Email is one of the most important tools that many businesses use, with 87% of companies surveyed claiming it’s critical for their ongoing success.
Whether you’re a solopreneur, running a small business, managing a charity, or looking after marketing for a larger organization – email remains an important channel in 2025 for collaboration, building relationships, keeping your subscribers up to date, and driving sales and leads.
But with email’s popularity as a form of communication (the average person receives more than 100 emails a day!), it’s important to take the right steps to ensure your emails make the right impact in a crowded inbox.
And in the modern digital world where things are always changing, it’s important to keep up with the latest email best practices to keep your emails out of the spam folder, your audience engaged, and improve your email performance.
So let’s take a look at nine top tips for email design best practices for 2025 to help you create emails that stand out and get results.
1. Use recognizable sender names
It might surprise you to know that one in four people receive scam calls, texts, or emails daily.
With this in mind, it’s perhaps understandable why subscribers have a heightened sense of skepticism about some of the email marketing they receive and increasingly value emails from brands they feel they can trust.
When it comes to sending email marketing campaigns in 2025, it’s important to do everything you can to make sure your emails don’t trigger any alarm bells with users and give them the confidence and peace of mind to open your email and engage with it.
One simple yet effective way to achieve this is by using a recognizable sender name in your emails.
Simplelists make it easy for your business to send emails from your own domain, enhancing the professional appearance of your emails and increasing trust with your audience.
By using your own domain, you can ensure that your emails look authentic and are less likely to be mistaken for spam – leading to higher open rates and engagement rates.
2. Implement personalization
No matter what industry you’re in, your emails are likely to face a lot of competition in your subscriber’s inbox in 2025.
When it comes to how to design an email that stands out and encourages subscribers to take action, simple personalization techniques, like using each subscriber’s name in the subject line, can be effective.
If you wanted to take things a step further and explore more advanced personalization techniques, you might even consider tailoring the content of your emails based on each subscriber’s past behaviours or preferences.
Simplelists allows you to easily personalize your emails with a number of different dynamic variables, including:
- $TO_FIRSTNAME: Recipient’s first name
- $TO_SURNAME: Recipient’s last name
- $TO_NAME: Recipient’s full name
- $TO_EMAIL: Recipient’s email address
- $CCID: Contact’s custom ID
- $CEID: Custom ID of the email address
- $FROM: Original sender’s full email address, including name
- $FROM_NAME: Sender’s name
- $FROM_EMAIL: Sender’s email address
3. Consider your visual content balance
Another email design trend for achieving success in 2025 is maintaining a good balance between text and visual content.
There are a lot of benefits to including images and videos in your emails. They can help break up large blocks of text, capture your audience’s attention more effectively, are often better at communicating complex concepts, and can enhance your engagement and click rates.
However, too many images or rich media elements in your emails can cause your messages to be flagged as spam, which can hurt your deliverability. So, it’s important to strike the right balance.
There are no hard and fast rules, but the best email design examples try to keep their emails 60-80% text and 20-40% images. This balance helps ensure that your emails are still visually appealing without triggering spam filters.
Simplelists has full support for HTML emails, enabling your business to send professional and engaging emails that effectively balance text and visual content.
4. Ensure brand consistency
A 2023 study by Trustpilot found that 79% of consumers feel it’s more important to have a sense of trust in a brand today than it has been in the past.
We’ve already discussed the importance of making sure your emails come from a recognizable domain to improve trust, but your email marketing design also plays an important part.
Keeping your emails consistent and on-brand, with a recognisable logo, color scheme, and font, can go a long way toward building recognition and trust with your audience.
It’s also important to maintain a consistent tone of voice in your emails, with your language and writing style aligning with other channels your subscribers might be familiar with such as your website and social media platforms.
If you’re linking through to your website or a landing page from your email, it’s also recommended to make sure the landing page experience aligns with the visuals in your email for a seamless experience.
5. Focus on layout and user experience
Another key tip for email design best practice in 2025 is to focus on the user experience of the people receiving your emails, making sure your layout is optimized for readability and engagement.
In addition to the previous tips on visual content balance, it is important to take a strategic approach to white space. Using white space correctly can help your emails look clean and uncluttered and make them easier for your audience to navigate and read.
By combining a clean email layout with the right visual content balance, you can create engaging and easy-to-navigate emails, increasing the chances that your subscribers will engage with your content.
6. Prioritize mobile-friendliness
With 50% of all emails being opened on mobile devices, it’s also important to make sure your emails look great on smaller screens if you’re going to have group email or email marketing success in 2025.
It’s generally considered best practice to use responsive email design for any emails you send to your subscribers.
The layout of responsive email designs adjusts based on the size of the screen they are viewed on. This helps your emails look professional and easy to read, whether they’re opened on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop machine.
It’s always recommended to use a single-column layout for email design for mobile devices and make sure the font you use can be easily read without users having to zoom in.
7. Design emails with accessibility in mind
It’s estimated that more than 2 million people in the UK have visual impairments, which is around 3% of the total population.
If you truly want to get the most out of your campaigns, email marketing design best practices include building your email with accessibility in mind to make sure that all your subscribers can read your content, regardless of any disabilities or impairments they might have.
A good place to start is to make sure you have sufficient contrast between the text in your emails and your background so they are easy for everyone to read.
Another best practice for email design is the use of ALT tags for images. ALT tags provide a text description of images, which can be helpful for any of your subscribers that use screen readers. It’s important not to assume that only those with visual impairments use screen reading software – they are also used by people who may have a lower level of literacy, or simply prefer to hear content read out loud.
With full support for HTML emails, including the use of ALT tags, Simplelists has everything you need to include accessibility best practices into your email campaigns, helping you connect with every member of your audience effectively.
8. Optimize your subject lines and preview content
Your email subject lines and preview content are your opportunity to capture your subscribers’ attention and encourage them to open your email.
The right combination of a well-crafted subject line and intriguing preview content can significantly improve the open rate of your email campaigns.
We’ve got a list of top tips for best practice email design techniques in 2025:
- Try to keep your subject lines concise and to the point. Ideally, they should be around 50 characters or less so users on mobile devices can read them fully.
- Consider creating a sense of urgency or intrigue to encourage subscribers to open your email. For example, you might promote a limited-time offer or ask a question in your subject line.
- Using personalization by including the subscriber name in your subject line or preview text can help your emails capture attention, and can improve your open rate.
- Make sure that your subject line and preview content work together. Your preview content should ideally complement your subject line and provide additional context.
9. Always be testing
If you want to improve your group email engagement or email marketing performance, it’s important to have a robust testing approach for your emails.
One of the benefits of email as a channel is that it’s highly measurable.
You can easily access stats such as deliverability rates, bounce rates, open rates, and click-through rates to help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
Once you have an understanding of your benchmark metrics, it’s best practice to continuously test and optimize your email campaigns to improve performance.
A common way to achieve this is with A/B testing.
With an A/B test, you design two versions of your email – adjusting variables like your subject lines, layouts, calls-to-action, or images. You send each email to an equal proportion of your audience – for example, 50% might receive email A, and 50% might receive email B.
By comparing the performance of each email, you can determine which approach to email design best serves your audience.
One thing to bear in mind when setting up an A/B test is to try not to change too much all at once. Otherwise, it will be hard to determine which changes have actually made an impact. Best practice is to change only one variable at a time.
Looking for an email platform that can help you implement email design best practices?
By following the email best practice guidelines in this article, you can make sure that your group email and email marketing approach is set to succeed in 2025.
But you also need an email platform with the right features and functionality to help you implement these tips.
With Simplelists, you get full support for HTML emails, enabling you to send visually appealing and engaging responsive emails, that meet accessibility standards.
You can also send emails from your own domain, to help build trust and recognition with your audience.
Additionally, Simplelists has support for a wide range of fields to dynamically personalize your emails, making them more relevant and engaging for each subscriber.
Ready to see how Simplelists can help your business achieve email design best practices in 2025? Sign up for a free one-month trial today.