MarketingPlatform: Fonts in Email Campaigns

Choosing the right font is just as important as designing the rest of your email campaign when it comes to achieving the right look and feel that also supports your digital brand identity.

When selecting multiple fonts, a "Fallback" Font Family will appear. Choosing a fallback font ensures that your campaign still looks good with an "emergency font" in case the recipient's email client does not display your primary chosen font.

In email marketing, we typically talk about Web Font and Web Safe Font. Why is this important? Not all email clients can display all fonts. But don't worry... MarketingPlatform will always ensure that your emails can be read, and that you can safely choose the preferred font in the builder.

Web fonts are a fantastic way for a web designer to create the same look and feel in the email campaign as on the website. The possibilities are many, they are easy to install, and can provide that extra special touch that we all want to give our campaigns.

When it comes to email, most browsers and email clients do not have these web fonts installed, and there is not much that can be done about it. iOS and Apple Mail are generally good at supporting fonts, but Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and various other email apps for mobile devices are not as good. Outlook and Hotmail are also somewhat challenged in this area.

This is where the difference between Web Fonts and Web Safe Fonts really becomes clear. Web Safe Fonts are a collection of fonts that are supported across various email inboxes and clients. These are fonts like Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, Arial, etc. Therefore, it is safest to use a Web Safe Font. But you don't have to.

In MarketingPlatform, you can choose from more than a thousand different Google Fonts. Find and select the font you prefer to use, and the platform instructs the inbox to display this font when possible. In addition, you choose a Web Safe Font as a "fallback" font, which will be displayed in cases where your primary Web Font cannot be displayed.

... when it comes to your fallback font. Some versions of Outlook will simply choose to display Times New Roman regardless of the font you have chosen. And there is nothing you can do to change this.

When writing HTML and styling an email campaign, you are always 'only' sending instructions on how the email campaign should look. We have come to know the different challenges in (especially) Outlook, but it will always be up to the inbox how it will display your campaign.