5 responsive email design best practices for 2025 (and beyond)

5 responsive email design best practices for 2025 (and beyond)

You work hard to ensure you’ve crafted an email marketing campaign full of on-brand messages that will make your target audience swoon and drive conversions. You hit send. And then you realize that your company logo has a white box around it if the email is viewed in dark mode because you didn’t use a transparent PNG. Your text is too small to read on mobile devices. Or, your complex email design is slowing down your load time. 

All these nightmares can be avoided by embracing our top tips for responsive email design. As you plan email content for 2025, and beyond, here’s what to prioritize to ensure your marketing emails pack the biggest possible punch. 

What is responsive email design?

Responsive email design ensures that your email formatting adjusts depending on the recipient’s screen size, providing an optimal user experience whether the email is viewed on mobile phone, tablet, or desktop. Responsive design uses flexible layouts, scalable elements and images, and CSS media queries to ensure the subscriber experience remains consistent across different devices (and different email clients). 

The main goals of responsive email design

A responsive layout in your email marketing does more than simply provide design adaptability. Responsive email design helps you achieve five key objectives that are essential to the success of your email marketing campaign(s), including optimizing user experience, increasing email engagement, supporting accessibility, improving your email conversion rates, and maintaining brand consistency. Here’s how (and why it matters).

Optimize user experience

Responsive email design ensures that subscribers have the best possible user experience, no matter what device they’re using. When a subscriber opens an email, and the text and images are scaled appropriately, they can more easily read your pithy, engaging marketing messages. Resizing or moving the CTA button for desktop and mobile can help them understand what action to take. Centering user experience is the cornerstone of any high-performing marketing initiative. 

Increase email engagement

Responsive emails have higher engagement than non-responsive email designs. Enhance interaction with your email campaign by making the emails easier to navigate and engage with. Features like scalable buttons, clear CTAs, and readable layouts can help ensure every email you send is maximized to drive engagement. 

Support accessibility

A responsive layout helps ensure that all your emails support accessibility and are compliant with ADA requirements. You want to ensure that your features have sufficient contrast. This is one area where responsive design has become more important in recent years. As more people use dark mode, you want to ensure that your emails are able to adapt and maintain contrast. Accessible font sizes and alt text for images support usability for all subscribers, including those with impaired vision or those using screen readers. 

Improve email conversion rates

Ultimately, you want your email marketing to convert and drive revenue. Responsive email design helps you do that. By reducing friction with more straightforward navigation and faster load speeds, responsive design helps to drive higher click-through and conversion rates. 

Maintain brand consistency

You don’t want wonky formatting to throw off the customer experience of your brand. Maintaining consistent design across devices helps to build trust and strengthen brand recognition. 

5 essential responsive email design best practices

As the way we use our devices continues to evolve, so do the best practices for responsive design. Years ago, it might have been enough to ensure you had included mobile device design as a secondary consideration. That’s not going to cut it in 2025. Here’s what you’ll want to prioritize in responsive email templates this year…and beyond. 

1. Design for mobile first

Mobile devices have become the dominant way people engage with their email. It’s not just limited to B2C marketing either. Ensuring emails are mobile-friendly has become essential for B2B marketing success.

Multi-column layouts might look killer on desktop, but they don’t work as well on mobile. Instead, choose a single-column email layout that’s better suited for mobile email viewing. Keeping the design simple and uncluttered makes emails easier to follow on a small screen. And if you’re not ready to let go of your multi-column design for desktop, CSS media queries can adjust layouts and styles for larger screens. (How’s that for having your email cake and eating it, too?)

There’s another reason to keep your email design simple—load time. The faster your emails load, the better the user experience. Users are more likely to read and interact with them. And when your emails load quickly, it can also help improve your sender reputation (which, in turn, increases the likelihood that your email marketing lands in the recipient’s primary inbox). 

When creating a mobile-first responsive email template, choose CTA buttons that are a minimum size of 44 x 44 pixels, surrounded by ample white space. These large buttons are designed to make it easy to take action with the tap of a finger (usually a thumb). And, of course, you always want to make your text easy to read on mobile. A good rule is to set body text at a minimum of 16pt to ensure it’s readable on small screens. 

2. Dark mode support

In recent years, the number of people using dark mode on their devices has seen a sharp increase. Users are opting for dark mode to help reduce eye strain and improve visibility in low-light environments. As you play your email marketing for 2025, you want to ensure that your responsive email design uses transparent images and adjusts for color contrast when a device is in dark mode. In addition to making these changes, you should also add testing the email in both light and dark modes to your pre-send QA checklist. 

3. Design for different email clients

Email clients like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Yahoo Mail render emails differently due to varying support for HTML and CSS features. Ensure you understand the limitations of each email client. Starting with a simple, mobile-friendly email layout can help ensure your email displays correctly on every screen. Many email clients strip external CSS, so you’ll be best served by using inline styles to ensure consistent rendering. 

4. Accessibility

Accessibility should be a central consideration for all your marketing efforts, and responsive email design is no different. Use fonts that are easy to read and 16+ font size. Make sure that your email design has adequate color contras (a minimum of 4.5:1) for both light and dark modes. Write alt text for all images in your emails. For more ways you can support accessibility in your email layouts, read Email Accessibility Design Best Practice Tips. 

5. Email interactivity

Including interactive elements in your email messages can help boost engagement. Consider incorporating carousels, online polls, or interactive videos into your responsive templates to encourage active participation. For more tips on including interactivity in emails and how to make sure your email design is compatible with different email clients, check out the guide How to Make Interactive Emails. 

Level up your responsive email design in 2025

From our email API, designed by devs for devs, to our Email Marketing Campaigns, with drag-and-drop email templates, Twilio SendGrid has the solutions to meet you where you are and help you hit it out of the park. We’ll help you optimize for mobile, dark mode… and that’s just the beginning.