Your emails are a collection of sentences and words. Words are a collection of characters, and characters are a collection of email fonts.
That’s why you need to put the same amount of time and attention toward your email fonts as your copywriting—it’s the foundation of your messages.
However, not all fonts are equal, especially with your email program. The best email-friendly fonts will make your campaigns shine, while the not-so-safe web fonts can make your designs go unnoticed.
Fortunately, you don’t have to guess when choosing the best email font for your campaigns. Whether designing a brand-new email newsletter or updating your business email signature, we have the fonts you need.
Here’s everything you’ll learn in this ultimate guide to email fonts:
Email-safe fonts are typefaces that are widely available across different operating systems, devices, and email clients. These fonts are designed to load consistently in recipients' inboxes—whether they're using Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, or checking email on an Android or iPhone device.
Here's why email-safe fonts matter:
Consistency across platforms: Email-safe fonts help maintain a consistent look and feel for your messages, regardless of the recipient's email client or device.
Improved readability: These fonts are typically chosen for their legibility across various screen sizes and resolutions.
Avoiding default substitutions: When you use a font that isn't email-safe, email clients may substitute it with a default option, potentially altering your email's design and message.
However, even email-safe fonts aren't completely foolproof. While they're more likely to display as intended, there's always a small chance of inconsistency across different email environments.
They're just safe(er).
The best email-safe fonts strike a balance between:
Wide compatibility across email clients and devices
The average email attention span is11.1 seconds per email, although it’s (surprisingly) increasing. So in addition to design and branding considerations, it’s crucial to understand these data-backed reasons for finding the right email font for your campaigns:
Increase your recipient’s likelihood to commit:People estimate that tasks will take twice as longwhen the instructions are in fancy fonts rather than a plain font. You achieve greater motivation to commit when you present a task that requires less time or effort.
Boost your conversion rate: Click Laboratoryincreased form conversion by 133%just by changing the font size from 10 point to 13 point and adding a bit of line spacing—that’s it.
Impact reader judgment: Certain fonts affect how people feel about the content they read. In this study, using the Baskerville font resulted in an increase of people agreeing with a statement by 1.5%. Now that might not sound significant, but 1.5% could make a difference to your bottom line.
Improve readability: Most people experience no change in speed or retention when reading serif vs. sans-serif fonts. However, children, older people, people with limited sight, and those living with dyslexia tend to read sans-serif fonts better.
However, don't judge a font by its...font. While a font helps define your brand, your brand also defines the font. Not sure how that works? Watch this "explainer" video on font choice:
We recommend the following email-friendly and web-safe fonts. Use these email fonts to increase the chances of your text rendering correctly with your recipients:
Arial
Courier New
Georgia
Helvetica
Lucida Sans
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
1. Arial
Arial is a contemporary sans-serif email-safe font option. With it, you’ll find curves that give it a modern feel. Arial is an excellent font for body copy or headlines across email campaigns.
2. Courier New
Courier New has a typewriter-like appearance with serifs. It doesn’t have a modern look and feel, making it more appropriate for movie scripts and manuscripts than email.
3. Georgia
Georgia is a classic serif font from Microsoft used in newspapers and magazines. It gives an authoritative (and formal) appearance to your emails and is an excellent option to enhance the readability of densely worded content.
4. Helvetica
Helvetica is the most popular digital font for titles, brand names, taglines, slogans, and headlines. It’s not particularly distinctive but is a good option for more than emails.
5. Lucida Sans Unicode
Lucida Sans Unicode is a basic sans-serif variant of the Lucida font that doesn’t have bold or italics versions.
6. Tahoma
Tahoma is a font designed by Microsoft to improve the visibility of small text on screens. It translates well to the compact layout of emails.
7. Times New Roman
Times New Roman is an email-safe font appropriate for just about anywhere. It’s not a contemporary font—it’s been around for almost 100 years—but it’s space efficient, legible, and familiar.
8. Trebuchet MS
Trebuchet MS is a bold, digital-friendly font with an unmistakable look. While some characters appear classic and typical, others get creative (see the “g”).
Email-safe and web-safe fonts aren’t the same. Web-safe fonts exist only on the web. So you won’t find them in operating systems, devices, software, or applications. Instead, these get added to your communications and applications with plug-ins and snippets.
Most email clients support several web-safe email fonts, but there isn’t overlap between all of them. For example, Gmail supports Open Sans and Roboto web fonts, but Outlook and Apple Mail don’t. However, each email client has a default font to revert to if it doesn’t support a web font. Here are a few:
Gmail: Arial
Apple Mail: Helvetica
Outlook: Calibri
So rather than designing one email for Helvetica, another for Roboto, and another for Calibri, use email-safe fonts that work universally across most email clients.
If you use a web-safe email font instead of an email-safe font, we recommend selecting (and testing) a font alternative. Consider one of the following options:
Raleway
Roboto
Open Sans
Poppins
Oswald
Ubuntu
Merriweather
Rubik
Quicksand
Oxygen
Lato
1. Raleway
Raleway is a sans-serif font with thin, font-weight lines and generous letter spacing for a comfortable reading experience without compromising page space.
2. Roboto
Roboto uses friendly, open curves with natural widths. It’s the default font on Android, Google Play, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Images.
3. Open Sans
Open Sans is a font optimized for print, web, and mobile interfaces, thanks to its neutral, friendly look. The upright nature and letter spacing prioritize legibility.
4. Poppins
Poppins has a clean look and font style that make it perfect for headings, subheaders, and standout paragraph copy. It has a great balance between playful and professional.
5. Oswald
Oswald is a tight, condensed font that lets you incorporate more characters without compromising readability. Use Oswald in headlines to make a bold statement while maintaining a balanced appearance vertically and horizontally.
6. Ubuntu
Ubuntu font features a contemporary style with a unique flair, balancing a distinct design with professional use cases.
7. Merriweather
Merriweather is an open-source serif font designed for digital reading. The characters stretch tall but remain compact to increase legibility without wasting space.
8. Rubik
Rubik uses slightly rounded corners and low-stroke contrast. Access this open-source typeface for free on Google Fonts.
9. Quicksand
Quicksand, originally designed for display purposes, is a sans-serif font that does well in small print sizes too. It works great for body text in emails.
10. Oxygen
Oxygen is a web-safe font for web browsers, desktop computers, and mobile devices. It pairs nicely with Oswald and Quicksand.
11. Lato
Lato is a font with 18 styles and weights and 3,000+ glyphs per style. Its semi-rounded edges make it one of Google’s most popular fonts.
Don’t limit yourself to a single email font for all your communications—certain ones perform better as headers, body copy, or signatures. Below, we’ve listed the best fonts for several email use cases.
We recommend using a web-safe font with an alternative, email-safe font for your email signature. Since it’ll likely be the same in most emails, you can optimize your web-safe version and alternative options to ensure a polished, consistent appearance.
The following web-safe email fonts are our recommendations for email signatures:
Some fonts are playful, while others are more professional—and some unique ones have a balance between both. For the most professional email fonts for business, we recommend choosing fonts that display trust and class:
Ubuntu
Poppins
Arial
Helvetica
Georgia
When selecting a professional font for your business emails, consider the following factors:
Brand consistency: Choose a font that aligns with your overall brand identity and other marketing materials.
Industry norms: Some industries may have specific expectations about communication style—consider whether a more traditional or modern font is appropriate.
Audience: Think about your recipients and what font style might resonate best with them.
Email client compatibility: Double-check that your chosen font is widely supported across various email clients to maintain consistency.
Readability: Prioritize fonts that are easy to read at different sizes, especially on mobile devices.
Versatility: Select a font family that offers various weights (light, regular, bold) to create visual hierarchy within your emails.
Remember, while these professional fonts are excellent starting points, the best choice for your business will depend on your specific needs and brand identity. It's often effective to pair a sans-serif font for headlines with a serif font for body text, or vice versa, to create visual interest while maintaining professionalism.
Email newsletters often must fit a lot of content into a small space. If you struggle with this when designing your campaigns, we recommend the following fonts for email newsletters:
Your email marketing campaigns should use multiple fonts to separate (and distinguish) headlines from the body copy. The following fonts pair well for email marketing campaigns:
Gmail is the most popular email platform with 1.8 billion active users, so there’s a high likelihood that much of your audience uses it. Using one of these web-safe fonts optimized for Gmail (with alternative options in case recipients use other inboxes) is our recommendation::
Once you’ve chosen a font, it’s time to optimize your fonts for email campaigns. This includes using them appropriately, increasing the readability, and improving the customer experience.
Remember, the purpose of your font isn’t to entertain: it’s to get recipients to read your emails and take action. So keep things direct and on brand.
While it’s crucial to embrace creativity to create emails that strengthen your brand and engagement, prioritize readability, comprehension, and user experience.
One way to get your fonts (any font) to show up correctly in an email is to add them to embedded images. However, sending image-only emails is inadvisable. Here’s why from Litmus:
Subscribers might turn off images.
Visually impaired recipients might not be able to read the email.
Recipients might not be able to find your email later because your email text isn’t searchable.
Emails stuffed with images will load slowly (or not at all).
Responsive images that look good across every device are a challenge to create.
Dark mode can invert colors or otherwise distort images.
Copy edits become cumbersome. Instead of just fixing a misspelled word, you’ll have to edit, download, and re-upload a new image.
Choose and test alternative fonts for your email campaigns, especially if you use web fonts instead of email-safe fonts. Each email client has default alternative options, but these are flexible.
To avoid choosing the wrong alternative font, find fonts with similar heights, serifs (or sans-serifs), and letter spacing.
Font size can help or hinder your email campaign. If it’s too big, the necessary text won’t all fit. But if it’s too small, subscribers will struggle to read it.
Email on Acid recommends using a font size of 14 pixels or larger. However, some email marketers will increase the font size on mobile devices to 16 or 18 pixels to improve readability.
Test your emails before sending them to ensure a desirable look across clients, browsers, and devices (iOS and Android). However, instead of creating accounts on Gmail and Outlook and sending yourself test emails to review on desktop and mobile, use Twilio SendGrid’s email testing tool.
It’s integrated into our email builder tool to streamline the testing process during the design stage. SendGrid’s email testing will also analyze your email to find broken links, display issues, and even spam content.
Using too many fonts can create a distracting, disjointed experience. We recommend using a maximum of two fonts that work well together.
Consistency in your email is also crucial. For example, if you use one font in a headline and another in the body copy, don’t alternate between them halfway through the email.
Regardless of your font choice, consider line and letter spacing when designing your emails. Too little or too much spacing makes reading difficult.
We recommend using letter spacing for all uppercase text because capital letters can sometimes blend into each other. Also, consider adding letter spacing for smaller-than-usual text to ensure readability.
