Why Responsive Email Templates Fail: How to Make Them Work

Likely, you already know you need to deliver responsive, mobile-friendly email designs on a regular basis if you want to get subscribers to engage with your campaigns. Hence, they make a purchase, share your products with their connections, and post positive attitudes toward your brand based on this engagement. As you can see below, this gives email marketing its massive ROI (return on investment). Even if you didn’t know that 71.5% of consumers check their email most often on a mobile device, you should realize that responsive design is crucial for most marketing aspects in the modern world. But, using responsive email templates frequently fails to deliver the results you need.

Of course, while smartphones are the primary devices used to check emails, we do open email on other devices throughout the day. Mobile phones are often used upon waking up, while waiting for something to happen, and on our way to work (please only do this when you’re not driving). Laptops and PCs are commonly used while at work. Mobile phones are used again while chilling on the couch at night. In fact, the term connected consumer was introduced to reflect today’s always-connected users who are married to multiple devices, often at the same time.

When you think your subscribers are engaging with your emails in different environments like you, you immediately feel the need to offer them the ideal email reading experience, no matter the device used to open it. That’s when you might think about creating responsive email templates. Despite their necessity, designing and coding emails that respond well to different screen sizes is still the most significant email design and development challenge for many brands.

If you are facing this issue, this blog will be a timely read for you. Learn about the most common pitfalls encountered while building responsive email design templates and how you can overcome them.

Let’s dive in!

5 most common challenges of responsive email design templates

When we talk about how to make email templates responsive, it means designing your email templates in a way that allows you to display your email content across any device without distorting the content. With responsive design, your email looks the same on a desktop, mobile phone, laptop, or tablet. Subscribers find it easy to interact and engage with email campaigns that look great regardless of device. No squinting, pinching, or zooming in. Naturally, responsive email templates increase your email engagement and decrease the unsubscribe rate.

Consider the fact that users might open an email message several times, using different devices at different times based on what’s most convenient at the time for their purposes. Hence, I might open an email on my phone while I’m out of my office, then open it again from my computer if I want to send a detailed reply or attach a file from my computer. I might open a message on my computer and then send the response from my phone so I can include a photo or phone number stored on that device.

Given the perpetual rise of mobile users, making email templates responsive is a non-negotiable practice. You never know when your next prospect will open an email inbox on their mobile device. Plus, In 2025, the global number of mobile users is projected to reach 7.49 billion. That’s more than the number of unopened promotional emails sitting in your inbox right now.  Okay, maybe not—but you get the point.

Let’s say—

Your Black Friday Offer email is coded to be a responsive email design. Some subscribers see featured products in a three-column design when the email is opened on the desktop. Other holiday shoppers are on the go and browsing products on their mobiles (see a single-column layout).

Image Source: Beefree

The point of responsive design is that both emails are equally easy to scroll and navigate. CTAs are both clickable and tappable. There is no readability issue, and the images take forever to load. The result is a successful email campaign that pulls in more traffic, engagement, and conversions.

Sounds like a fairytale? It does.

But to make this happen, you have to know how to code so that you can build responsive HTML email designs that render perfectly everywhere. Or you could grab pre-built responsive email templates that are coded beforehand and can be customized using a drag-and-drop builder. However, building an email design for a desktop and re-coding it to look right on various mobile devices requires a lot of development work. And oh, will you encounter some roadblocks along the way. What are the issues you face while designing responsive email templates?

Let’s find out.

Inconsistent rendering across email clients

One of the most frustrating parts of designing responsive email templates is the fact that they render differently for different email clients. Popular clients like Apple Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook do not fully support HTML and CSS. Because each one of them renders code differently, your email layouts may not adapt well across platforms.

The complexity of HTML and CSS for emails

As we said earlier, the level of support for each type of HTML and CSS feature varies widely across email inboxes and apps. Most significant in this camp is the Gmail app. It supports media queries for Gmail accounts. However, when it comes to emails from another service, media queries are not supported. Also, Outlook for Windows only supports a subset of CSS.

Such scenarios make developing responsive HTML email template designs a bit more tricky than their unresponsive counterparts.

Tricky content arrangement

Designing email templates for both large and small screens can put even the finest developer in a great dilemma. You’ve got to arrange images, text, and CTAs to work on large and tiny screens.

Shrinking fonts makes email copy unreadable without constant zooming. Expanding text into a legible size leads to excessive scrolling. Matters get even trickier when you add multiple links and CTAs into the mix.

Endless design considerations

Even if you use a reasonably simple design while designing a responsive email template, the list of design variables is plenty. Images, color contrast, and fonts shift across the devices and screen sizes. Brightness settings, touch interactions, and even bandwidth can make your painstakingly designed emails look fabulous on one screen and questionable on another.

Time-consuming development and testing

Coding, designing, and testing a responsive email template is a time- and resource-intensive process. This should come as no surprise, given the ton of variables that impact how your responsive email template behaves.

Each email must be checked across multiple platforms and devices to ensure consistency. Monitoring performance is equally arduous. You need to collect data points and analyze KPIs across different devices.

How do we fix these challenges of responsive email template design

• Take a mobile-first approach to email production. On desktop-first email coding, you often have to override many styles in your media queries. Meanwhile, in a mobile-first approach, most mobile styles naturally carry over to the desktop. So, if media queries fail, the email defaults to mobile styles. While the elements may look smaller on a desktop, the email layout remains unaffected.

That’s what Megan Boshuyzen, Sr. Email Developer at Sinch Mailjet, also suggests:

Image Source: Mailjet

• Use media queries. They are essential for responsive email design. They help you to apply CSS styles based on screen size or device type. So that email layouts adapt seamlessly.

As in, media queries can rearrange columns, resize text, or adjust images for smaller screens. This guarantees a consistent viewing experience for your subscribers, regardless of the device.

• Many email clients strip external CSS properties or block certain styles for security reasons. To avoid this, always use inline CSS. It means applying styles directly within HTML tags. This ensures that your email displays correctly.

But keep in mind that inline CSS can increase the HTML file size, especially for complex templates. So, minify your code to keep your responsive emails lightweight.

• Use fallbacks and conditional codes to counter compatibility issues and improve the user experience. For instance, use font stacks with fallback fonts to ensure text displays appropriately if the preferred font is unavailable. For images, use image fallbacks—especially for Outlook, which doesn’t support GIFs.

This way, your email looks good even when specific clients don’t support certain features.

• A no-brainer. Preview and test your responsive email templates across multiple environments and devices.

Wrapping up

If you’ve already introduced responsive email templates to your campaigns, you’ve probably observed a boost in your email marketing metrics. If not, keep the above strategies in mind to tackle the common challenges, and you will be off to deliver a more engaging and user-friendly email experience for your subscribers.

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