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Icons and Logos In Email- Navigating Their Importance And Ways To Maintain Image Quality

Importance of Icons & Logos in Email

Besides the obvious technical know-how, email marketing, at its core, is all about storytelling. And nothing strengthens the vitality of your narrative more than visual cues. Images, illustrations, and animations when added to your emails reduce their cognitive load, increasing their appeal by leaps and bounds in the process. However, these are not the only visual elements you can embed in your emails. What else, you ask? Well, icons and logos, of course (cue an aha moment)!

Don’t go by their size; they might be relatively smaller but are just as impactful when it comes to amping up the overall appeal of your email campaigns. That said, inserting icons and logos into your emails is a lot trickier than embedding images. Marketers often find themselves at their wits’ end while trying to maintain the image quality of these elements. But, fret not. In this article, we will be discussing a few techniques that will help you address these woes successfully.

But, before that, let us touch upon a few fundamental topics.

Why Are Email Icons So Important?

Typically used to provide greater context to headlines or text, email icons are essentially small images that either convey your brand’s ideals or illustrate salient points pertaining to your products or services. Though they are less detailed than pictures, more often than not, they can be used on their own without any additional text. Since their purpose is to provide your readers with a quick interpretation of your offerings, it is essential that their image remains quality sharp, and uncompromised across all devices.

Listed below are a few points that highlight the significance icons add to your emails.

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Here, icons have demarcated the whole email into three different sections. In the first section, they are used to denote the special features of their product, the “Down pillow”. In the second section, they alert the reader to the presence of their retail stores. And in the final section, the icons inform the reader about Casper’s social media handles. 

As you can see, icons make it very easy for you to split email blocks and make your message highly organized and accessible for your subscribers. 

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Email Icon Design Best Practices

Importance Of Logos In Email Header and Signature Branding

Logos are critical in the email header. Inserting your logo in the header helps readers to understand who they are receiving the email from the very instant they open it. Not just that, this practice also adds some much-needed coherence to your designs too. The points listed below highlight the significance logos hold in the email header.

As far as the email signature is concerned, again, a critical part of it is the logo. Let me explain why in the points below.

Best Practices To Follow While Inserting Icons And Logos Into Email

Making sure that your icons and logos are responsive and keeping their image quality uncompromised across all platforms is pretty challenging. However, with the following techniques at your disposal, you should be able to do so effortlessly.

1. Using Double Size PNGs

This is the most standard way of displaying icons and logos in emails. There are three underlying reasons behind this:

1. PNGs are compatible with all email clients.

2. One doesn’t need much additional code to embed them.

3. PNGs are lossless; you can compress image data without affecting the quality.

What’s the logic behind using double dimension PNGs, you ask? Well, that is just to ensure that the image quality of the icons and the logos remains sharp across all retina quality displays. So, what developers do is use double size PNGs and then force the specific size in the email code.

2. Using The SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) File Format

SVG graphics are made up of points and vectors, meaning they can be scaled as per the device requirement without sacrificing quality. SVGs don’t carry any image data. They simply contain the coordinates of paths necessary to generate a shape. As a result, their file sizes are relatively smaller than JPEGs and PNGs. Additionally, one need not lose sleep over the dimensions either for it can easily be managed in the code. Typically, it is the web designers who make use of SVGs for the icons and logos on their websites. Of late, however, many email designers have embraced this practice too. 

That said, SVGs are not supported unanimously by all email clients. While Apple Mail, iOS Mail, and Samsung Mail 9 provide good support, others such as Outlook (except Mac Outlook 2016), and Gmail offer no support across platforms. Hence, in the case of these clients, developers have to resort to using fallbacks in the form of PNGs. 

3. Using Sourceset

Quite prevalent among web folks, the sourceset technique refers to the practice of displaying different versions of a particular image corresponding to different resolutions. Here’s how sourceset works in web design:

As you can already figure out, sourceset is an excellent technique for making certain that your icons and logos remain responsive. By using sourceset, you no longer are required to use background image technique for scaling an image as per your user’s screen size.

But, much like in the case of SVGs, sourcesets in email enjoy support only from Apple Mail and iOS Mail. To make it work across the remaining clients, you would have to use an image tag with the srcset attribute, with the whole thing enveloped in a picture tag.

Wrapping It Up

Icons and logos add immense value to your emails. To provide a superlative user experience, it is critical you ensure their quality holds true across all platforms. We hope that the practices shared above help you take the first step in that direction. 

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