Email design can be a tricky egg to crack. These days, if you aren’t using an email builder, your campaigns may be prone to getting stale, not keeping up with your brand guidelines, and being difficult to update. With so many user-friendly options available, modernizing and updating your emails for 2025 is no longer such a monumental task requiring major stakeholders from across the company. 

In this detailed guide we’ll go over where to start, what to prioritize, and how to future-proof your email redesign process. Coupling this process with adopting an email production platform like Dyspatch will ensure that your team is creating engaging, on brand email experiences in no time. 

Part 1: Where to get started in the email redesign process

Analyze your data:

Before firing up Figma and dropping a bunch of rounded rectangles on the canvas, it’s crucial to understand your current campaigns’ performance. Look at your email analytics to get an understanding of  which email clients your audience uses. This information will provide insight into the technical limitations and opportunities you need to consider.

For instance, if a significant portion of your audience uses Gmail or Outlook, you’ll need to ensure compatibility with these clients to avoid rendering issues. Alternatively, if they’re using Apple Mail, you’ll be rejoicing at the unprecedented design freedom, and you can rest assured that your email designs will degrade gracefully when opened with older email clients. For a list of common design challenges, check out our article here on top email clients and devices to test for seamless communication.

Evaluate your engagement:

If you have a library of pre-sent emails in your CRM or ESP, identifying which email designs and campaigns are performing well might offer valuable learnings and help shape the modules you’ll be implementing in your new email design system. Keep context in mind when you are reviewing your email design to make sure you’re developing designs that align with your viewers’ expectations. 

Here’s what to keep in mind:

• Placement: where are your CTA buttons landing when rendered on desktop versus mobile? Does your audience require more text, or an immediate call to action to get them to engage? Using built-in device testing will help you determine where the major breakpoints are in your email, and help you optimize for all screen types
• Imagery: what types of images are your audience engaging with? Do they prefer real world examples of your product in action, or are they more engaged with abstract icons and imagery? Keep in mind that the images you use in your emails should be optimized for delivery over slower mobile networks, since some locations may have limited speeds, which will slow down loading of your emails. 
• Skim rate: Popular CRMs like Hubspot will provide you with a skim rate metric that will let you know if your users are only engaging with your content for a short time (2-8 seconds). This metric will be pivotal in determining whether you need to adjust your email designs to get your key point across. 

Re-review & dream big:

Before completing your analytics review, it’s important to take a step back and assess how your current email design aligns with your existing brand guidelines. If you found yourself making concessions to adapt your brand guidelines when implementing your original designs, now is the time to take another look at these limitations.

HTML email elements like as buttons, typography and other advanced styling might be worth re-implementing now. You can be confident that there is a graceful fallback when your email is rendered in older email clients. Modern design elements made possible by CSS3 and HTML5 can still be implemented, as long as you are testing them across all popular email clients, and are confident that they will not hinder readability of your emails when they are opened in an older email client. For a list of in-depth email accessibility requirements be sure to check out our new guide: Email Accessibility 101: The Ultimate Guide.

And last of all, you can rest easy, knowing that anyone still opening their emails in Outlook 2011, or Lotus Notes 8.5 are already used to a sub-optimal email experience and likely won’t even notice any major issues with your email design.  

Now that you’ve compiled all of your major analytics and reports, it’s time to get on to the fun (at least for me) part. Your email design system!

Part 2: Thinking modular

Identifying common elements

Now is the time to determine which common elements are shared across your email templates. Let’s consider both your marketing emails as well as your transactional emails. If you haven’t already seen it, the Dyspatch email builder design system Figma community file is a great place to start. Our email builder design system covers all of the common blocks you can use to build out your baseline email templates, including:

• Headers & footers
• Headlines
• Text blocks
• Images
• Tables
• Button & CTAs
• 1, 2, & 3 column layouts with images text and CTAs

Using the shared components of our Figma community files, you’ll be able to set your baseline text styling and size, your button styling and image treatments. When these components are updated, you’ll see their changes reflected across the sample email mockups 

Building your email design system

Now that you’re using an email builder and your design horizons are expanding, there are a number of decisions you’re going to have to make to ensure your email designs are consistent and the right fit for your audience. 

• Light or dark theme? Depending on your existing brand guidelines, this question might be answered for you. But if they’re more flexible, this is going to be an important decision to make. A light theme might feel more positive and minimal, but you run the risk of the design being haphazardly inverted in dark mode email clients. Alternatively, you can design your theme to be dark mode first, and not have to worry about major inversions happening to your color schemes. 
• Email width: Will you stick with the standard 600px width established across HTML email designs to date? Or will you go with a wider design at 700px or 800px wide? Keep in mind that the wider your email gets, the more of a gap there will be between your desktop and mobile designs. Large blocks of text images might look good on desktop, but will quickly become overwhelmingly large when rendered on mobile devices.
• Image treatments: Strengthen your brand by carrying iconic brand images over to your email designs. Add in rounded corners, borders, and even drop shadows where you see fit, knowing that they will render correctly in supported clients. 
• Typography: Using the correct branded fonts is crucial when designing your HTML emails. Implementing custom fonts provided by Typekit or Google Fonts is recommended. But always provide web safe fallbacks for your custom fonts to keep your emails legible on older clients. 
• Theme: The theme is where all of the major design decisions of your email brand guidelines will take place. Use the theme to set your email width, headline and body copy styling, padding and background images used in your email templates. Modules should remain as theme agnostic as possible to ensure they can be used in a variety of different emails.

Prioritize mobile first design

Depending on your customer base, a large portion of your users might be accessing your emails via their mobile devices, you’ll need to ensure that your emails are mobile friendly. On average, over 40% of emails are opened on a mobile device first. 

Optimizing your email design system for ease of use

Workspaces
Workspaces can be split up by campaign or email type depending on how many emails your team is managing. Utilizing workspaces in Dyspatch will allow you to not only specify integrations by email type, but you’ll also be able to ensure that the emails you’re creating are always shared with the right people internally. This guarantees that the most important eyes are always viewing the emails they need to.  

Internally we sort by type:

• Transactional emails
• Newsletters
• Product announcements
• Release notes
• Onboarding drip campaigns
• Internal company communication emails
• Webinars
  • Promotional
  • Registrations
  • Alerts / follow up

Themes

Themes are created to be shared across workspaces, ensuring that our transactional emails match our newsletters and onboarding drip campaigns.

• Light theme - this theme is built to render nicely in dark mode as well, but is primarily used for our standard communications, product updates, newsletters, etc.
• Dark theme - Our dark theme is used as a highlight, and we’ll use it for special announcements. 

Blocks 

Blocks are grouped by type and complexity. You’ll want to keep your shared and most-used modules easy to find and work with. With the inclusion of our easy to use block search, you’ll always be able access any block of your choosing with just a click.

• Headers/footers
• Body copy
  • Text
  • Images
  • CTAs
• Layouts
  • 2 column - image / text / CTA
  • 3 column - image / text / CTA
  • Featured posts
  • Call to action blocks
  • Image carousels

Conclusion

Redesigning your email in 2025 is most successful with a blend of data analysis, modular design, mobile optimization and the adoption of an email production platform. Getting started with a thorough understanding of your current campaigns’ performance and utilizing modern design principles will help you create engaging, effective, on brand emails that will stand the test of time. For more detailed insights and tools to aid your email redesign process, chat with someone from our team now. 

For further reading be sure to read our in-depth breakdown of email accessibility requirements with our post: Email Accessibility 101: The Ultimate Guide.

As the year draws to a close, our inboxes start to fill with a special kind of email: the end-of-year wrap-up. From Spotify's personalized music summaries to Instagram's top posts year-in-review, these campaigns have become a delightful tradition that users eagerly anticipate. But why are these campaigns so effective, and how can your business leverage this trend?

End-of-year email campaigns are more than just a festive gesture. They're powerful tools for boosting engagement and creating viral content that users want to share. In this post, we'll explore the key elements of a successful end-of-year wrap-up campaign and how you can create one that resonates with your audience.

Planning Your Campaign

Before diving into the creative process, it's crucial to lay the groundwork for your campaign:

1. Set Clear Goals: Determine what you want to achieve. Are you aiming to increase engagement, drive sales, or boost brand awareness?
2. Define Your Target Audience: Who are you creating this campaign for? Understanding your audience is key to crafting a message that resonates.
3. Timing is Everything: Consider when your audience is most likely to engage with your content. For many businesses, early December is ideal, catching users before the holiday rush but late enough to encapsulate the year's data.

Content Ideas

The heart of your campaign lies in its content. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Insights from In-App Usage and Statistics: Share interesting data about how users interacted with your product or service.
• Top Content Engagement: Showcase the content that resonated most with your audience. From the most popular new game download to the most highly reviewed new items in your store.
• Customer Appreciation: Express gratitude to your customers for their support throughout the year by acknowledging their locale, their contributions to your growth, or even your favorite reviews!
• Top Products or Services: Feature your best-selling or highest-rated offerings, and pique your audience’s interest about which items went viral in 2024.
• Exclusive Offers: Provide special promotions to encourage engagement and sales tailored to your users' engagement.
• Your Company’s Year in Review: Highlight your company's major achievements and milestones.
• Sneak Peek: Tease upcoming features or products to build anticipation for the new year.

Our Favorite Wrap-Ups from 2023

To inspire your creativity, let's look at some standout end-of-year campaigns from the previous year; not limited to email:

Spotify Wrapped

From spotify

• Why it worked: Highly personalized, shareable content that turns user data into a fun, interactive story.
• Key takeaway: Leverage user data to create a unique, personalized experience.
• It’s unique: Often credited with defining the “year end” category, Spotify is still a leader in the space. The label they give to your listening style, from Shapeshifter to other seemingly-AI-generated monikers, is part of the fun.

Strava Year in Sport

From Strava

• Why it worked: Celebrated users' athletic achievements with compelling visuals and motivating statistics. Strava is a highly social platform, where more athletes share their activities with their friends and followers. The year in sport is easy to share, generating additional engagement.
• Key takeaway: Use positive reinforcement and achievement highlights to boost user engagement.
  

Duolingo Year in Review

From Duolingo

1. 1. • Why it worked: Gamified language learning progress with fun animations and encouraging statistics. Many Duolingo users are highly motivated by long-standing streaks of daily use, and seeing their commitment be recognized in the year in review is a supportive note from their mascot, Duo. 
      • Key takeaway: Use gamification elements to make data more engaging and motivating.

Goodreads’ Year in Books

• Why it worked: Summarized users' reading habits and achievements, encouraging sharing and community engagement.
• Key takeaway: Foster a sense of community and encourage social sharing to increase campaign reach.
• It’s personal: Even if Goodreads users don’t want to share or forward their year in books, it’s a wonderful summary to reflect on personally. Not everyone wants to know what their favorite books were, but everyone is curious about how much they’ve read this year!

Healthylife Monthly wrap-up

• Why it worked: Provided valuable insights into users' healthy eating choices and improvements over the months to give them a snapshot of the impact of their choices.
• Key takeaway: Show users the tangible benefits, and month over month changes they’ve made while using your product or service.

These campaigns stood out because they turned user data into compelling narratives, encouraged sharing, and provided genuine value to their users. When crafting your campaign, think about how you can similarly transform your users' interactions with your brand into a story worth sharing.

Design Tips

Your campaign's visual appeal is crucial for grabbing and holding attention:

• Mobile-Friendly Layout: Ensure your email looks great on all devices, especially mobile.
• Consistent Branding: Use your brand colors, fonts, and style to reinforce brand recognition.
• Eye-Catching Visuals: Incorporate engaging graphics, animations, or videos to illustrate your key points. Read our ultimate guide to interactive email for more inspiration
• Clear CTAs: Make your call-to-action buttons prominent and compelling.

Writing Effective Copy

Compelling content is the key to engagement:

• Personalization: Use the recipient's name and tailor content to their interactions with your brand or application.
• Catchy Subject Lines: Craft subject lines that pique curiosity and encourage opens. Remember: sometimes, the simplest subject line is the best. Make sure the topic is prominent so that the round-up doesn’t get lost in busy inboxes.
• Concise and Engaging Body Text: Keep your message clear and to the point.
• Interactive Elements: Use carousels or progress bars to highlight key statistics in an engaging way.
• Strong CTAs: Guide users on what to do next with clear, action-oriented language.

Engaging emails drive traffic and conversions. In our post: 5 Best Copywriting Techniques to Boost Email Conversions, we handpicked five proven email copywriting techniques that you can use to generate clicks and conversions from your end of year wrap up email marketing campaigns. 

Conclusion

End-of-year wrap-up campaigns offer a unique opportunity to engage your audience, strengthen brand loyalty, and drive business results. By starting your planning early, focusing on personalized, visually appealing content, and paying attention to the technical details, you can create a campaign that your audience will love and share.

After your campaign, it will be time to measure its impact:

• Key Metrics: Look at open rates, click-through rates, social shares, and conversion rates.
• Learning for the Future: Use insights from this campaign to improve your strategy for next year.

Remember, the key to a successful campaign is to provide value to your users. Whether it's through insights, entertainment, or exclusive offers, make sure your wrap-up leaves a lasting positive impression.

The best time to start planning your end-of-year campaign is right now! With these tips in hand, you're well on your way to creating a memorable and effective wrap-up that will set the stage for a successful year ahead.

Want to be featured in Dyspatch’s round-up next year? Share your wrap-up campaign with us and we’ll be glad to share it with other email aficionados for inspiration. 

Creating high-quality emails quickly and efficiently isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for staying competitive in today’s fast-paced digital marketing world. Here are five practical steps that can help streamline your email workflow—saving you time, reducing errors, and improving collaboration across your team.

1. Implement a Modular Design System

Designing emails from scratch every time is not only time-consuming but also inconsistent. A modular design system allows you to build emails using pre-designed, reusable components like headers, footers, and promotional sections. This approach streamlines the creation process, ensuring that your emails are consistent across campaigns.

• Why it matters: Without modular components, teams often spend hours revising and recreating the same elements. You’re essentially rebuilding the wheel with every new campaign. This results in missed deadlines and increased labor costs.
• Real-world example: Grover, a subscription-based rental service, reports spending a mere 10 minutes building an email template after switching to Dyspatch. Fixing broken emails has become a thing of the past, and they can rest easy knowing that their email templates are reliable and worry-free. 
• Takeaway: By using pre-built, customizable components, you can significantly reduce the time spent on repetitive design work and focus on what matters—crafting the right message for your audience.

2. Centralize Collaboration

In a traditional email workflow, collaboration can become fragmented. Feedback from designers, marketers, and developers is often scattered across emails or spreadsheets, making it hard to keep track of revisions and approvals. A centralized platform lets all team members work in one place, with tools like real-time commenting and approval workflows to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

• Why it matters: Lack of centralized collaboration leads to delays, miscommunications, and unnecessary back-and-forth, costing valuable time. Teams can spend days just waiting for feedback or searching through emails to find the right version of a draft.
• Real-world example: Hunter Industries, a global manufacturer of irrigation systems, centralized their email creation process with Dyspatch. This made it easy for their teams across different departments and regions to collaborate in real-time, cutting down on the time it took to get emails approved and deployed.
• Takeaway: Centralized collaboration ensures that everyone is on the same page, which speeds up the process and reduces errors. The quicker your team can review and approve emails, the faster you can launch campaigns and engage your audience.

3. Simplify Localization

As you scale your campaigns, especially for international audiences, email localization becomes crucial. Manually translating content and ensuring cultural relevance for each market can slow down the process and lead to errors. With an integrated localization tool, you can automate this process and ensure that your emails are tailored for different languages and regions without additional effort.

• Why it matters: Manual localization can take days, and if translations aren’t handled carefully, you risk alienating customers with poorly executed or inaccurate content. Plus, the longer you spend on localization, the more time you waste before your emails reach their intended audience.
• Real-world example: Culture Amp, a leading employee experience platform, uses Dyspatch to manage over 45 locales per email. Simplifying their email production workflow, moving their process from a code-heavy approach to a more collaborative, efficient, and scalable process.
• Takeaway: By automating the localization process, you can save time, reduce errors, and scale your campaigns without additional resources. Emails become more relevant to each market, leading to better engagement and improved customer satisfaction.

4. Harness the Power of Personalization

Email personalization is transforming email by allowing marketers to create highly targeted and dynamic experiences. Unlike static emails, these messages will automatically personalize its content based on specific user attributes, behaviors, and preferences when sent.

• Why it matters: One-size-fits-all emails are a thing of the past. Modern consumers expect personalized experiences that speak directly to their individual needs, interests, and journey. Conditional content builders eliminate the manual labor of creating multiple email variants by automatically tailoring content in real-time.
• Real-world example: Using Email Personalization for More Connection & Conversions. Email marketing is still the highest return on investment (ROI) marketing activity with an average 3600% ROI, or bringing in $36 for every $1 spent. And… people want email personalization: About 75% of people expect personalized marketing when they share information about themselves with companies.
• Takeaway: Conditional content builders represent the next evolution of email personalization. By leveraging intelligent, adaptive design, marketers can create more meaningful connections with their audience, driving engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, conversions.

Advanced Personalization Capabilities:

• Demographic Targeting: Automatically adjust imagery, messaging, and offers based on age, or location.
• Behavioral Triggers: Customize content based on previous interactions, such as recent purchases or website browsing.
• Customer Journey Mapping: Deliver different content to new subscribers, loyal customers, or at-risk churn segments.

5. Integrate with Your ESP

When you have to manually export emails from your design platform and upload them into your email service provider (ESP), it introduces additional steps that can cause delays, errors, and formatting issues. Integrating your email creation platform with your ESP allows for a smoother, faster transition from design to deployment, minimizing the need for manual intervention.

• Why it matters: Manual export and import processes can introduce formatting errors and slow down email deployment. Every extra step adds time, and any error can delay your campaign or lead to issues with email display.
• Real-world example: Healthylife, a digital platform for health and wellness, needed an email production platform that would allow them to decouple their email templates from their marketing automation platform – giving them the flexibility and ease to move templates across to another platform as, and when, the business scaled.
• Takeaway: Integrating your email creation tool with your ESP simplifies the process and eliminates the potential for errors. It ensures your emails are deployed faster and more accurately, improving your overall campaign performance.

Wrapping It Up

Streamlining your email workflow isn’t just about speeding things up—it’s about reducing costs, eliminating errors, and making your team more productive. By implementing a modular design system, centralizing collaboration, automating localization, using dynamic content, and integrating with your ESP, you can create better emails faster and with less hassle. These improvements don’t just save time; they also help you scale your email marketing and achieve better results, no matter where your audience is.

Ready to streamline your workflow? Let’s talk about how Dyspatch can help.