Tips on Using Web Fonts in Email

typography

 

These days the web is full of sites using beautiful typography. Services such as Google Web fonts, Typekit and Fontdeck make it easy to display thousands of fonts on any site. But the problem comes when you can want to carry over your brand’s typeface to e-mail.

Most email clients are way behind the times when it comes to anything other than your standard system fonts. The ability to use webfonts in email varies widely depending on email client. Campaign Monitor has a great chart that details which email clients support web fonts.

With that being said there are three things to consider when planning to use web fonts in an email:

  1. Who is your target market and what are they using to read email? Apple Mail, iOS Mail and Android, which now make up a large percentage of the consumer population, are able to display web fonts. But, for example, in Outlook (on Windows) this is not possible. So if your target audience is mainly corporate professionals, you may be out of luck.
  2. How are you serving your web fonts? Make sure the vendor you are using to serve your fonts supports font embedding using @import.
  3. Is it really important that the web fonts come through in email? This is more of a design and branding decision. If an email client does not support webfonts, they will display a standard font like Arial or Times New Roman.  Since you are able to specify which standard font will be displayed, there may not be a significant impact.

Today, display of web fonts in email clients is far from universal. However depending on your target market, and their email clients, using web fonts can make your emails really stand out. If you are able to make people stop and look at your emails for just a few more seconds it’s probably worth it.

At EmoryDay we offer a full range of e-mail marketing services. We can create optmized camaigns, that are tailored to your brand’s needs. Contact us to learn more about how e-mail marketing can enhance your marketing strategy.

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