font stack. Kevin describes it like three levels of fonts in the code:

  • 1st level: The custom font that supports your copy and brand identity
  • 2nd level: Web-safe font with the same x-height and kerning as the custom font
  • 3rd level: Final fallback which will be present in every system and would render anyhow

For instance, say you use Open Sans in your email. If that doesn't render when a reader opens the message, the code will tell it to default to Helvetica, and if that doesn't render, then Arial.As with all matters of email design, it's critical to test. "No matter how good the fonts look at your end, make sure to set a fallback that displays the font or its matching fallback font properly at the receiving end," Kevin advises.Luckily for us, when designing emails with theBEE editor, you don’t have to worry about building your own font stacks. They're automatically generated when you choose your fonts.

2. Elevate the look of plain text with smart formatting

Any well-formatted text shows aclear hierarchy when used in headers and sub-headers, especially if there is a well-executed combination of fonts and font sizes. Here are some formatting tips to keep in mind:

  • Section headers: Use 'em! Headers establish structure—and sometimes, they're all readers will pick up if they're skimming. Use a strong, consistent format—like a sans serif that's at least twice the size of your serif body text.
  • Line height: A good rule of thumb: set your line height to be at least 1.3x the height of your letters. It'll help maintain a comfortable distance, between lines, that optimizes readability.
  • Section breaks: Empty space is your friend. Offer ample padding between sections to mark a transition from one to another.
  • Email width: If you're sending a text-heavy email (think paragraphs of text in a wordy update or newsletter), constrain the width—to about 500px—to improve readability.
  • Links: Choose a fun, vibrant brand color that pops on the page, and be sure to keep the underline.
  • Bold + italics: Use bold and italicized lettering sparingly and strategically. Ask yourself: is this text treatment serving a purpose?

This email from Heyday is comprised of web safe fonts Arial and Georgia. Yet the strategic implementation of coloring, underlining, bolding, and italicizing font makes the lettering look sophisticated—and easy to read.

Heyday fonts in email

Here's another email from Postable that uses nearly all Helvetica text.

Postable fonts in email

Pro Tip: Keep it accessible!

Make sure your email is accessible to everyone—including the vision-impaired—by formatting your text wisely. This means using large, legible fonts (at least 14pt), underlining links, and being mindful of color schemes. Kevin writes more about email accessibility here, and we also covered top accessibility tips in our post, Why Does Email Accessibility Matter? Insights and Advice From Email on Acid’s CEO.

3. Activate web fonts and upload custom fonts in BEE

Now that you're a typeface wizard, here's how to customize the fonts you can access in the BEE editor.

Add web fonts

First, log in and open a new or existing email design project.

BEE editor fonts in email

Navigate to Settings along the upper menu.

BEE editor fonts in email

Click Brand Styles.

BEE editor fonts in email

You'll see a menu of web safe fonts that are already available and loaded into BEE.Scroll down to the next menu, a selection of available web fonts that you can add to BEE for your use. Simply select the ones you want to add!

BEE editor fonts in email

Add custom fonts

Within the Brand Styles menu under Settings, you'll also see a button to Add Custom Fonts.

BEE editor fonts in email

Tap it, and a pop-up menu will appear to let you add your own custom brand fonts!

BEE editor fonts in email

You now have the option to design your font stack of fallback options. Pretty neat, isn't it?Give it a try with a freeBEE Protrial.The drag-and-drop editor is easy to use, comes with built-in templates and stock image libraries, andallemails and design elements are mobile-responsive.Let us know if you have questions or ideas about font use in emails in the Comments area below! And, a special thanks to Kevin George of Email Monks for contributing!

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Creating professional emails and landing pages can be challenging for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.

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Why use Beefree for professional email campaigns?

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty of using Beefree, let's quickly go over why this tool is worth your time. There are a lot of email marketing tools out there, but Beefree stands out from the crowd for a reason. Let’s break down the unique benefits that make it an invaluable asset for anyone serious about email marketing:

Design made easy:

According to HubSpot, well-designed emails can drive open rates as high as 30%. Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. But you're finding yourself stuck because crafting professional emails and landing pages that capture attention is no easy feat.

With Beefree’s intuitive design tools and a library of over 1,700 templates tailored for various industries and purposes, you can achieve professional results without the guesswork. The wide variety of pre-designed options ensures that you can find a solution that aligns perfectly consistent with your brand.

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Time-saving features:

Speed is key, especially if you’re running time-sensitive campaigns. Beefree simplifies the design process with reusable content blocks, real-time collaboration tools, and the ability to transform emails into landing pages with a single click. These features enable you to produce high-quality materials in less time, allowing you to focus on strategy and content rather than struggling with technicalities.

According to a Beefree report, 82% of users report faster email creation. The ability to save and sync reusable content blocks means you can replicate what’s working without reinventing the wheel each time. Once you find a winning format, you can use it again and again with minor tweaks to fit the audience or campaign.

Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. With Beefree’s templates, you can get those messages out quickly and make sure your brand stays top-of-mind for your audience.
Using email cadence software like QuickMail ensures that outreach campaigns maintain a structured and effective flow, preventing overwhelming inboxes while keeping engagement high.

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Increased engagement:

A significant 64% of Beefree users report an 11% or more increase in click-through rates after using the platform. By enhancing the visual appeal and personalization of your emails, Beefree helps you achieve better engagement with your audience. The ability to test and iterate your designs ensures continuous improvement in performance.

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Getting started with Beefree templates

Alright, now that you know why Beefree is so powerful, let’s talk about how you can get started with their massive library of templates. This section will walk you through choosing and customizing a template that works for you.

1. Choose your template

The first thing you want to do is pick a template. Beefree’s catalog has templates for just about every sector—whether you're in retail, healthcare, SaaS, you name it. With a variety of options, you can find something that suits your goals perfectly, whether for a simple newsletter or detailed marketing report templates. Say you're promoting a webinar—just pick a template that’s built to highlight your CTAs, and you're off to the races.

The best part? You’re not starting from scratch. You save hours by picking a pre-designed template, and then it’s just a matter of customizing it to fit your brand. Beefree's templates are super flexible—add or remove elements, change colors, switch up the fonts, rearrange layouts—make each email uniquely yours without the hassle. This flexibility is especially beneficial for maintaining a low code architecture in website design.

2. Personalize

Consistency is key to building trust, and when your emails have a cohesive look, it helps recipients recognize your brand. It is also important to follow a brand style guide for your email campaigns so that the audiences can associate elements like your logo, colors, and fonts easily with your brand.

When using a template, customization is key to making your emails and landing pages feel unique and relevant. With Beefree’s drag-and-drop editor, you can easily tweak templates to align with your branding. Adjust colors, fonts, and layouts, or add personalized content such as recipient names and company details. The flexibility ensures that your final output is as distinctive as your brand’s voice.

Plus, with so many people opening emails or landing pages on mobile devices, Beefree’s mobile design builder guarantees that they look great no matter what device they’re on. When your emails look good, people trust your brand more, and that makes them more likely to click through and take action.

Personalization isn’t just a nice touch; it’s essential for engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 26%. By tailoring your designs to speak directly to your audience, you can create a more impactful experience. Furthermore, the platform’s collaborative features allow team members to provide input and make edits in real-time, enhancing efficiency and creativity.

1. Export

So, you’ve picked and customized your template—now it’s time to send those emails.

One of the coolest things about Beefree is that it plays nice with just about every major email platform out there—Mailchimp, HubSpot, Outlook, Quickmail—you name it. This means you can create a killer email in Beefree, connect it to your favorite email platform, and schedule it all from one place. For more advanced needs, many businesses choose a CRM with email integration, to seamlessly combine customer management and automated outreach.

Start designing for free

Beefree simplifies the process of creating visually appealing, professional emails and landing pages, saving you time and boosting engagement. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow or enhance your marketing efforts, Beefree offers the tools and flexibility to meet your needs.

The best part? You’ll save time and see increased engagement, connecting with your audience in a meaningful way. In a world where everyone’s fighting for inbox space, Beefree helps you stay ahead of the game by simplifying the process while delivering professional results. So, why wait? Dive into Beefree today and see how it can transform your email campaigns.

8 Common Email Spam Triggers That Can Damage Your Sender Reputation

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In 2024, roughly 361.6 billion emails were sent per day. Whether you're using email for business or to keep in contact with your long distance cousin (do people still do this?), it’s easy to picture just how clogged someone's email can get. That's where modern day Email Service Providers (ESPs) come to save the day with trigger-based spam filtration tools.

For user these spam filters help ensure a smooth email experience, free of spammy and fishy emails. However, as email marketers, these filters lead us to be overly cautious out of fear that our emails are not accidentally filtered out.

Whether you’re employing a lifecycle email marketing strategy or simply confirming an order, we’ve outlined the basics of how spam prevention works, why it matters, and how to avoid running afoul of some commonly used triggers.

Why you need to avoid email spam triggers

Whether you’re an ESG reporting software or a travel company email spam triggers can email marketing performance and in turn hurt your business. For one, there’s the obvious reason that if your emails get sent to the spam folder, they probably won’t be seen. That's time and effort wasted.

Beyond that, being sent to the spam folder too many times delegitimizes your email marketing, which damages what’s known as your sender reputation. When just starting out, this reputation is effectively neutral. But if it gets too low, it could damage your marketing performance and even result in being blocklisted.

How email spam filtering works

As mentioned above, spam filters are implemented as a form of quality assurance and protection for end-users. Here's how ESPs determine content to be spam:

  • Sender reputation analysis: ESPs check sender reputation based on authentication, user complaints, bounce rates and sending patterns. They’ll also check the reputations of your IP address and web domain.

  • Content analysis: Content filtering uses triggers like keywords, formatting and error detection to distinguish spam from legitimate email marketing.

  • Blacklists: Along with sender reputation metrics, ESPs also cross-reference email senders against any of several blacklist databases. Being on even one of these means you’ll struggle to climb out of the spam folder at all.

8 common email spam triggers and how to avoid them

Now let's get to the good stuff. Prevention is generally the best strategy when it comes to avoiding email spam triggers. Here are seven factors commonly used by ESPs to filter spam emails, and the simplest solutions for dealing with them.

1. Lack of authentication

Missing authentication is one of the first red flags an ESP will pick up on. Authentication shows you’ve taken certain steps to establish legitimacy. It’s also used to prevent fraudsters from impersonating your brand online. There are three commonly used forms of email authentication:

  • Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This means publishing a list of mail servers and IPs with permission to send messages using your domain. This is one reason it’s important to conduct email marketing through a branded business email, rather than a personal account.

  • Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): A cryptographic signature which shows a message’s original content has not been altered during sending. Think of it like the tamper-proof seal on a bottle of milk.

  • Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC): A way for you to establish how you want receiving platforms to handle authentication failures related to your domain.

2. Shady linking practices

Link placement and presentation play an important role in email marketing. Aside from engaging recipients and securing click-throughs, using links appropriately helps avoid your emails looking like spam.

Questionable linking practices include:

  • Links to domains with poor reputations
  • Excessive numbers of in-email links
  • Compressed, modified or obscured links, particularly when generic link shorteners are used

Only link to your own authenticated domain. Also, use an unlimited bandwidth VPS to help ensure your website access speed is always stable and fast. This will give visitors the assurance that your site is legitimate.

Don’t forget to make the purpose of any in-email link absolutely clear.  

3. Content

Although the reason for an email landing in a spam folder is often related to authentication, reputation, or poor formatting, content can at times be the culprit. Here are elements that you should look at if you suspect that your content is why your emails are not reaching their recipients:

  • Typos
  • Irrelevant content that doesn’t foster positive engagement
  • Poorly translated text
  • Partner content with poor reputation
  • Possibly offensive content
  • URLs or images with poor reputation

Another thing to note is language detection filters. Various words, phrases and tone choices have strong associations with scam emails. This includes certain buzzwords, vague or exaggerated claims, or excessive sales jargon. However, this is only really an issue when you already have a bad reputation.

Nevertheless, let’s say you’re beginning to build your reputation back up and are conducting Black Friday email marketing. While it’s important to use engaging language and strong CTAs, you should avoid terms like:

  • Limited time only
  • 100% free
  • Make money from home
  • Avoid bankruptcy
  • You have won

4. Bounce rates

A ‘bounce’ is when an email doesn’t arrive in the recipient’s inbox. This could be due to it being sent to a fake email address, an out-of-date email that is no longer in use, a full inbox, etc.

When a sender frequently experiences high bounce rates for their emails, this damages their reputation with ESPs.

But how do you improve bounce rates and, therefore, your reputation? The best way is to have good segmentation practices to ensure the right content goes out to the right people. You should also keep your list clean by regularly evaluating it and removing hard-bounce email addresses as well as inactive subscribers.

Moreover, ensure you send relevant messages that your audience actually wants to receive. Of course, always be mindful of the rest of the triggers on this list to make sure you’re protecting your sender reputation.

5. Misleading email subjects

Even if you’re not trying to do anything malicious, misleading subject lines can trigger email spam filters. For example, an email might claim to promote educational B2B content about internal audit controls. Then, instead, link the user to a landing page to sell them a product.

Always set clear topic sentences as email subject lines. Try to summarize the content and intent of the email. If you’re sending a welcome email for customer retention or promoting, say, a product or sale, make it obvious before the recipient clicks on it.

6. Poorly written and formatted emails

Poor formatting and low-quality writing are other important email spam triggers. Common writing triggers include:

  • Overly vague language lacking personal detail
  • Typos and spelling errors
  • Being too brief

A marketing email can trigger spam filters if it lacks formatting of any kind, or if there are inconsistencies. It’s also suspicious when marketing emails lack branded color schemes, imagery or the correct logo design.
Avoiding these email triggers is simply a matter of emphasizing professional communication standards in email marketing.

7. Poor engagement

Low engagement manifests itself through a lack of interaction with your emails from the recipients—low open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, as well as low subscriber count are all indications. 

Consistently low engagement will likely result in your emails being filtered into spam. To combat this, you should strive to deliver good and captivating content tailored to your audience. More specifically, you can:

  • Use segmentation to personalize your emails and craft the most compelling content for each segment.
  • Put together attractive subject lines
  • Make use of solid and clear CTAs

8. Getting blacklisted

Improving your sender reputation, also means you don’t run the risk of being blacklisted. Blacklists are a useful prevention tool, but if you end up on one of these lists, your email marketing is more or less guaranteed to end up in spam folders.

Aim for prevention with email security and compliance training, and don’t send unsolicited marketing emails. You can also use a blacklist checking tool to make sure your sender emails haven’t been compromised.

Maintaining your sender reputation is essential

Email spam triggers aren’t all bad, they ensure that your well crafted messages aren’t drowned out and that users are able to easily see the emails they’re interested in. 

To reap these benefits, you need to keep an eye on these triggers and protect your sender reputation. Don’t worry, though. It’s easy to deliver marketing copy that avoids email spam triggers once you know what they’re looking for.

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