I am sending my first GroupMail email newsletter soon. What are the best fonts to use for email newsletters and websites?
While researching best practices for email fonts in email newsletters and websites, there was one thing that I discovered. There simply is not one correct answer. Some articles cite visibility studies which proclaim Arial to be the best font. Others suggest that serif fonts like Times New Roman are easier to read on email and website screens. Still others charge that Georgia is the most legible for email and the web.
If you want to roll like an R&B star, Kanye West prefers to use Gothic or Helvetica fonts for his email.
Okay, but what about email and web font size for my HTML newsletters and website landing pages?
The same variety of responses are found when searching for the best email and web font size. While many seem to agree that the font size should never be below 10pt (I understand this more now that I find myself, for the first time, reaching for my pharmacy-rack reading glasses!) there seem to be two camps – 10pt or 12pt.
IMHO, I think that the email or website font used should;
1. match the tone of the message being sent,
2. be a system font, likely to be supported by the majority of email clients and web browsers, and
3. be large enough for people to read without any effort.
Beyond this, whether you use Arial 12pt or Georgia 12 pt is somewhat irrelevant as far as I am concerned.
HTML email and web designers might throw me under the bus for this, and I really do understand why they would want to.
To a website or email newsletter designer, the suggestion that it doesn’t really matter what specific font you use is akin to a sommelier hearing someone advise that it really doesn’t matter which wine accompanies a dinner. But, truth-be-told, a sommelier friend of mine once told me that if you like Sauvignon Blanc, then that is exactly what you should have to accompany a rich beef bourgogne – even if the experts think that the correct choice would be a Pinot Noir. The experts might be right. But if you don’t like Pinot Noir, then their being ‘right’ won’t make you happy. The same is true with font selection. Most of your recipients won’t be font snobs.
Of course, there are some fundamental mistakes that can be made with email and web fonts, such as;
1. being inconsistent within your message and alternating font style and size between paragraphs, or
2. using a font that is simply too small for recipients to read easily, or
3. using a font that is so big it looks like a child in kindergarten wrote it, or
4. using some fancy font that you downloaded from a font warehouse in China that nobody else has loaded in their system, or
5. using Comic Sans MT for a serious business message.
Whether you use Arial 12pt or Georgia 12pt isn’t going to significantly impact your click-through rates.
That said, using a red hyperlink instead of a gray hyperlink for your call-to-action might very well impact the response rates to the emails that you send.
You can use whatever font you like with our award-winning GroupMail newsletter software.