Last month a founder sent me an email design she was proud of. Custom illustration across the top, three product shots in a neat row below it, brand colours, the lot. It looked like something a design agency charged four figures for. It got a 0.4% click rate.
She couldn’t work out why. The email was gorgeous. That was the problem.
Somewhere we picked up the idea that a good-looking email and a high-converting one are the same thing. They aren’t related as closely as you’d hope. I’ve seen plain, almost ugly emails outperform beautifully art-directed ones, again and again, because the plain one made the next step obvious and the pretty one hid it under a pile of lovely distractions.
So let’s talk about the design choices that move the click, as opposed to the ones that just win compliments.
Short on time? Here are the key takeaways
- Give every email one job: the moment you ask for two things, you usually get neither.
- Make the action impossible to miss: one clear button beats a paragraph with a link buried in it.
- Design for the thumb first: most of your list is reading on a phone, half-distracted, one-handed.
- Images should support the message: if the pictures don’t load, the email still has to work.
- Build for the scan, not the read: people decide whether to click in about three seconds, before they’ve read a word.
One email, one job
Most emails try to do too much.
You’ve got the sale, but also the new blog post, and the loyalty programme reminder, and a cheeky line about the podcast. Each one made sense when you added it. Together they turn a clear ask into a menu, and a confused reader does the easiest thing available, which is nothing.
Before you design anything, finish this sentence: when someone opens this, I want them to ___. One verb. Buy the thing, book the call, read the guide. That single action is the email’s job. Everything on the page either serves it or competes with it, and the stuff that competes has to go, however good it looks.
This is harder than it sounds, because cutting feels like waste. You wrote that second offer, you don’t want to bin it. Send it next week instead. An email that asks for one thing clearly will beat one that asks for three things politely, every time.
Make the one action impossible to miss
Once you know the job, the design has one priority: make that action the most obvious thing in the email.
That usually means a button. A real button, with a solid block of colour, sitting on its own line with space around it, in a colour that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the email so the eye goes straight to it. Not a text link hidden in the fourth sentence of a paragraph. Links in body copy get missed on a phone. They’re small, they’re easy to scroll past, and they ask the reader to go hunting.
Give it room. A button crammed against text above and below reads as part of the wall. The same button with clear space around it reads as “press here.” That space around it is doing the work of pointing, so stop treating it as room going to waste.
And the words on the button matter more than the colour. “Shop the sale” tells me what happens when I tap. “Submit” or “Click here” tells me nothing. Write the button like you’re finishing the reader’s sentence: “I want to ___.”
One button, repeated once further down if the email is long, pointing at the same place. Two different buttons going two different places and you’re back to the menu problem.
Design for the thumb, not the desktop
You design your email on a big monitor, in a quiet moment, giving it your full attention. Nobody reads it that way.
Most of your list opens on a phone, on the train or half-watching the telly, holding the thing in one hand. If your email only makes sense full-size on a laptop, it’s broken for the majority before you start.
So go mobile-first. Single column, because two columns collapse into a mess on a narrow screen. Text big enough to read without pinching, which means around 16 pixels for body copy and no smaller. A button wide enough to hit with a thumb without zooming. And your most important line and your main button need to land in the first glance, before any scrolling, because plenty of people decide right there whether to carry on.
That first glance includes two bits of design most people forget they control: the subject line and the preview text. They’re the only design you’ve got before the email even opens. The subject line earns the open, and the preview text, that grey line of copy next to it, either reinforces the promise or wastes itself repeating your company name. Write it on purpose.
Don’t hang everything on one image
I love a good hero image. But a lot of emails rest everything on one big graphic, often with the headline and the button baked into the picture as part of the design.
Then the image doesn’t load. Images are off by default in plenty of inboxes, or the connection’s slow, or the reader’s in dark mode and your white-background PNG turns into a grey smudge. Now your beautiful email is a blank rectangle with a tiny broken-image icon where the whole message used to be.
The fix is a habit: the email has to work with the pictures switched off. Keep your headline and your button as live text, not pixels inside a JPEG. Use properly coded buttons rather than an image of a button. Add alt text to every image so there’s words when the picture fails. Check it in dark mode, because a logo that looks crisp on white can vanish on black. Images lift an email that already works without them.
This is also where designing emails gets fiddly, and where the tools matter. If your team already designs in Figma, Omnisend now connects with it directly, so you can build a layout in Figma and sync it straight into your Omnisend image library to drop into a campaign, instead of rebuilding the whole thing by hand or emailing screenshots around. Handy when the people who design and the people who hit send aren’t the same person.
Build for the scan, not the read
Nobody reads your email start to finish. Not on the first pass. They scan it in a second or two, and the design decides what they catch.
So build the page for a skim. One clear headline up top that states the value, not a clever pun that needs the body copy to make sense. Short paragraphs, two or three lines each, with air between them. Subheadings or bold lead-ins if it runs long, so a skimming eye still picks up the thread. The key line and the button sitting where the eye naturally travels, down the left and through the middle.
Squint at your own email until the words blur. What still stands out? If the button disappears and some stock photo is the loudest thing on the page, your design is pointing at the wrong spot. Fix the hierarchy until the one thing you want tapped is the one thing that survives the squint.
Final Thoughts
A converting email comes from discipline more than decoration. You decide the one job, point everything at it, and strip out whatever competes, however pretty it is. The founders whose emails sell have usually just been ruthless about clarity, and their emails are often the plainer ones in the inbox.
That’s where Omnisend comes in. Its drag-and-drop builder makes mobile-ready emails without code, the product picker drops your real products and buy buttons straight in, and the new Figma integration lets you design in Figma and sync it into Omnisend so your campaigns look the way your team intended. And if you’re coming from another platform, the switch is lighter than it sounds: Omnisend’s team moves your flows and templates across for you in about five days, and most people end up paying up to 35% less once they’ve landed. Foundr readers also get 50% off their first three months, just use code FOUNDR50 when you sign up and start building emails people actually tap.
P.S. Omnisend now connects with Figma, so you can design your emails in Figma and bring them straight into Omnisend’s image library to use in a campaign.
