JG
3
Email Desktop Width Size
Hi,
I'm looking at redesigning my emails but wondered what width to use. I've seen that 600px is best, but then I see that anything between 600px and 800px is fine.
Would be great to see what everyone else uses and what's best practice.
Thanks
Email is consumed on all devices in all viewing contexts. The best size is all of them. Allow the content to scale until it breaks a reasonable measure (character and word length in a line for readability), then adapt the layout via feature and media queries.
Email is also consumed by screen readers and other assistive technology as well as agents like Google, Siri, Alexa and Cortana where size doesn’t matter.
“Desktop” is a myth. However, as Marie stated, consider your explicit audience as well.
Hi James,
Please note this is my opinion can it can differ from other people.
The industry recommendation is 600px to 700px and is just a guide. If your design calls for a different size you can higher. I have been designs that were 2000px in width. The main idea is to place the most important things within the viewable area of the email so the branding and important content are visible as soon as the email is viewed.
Cheers
This same question seems to come up every few months. My opinion is to go with who your target audience is. If you know that the majority of your subscribers are techy people then chances are that they have larger monitors for their desktop. If they are part of the older generation, then they may have smaller monitors. We created ours at 920 and received a lot of positive feedback from the subscribers who were on desktop. Of course, the email responds to mobile devices as well which is now over 50% of email opens.
Great points here all around. Q: Does anyone keep in mind the email clients themselves though, and what the viewing area is for an email? For example, yahoo on the desktop and the left & right sidebars narrowing the space the email will fit in, no matter what size monitor you have. Or is this again just all about knowing your audience & who is opening where?
This is where litmus can really help you find out what is the most popular platforms for your subscribers. Then you can tailor to those audiences. My audience is mostly Outlook for desktop (yeah, I know) so I know it has more real estate available.
That’s highly unusual. Outlook on Windows and Mac is now an edge case. All 7 versions in market combined account for only 6% of the total general email share.
Still, you don’t actually know what the real estate is on a desktop app. First, the preview pane is where most email is viewed in Outlook, not opened in separate view. That preview pane can be configured several different ways. The app window itself can be scaled and positioned a number of different ways. The OS can be used in split screen mode. The user can zoom the display. The user can zoom the text. The user can have any number of local preferences that change their viewing context.