MT2
Email in Retail - Challenges and Innovation
Hey there email community! I'm an email designer who works specifically in retail and e-commerce. I commonly find that we have a unique set of challenges in regards to email design. For example, we have custom corporate fonts that we are not allowed to deviate from and our campaigns are highly image driven. This poses a challenge for responsive design and selectable type. Currently we do an adaptive process, swapping from desktop to mobile versions, but this is something I'm working to change.
I know there are other brands out there that face similar challenges and I would love to know how others have become innovative within these guardrails. SO, let's talk retail. :D
Really the best solution is to educate the bosses about why text is better for text than images.
Firstly using a webfont will sort the issue for about 60% of your users (based on generic Litmus stats but we've seen more like 80% for retail). If you use the same link as you use on your website, people should already have the font cashed so that will save on download.
43% of users have images off by default (that's a loose stat but good for making a point) these people won't see your message when they open the email. You can style your alt text in some place but it's not clear and that will still be the wrong font.
Downloading images adds weight to your email, so people on a slow connection may have to wait a while to download the message and could likely give up.
If you're swapping images for mobile then everyone on mobile is downloading 2 sets of images, doubling the above issue.
If you're using retina images that again increases the download weight. If you're not using retina images your text will look blurry on retina screens.
It's not accessible, anyone using a screen reader or screen magnifier can't read your content.
It's not searchable, if someone wants to search for 'black Friday deals' in their inbox, yours may not show but competitors will.
Most people aren't designers and won't notice you're using a different font.
In short:
Text is, scalable, easily editable, retina optimised, light weight, loads by default, accessible, searchable.
Images use the brand font that will look better to your design team.
Sorry rant over, hope that helps :)
No, this is great! I love a good rant :D
Thanks for all the wonderful information. I'm going to try and find out where we are hosting our custom web font and see if we can start this journey easily! Thanks!
Meg
I don't work in retail, but I do have strict brand guidelines. Ultimately, I worked with our creative director to agree on fonts for email. We made the strategic decision to use text instead of images (even if it deviates from our brand) because about a third of recipients don't download images (this is a generalization based on industry standards). If you can persuade your brand manager / creative director to allow for variation exclusively within email, you'll probably increase conversions from email. So I'd say to start with the best data you have available. Even if you just want to do some A/B tests to confirm for decision makers what you already know.
Right, would be ideal to make a compromise of a webfont that you could use, and then have a similar fallback generic font on clients that don't support it.
For the font, it is unfortunately pretty baked in that we have to use our corporate custom font. This decision goes all the way up to the CEO, so I'm not sure I will be able to deviate. But A/B testing is a great recommendation to help answer some of these questions. :D Thanks for the feedback everyone!
Maybe you can get permission to use the font that you think would work with both web and mobile for an A/B test so you can provide actual data.
I run my templates off of Zurb Foundation for Emails 2 and have had good success. I work retail as well and have been pushing really hard to make these responsive shifts. In terms of web fonts we haven't had a ton of issues. Typically what I do is find a similar font that is located on Google Web Fonts. We use that for the clients that support it and have an appropriate native fallback for Outlook. While establishing the site for client we work closely with them and explain the reasoning behind everything we do. It seems to work quite well so far. Clients are happy, and boss is happy as well because the emails look great and convert better from mobile devices.