Why desktop-only emails fail on mobile

POST 6/7 👉2025: Why Design Is Now a Deliverability Signal—Not Just a Branding Element. Good design doesn’t just get attention. It gets delivered — to the right part of the inbox. Let’s get one thing clear: Promotions is inbox. Updates is inbox. What matters in 2025 is avoiding spam, not forcing Primary. If your email is expected, renders cleanly, loads fast, and respects UX principles, you're in the right place. Too many ecommerce marketers still underestimate how much design affects deliverability. It's no longer just about what looks good. Design performance is now tied to how your domain is scored by Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook. Here’s how. Mobile-first rendering: Over 74% of ecommerce opens now happen on mobile. If your layout breaks or loads slowly, you're triggering behavior Gmail sees as friction — not engagement. Load speed and responsiveness: Gmail and Apple Mail monitor how quickly your message displays and how long the user interacts. Heavy layouts or large imagery can cause quick exits, reducing future inbox trust. Dark mode compatibility: Unreadable emails in dark mode break the experience. Invisible text or poor color contrast are quietly penalized. Accessibility: Skipping alt text, using tiny fonts, or low-contrast layouts may technically deliver your message — but visually fail for many. Those silent exits hurt engagement scoring. Real-world case: A brand redesigned its templates with GIFs, AMP, and rich visuals. On desktop? Beautiful. On Gmail mobile? Broken. Result: click rates dropped, complaint rates rose, and inboxing fell. They reverted to fluid layouts, lighter assets, and simpler code. Engagement and delivery recovered within 2 sends. Email design checklist for 2025: 1. Keep size under 100KB 2. Use system fonts 3. Code mobile-first, not retrofitted 4. Preview in both dark/light modes on Gmail and Apple Mail 5. Always use alt text 6. Avoid base64 images and fixed-width tables 7. Load-test AMP and interactive elements 8. Match design tone with your website 9. Ensure contrast and readability pass basic checks Takeaway: Every second of lag is a penalty. Every failed render hurts trust. Gmail is evaluating design behaviors—not beauty. Design is no longer just branding. It's inbox access. #email #emailmarketing

The Mobile-Desktop Divide Killing Your ROI Just audited an account where mobile traffic was 65% of clicks but only 15% of conversions. The culprit? A complete disconnect between mobile user experience and desktop design. Here's what was happening: 🎯 Mobile users faced tiny, unclickable buttons 🎯 Forms required pinch-zooming to complete 🎯 Load times exceeded 8 seconds on mobile networks 🎯 Critical information was hidden in desktop-only elements For service businesses, this is revenue walking out the door. Your potential customers are on their phones, ready to contact you—but can't. For one home services client, we implemented: 🟢 Mobile-first landing page design 🟢 Click-to-call buttons prominently displayed 🟢 Forms reduced to essential fields only 🟢 Location-based personalization for mobile users The results? Mobile conversion rates increased from 1.7% to 6.9% in just 30 days. When was the last time you actually tried converting on your own website using a smartphone? #MobileOptimization #UserExperience #ConversionRateOptimization

Most emails don’t need more design flair. They need better fundamentals. I’ve seen brands obsess over colors, fonts, illustrations… Meanwhile, their emails look broken on mobile, bury the CTA, and feel like a puzzle to navigate. Truth is: High-performing email design is boring, strategically boring. It’s clean. It’s conversion-first. And it works. After designing thousands of emails, here are the 10 non-negotiable design rules we stick to: 1. Text first. 16–18px body. 22–28px headers. No one reads tiny text. 2. The Above-the-fold section is sacred. Clear headline. Supporting line. Visual. CTA. In <3 seconds. 3. Dark mode is not optional. Test your layout, or use graphics that won’t break. 4. Your CTA = Your paycheck. Bold. Contrasting. Thumb-tap friendly. 5. Use a single-column layout. Stacks beautifully on mobile and doesn’t overwhelm. 6. No nav bars at the top. Fewer distractions = more clicks. 7. Design mobile-first. 60%+ of people will never see the desktop version. 8. White space is your best friend. Clarity converts. Clutter kills. Make sure you use enough white space in your designs. 9. Brand consistency matters. But conversion always comes first. 10. Reuse what works. Build templates around winning layouts. Iterate. Scale. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time. Just design like someone who respects your reader’s time (and thumbs).

Desktop email is NOT the same as mobile email. Most brands forget to optimize and adjust their emails for mobile devices—and it ruins their design. What happens? 👉 Products stack awkwardly, breaking the layout. 👉 Images and text become misaligned. 👉 The email looks messy, causing customers to bounce instead of buy. Here’s an email from LARQ—the desktop version looks perfect, but on mobile, the same products stack incorrectly, making the email look awful. Since 70%+ of emails are opened on mobile, ignoring this is a huge mistake. How to fix it? ✔️ Test every email on both desktop and mobile before sending. ✔️ Turn off mobile stacking. ✔️ Check for any errors and padding issues missed in the desktop version. A clean, easy-to-read email = higher conversions.

We’ve worked with hundreds of Shopify brands on their emails and this is one mistake we see time and time again…. A lot of DTC brands are still sending image-only emails. Looks cool, but hurts performance. Here’s why you need to balance text + images in your emails (and what happens if you don’t): 1) Image-only emails tank your deliverability Gmail and Outlook flag image-heavy emails as promo or spam. If your emails aren’t getting opened, it’s probably not your subject line—it’s your structure. 2) They take forever to load You’ve got 3 seconds before someone bounces. If your giant image doesn't load (or your customer is on bad Wi-Fi), they’re gone. Meanwhile text loads instantly. 3) No text = no context If someone can’t see the image, they miss the entire message. Including real text ensures your CTA, offer, and product details still get across. 4) You’re killing your mobile experience Image-only emails break on mobile all the time, text gets too small to read. Responsive text and buttons help create a frictionless experience—especially for people scrolling with one hand. 5) Emails need to sell, not just look pretty Beautiful design matters. But conversion matters more. A clean mix of images + copy consistently outperforms pretty, image-only emails in every campaign we run. Luckily once there’s a balance of image and text in emails, it boosts deliverability, open rates, clicks, and revenue across the board. Curious to hear from other brands—how are you structuring your emails right now? Let me know in the comments. PS. This image is me pleading to the GMail gods to let these emails get delivered lol.

Our desktops betrayed our mobile users. We’ve preached "mobile-first" since 2015. A mantra. Yet, we build where we sit. Behind big screens. The dangerous assumption: it'll translate. Then reality hits: 80% of traffic, conversions for some clients are mobile. Desktop? A ghost town by comparison. And we *still* design like it’s the main event. That $60K lesson wasn't just a checklist miss. It was deeper. Desktop looked flawless. Client ecstatic. Mobile, revealed at their exec presentation, was a train wreck. Overlapping text. Disappearing CTAs. Broken forms. "Typical UX/UI standard..." they said. Fair. Brutal. The most painful part? We *knew* better. Our SOPs said "mobile-first." But our habits, our tools, our review cycles defaulted to desktop. It's an industry-wide frustration, even with smart teams at solid brands. This isn't just about us. It's about many of us. We talk mobile, then retreat to our 27-inch views. The SOPs for true mobile-centric design often feel… optional. It's not a skill gap. It's a habit gap. A workflow that hasn't caught up with years of mobile dominance. The future isn't adapting desktop to mobile. It's building for mobile as the primary reality. And treating desktop as the graceful adaptation. How do you force your team's actual workflow to be mobile-native?

One of the biggest mistakes dispensaries make with email marketing? Well lets just say around 70-80% of emails are viewed on phones and 100% of emails are designed on desktop. *The mistake is not designing for Mobile viewing* - text is too small - graphics out of proportion - small buttons - overall layout doesn’t flow 👉 Solve it with these tips: ➤ ALWAYS preview the design on the mobile-view in the email builder and send yourself a test email to check it out on your phone. ➤ Adjust the text sizing so it’s comfortable to read, headlines are 2-3x larger than paragraph text, color of the text contrasts against the background color or image it’s on top of. ➤ Don’t jam too many graphics in one view — a “view” is how the person sees the entire screen at once and how many elements are presented to them. Try to show them 1-3 max… not 5+ sections or else it’s overwhelming. Give them a smaller amount to focus on at a time. ➤ Make your buttons larger and enticing to click on. Don’t turn it into a game of thumb accuracy. Pro Tip: give every image a link. ➤ Create a “Scroll Flow” What’s that? It’s a Tact Firm term we have for our mobile layouts. I define it as: a deliberate encouragement to scroll further into the content. Always tease the next section so the user is encouraged to scroll down, creating downward movement. Overlap sections. Use arrows or other directional graphics 👇 We see these mistakes ALL THE TIME when we conduct our Free Retention Audits for dispensaries.

Your email design is killing mobile conversions. 70% of emails are opened on mobile. Yet I still see tons of brands design primarily for desktop. Mobile-first rules: - Single column layout - Large, tappable buttons - Minimal text - Clear layout - Fast loading images Test every email on your phone before sending. Even better check on light and dark mode! If it's hard to read or click, fix it. Mobile experience = revenue. Desktop is secondary.

Do you know where people are opening your emails? A lot of the emails that I see are specifically designed for desktops… When in reality, over 75% of consumers say they check their emails most often on mobile devices. And if your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, then you could be in trouble. There’s nothing worse than an email where: – The formatting is all over the place – Subject and preview lines are snipped in half – It’s jammed to the brim with long paragraphs that look like a research paper These types of emails are nightmares for businesses. They drop engagement, lose your customers’ trust, and actually push people away from your brand… So when you’re writing your next email, please make sure that it’s mobile-friendly!