Jul 13 2009
Designing Email to Be Width-Compliant
Lately my team has been asked to provide insight on the appropriate width of an email. As I tell all of our clients, the answer depends on what the intended function of the email is, and whether or not it needs to be printed by the subscriber.
Our recommended width for emails that only need to be displayed onscreen is 650-700 pixels. By adhering to this guideline, marketers ensure that their full creative is presented to the user without being cut off by smaller monitors, elaborate email menu systems, or ad banner rails.
In cases such as order confirmations, ticket print-outs, or something the user needs to take with them for an in-store promotion, the email should be no wider than 600 pixels. This allows the email to fit within standard printer margins and minimizes issues at the point of customer contact (POS, ticket scanners, etc.).
Of course, not all marketers follow this rule. Take this example from Lucky Brand; weighing in at over 800 pixels wide, their creative has a good chance of sliding off the right side of the user’s screen. I would recommend trimming the width to conform to the 650-700 pixel rule to be safer moving forward.
As a general rule I would advise all email marketers to do a quick creative width test before preparing their emails for deployment.
What width do you recommend when designing online mobile versions of your email?
Since mobile versions should, unfortunately, remove images, we’re left with what amounts to the rich-text version of the email. Since this is the case, we should measure the total width at 72 characters (standard text email best practice). You can go longer than that, but then you’re leaving the line breaks up to the mobile device. Most marketers insert manual break tags to control how the text breaks, but this is more of a judgment call. Good question!
[...] than 4 days after our Creative Director, Steve Sharp, explained how to design emails to be width-compliant on this very site, something very strange began happening to my email inbox. Every so often I would [...]