Insights

Email Marketing Best Practices Part Three: Dark Mode

Haley Boblink

Haley Boblink, WTC&T’s Marketing Automation Lead, brings us a three-part series on email marketing best practices. Email marketing is oftentimes overlooked, but it is still one of the most effective marketing channels. Learning different ways to improve your email marketing will ultimately help you engage your customers in creative ways that will help drive engagement.

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Dark Mode is still a relatively new concept and feature, but many users (myself included) have latched on to it the second it arrived and haven’t looked back since. This is great for the end-user, but poses some interesting design dilemmas for creators; how to best cater to two audiences using drastically different views. While there currently aren’t any quick-fix solutions yet (although I’ve heard of some amazing innovations coming from platforms in the next few quarters), the following are some quick tips and optimization practices to make sure your emails are coming through strong for all users.

BEST PRACTICES

TRANSPARENT IMAGES

While the email providers that accommodate Dark Mode currently alter the CSS stylings in emails for you, that’s not the case for images. To ensure that your emails don’t have awkward white blocks in Dark Mode, try to use images with transparent backgrounds. While this will solve most of your image issues, this, unfortunately, won’t work with more dynamic content like social media icons.

WHITE STROKES

A workaround to dark fonts being camouflaged by Dark Mode is to add a white stroke around each letter. This will ensure that your text pops on Dark Mode, while also being near or entirely invisible on standard emails. Plus you won’t have to worry about your opaque logos looking like they were copied and pasted from Google Images

LOWER SATURATION

Utilizing colors with lower saturation can reduce the eye strain that causes many users to make the switch to Dark Mode in the first place while bringing more warmth into your emails in general.

FINAL NOTE

Above all, the innovation of Dark Mode emphasizes one of email’s key best practices: test your creations. Not all email providers are on the same page yet when it comes to rendering emails in Dark Mode; some invert the email partially, while others even alter background colors, which may affect your content if you use colors to style things like buttons. If you want your emails to look their best to everyone, it’s important to see the results for yourself. We can provide recommendations on external email testing, or if the idea of going through all of your assets to make sure they’re Dark Mode-compatible is too daunting for you, our Email Audit may be just the thing you need.

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This is the final post in our three part series on Marketing Best Practices. Take a look at our first two posts on A/B Testing and Echo Sending. If you feel like your organization could use a lift in your email practices, reach out to our Email Marketing Team and we will be in touch!