How Dark Mode Affects Your Emails + Render Testing Tips

Further Reading

You can take a deeper dive into our article, Dark Mode Design & Code Basics for Email Marketers.

Video Transcript / Posted June 15th, 2022

Hi, this is Tim at Clyde Golden. And today I'm going to break down how the increased use of dark mode might be impacting your email engagement.

Today around 25% of your readers are likely using Dark Mode. This is a number that's quietly grown over the past three or four years. It's a big enough group to pay attention to. And so we all need to understand what dark mode may be doing to our emails and to take steps, to make sure that the campaigns you send render well, stay legible and remain on-brand.

If you don't, your engagement metrics are likely to suffer because in short, dark mode messes with your emails. When toggled on by a subscriber, dark mode is a reverse color scheme that turns light-colored backgrounds on the user's screen dark while flipping dark-colored text in UI elements, like buttons, into lighter colors. Many people use dark mode because it's relaxing to their eyes, especially after dark. Others just like how it looks.

I don't personally use Dark Mode. I tend to like dark type on a light background. So I didn't immediately notice the impact. So if you're anything like me, you should go to your own device and flip on dark mode to see what it looks like in your particular inbox. Sometimes it looks great and sometimes, well, it's really awkward.

Here's a great example. Check out what happens to this Home Depot email when you toggle on dark mode. Watch the live text over the background image. It's suddenly unreadable. This is preventable. Now up to about a year ago, we didn't have much control over how our emails would appear in dark mode. We just had to deal with whatever an email client decided to do to our emails, but that has changed and certain inboxes now allow us to target specific elements within an email. In an ideal world, all email clients would behave in a predictable way, letting you control how your email renders in both light and dark mode, but it's not an ideal world and that's not the case.

So it's worth knowing the three ways that email clients currently interpret dark mode. First, several inboxes. Don't change anything about your email when your reader has turned on dark mode, that's a group that has historically included apple mail. Second, some email clients perform what's called an automated color inversion, where they decide what colors and changes get made to your email in dark mode. Sometimes the effect is really charming, but as we've seen before, not always. Third and finally, there are email clients that support custom dark mode code, and they let you specify using HTML, meta tags and CSS targeting exactly how you want your email to look in both dark mode and light mode. We have an article on our site that delves further into several custom code approaches that let you provide an optimal dark mode experience by specifying the alternative colors or files to use in dark mode for brands-sensitive elements like backgrounds, buttons, logos, social icons, and type.

Our article also discusses fallback design steps that you should take. These steps are just as important as they protect your email in scenarios where the email client does not recognize your custom code and instead performs an automated color inversion. One thing to add, it can take several attempts to get your color palette and other elements just right within dark mode. So here at the agency, we always run a series of render tests before finalizing a dark mode style guide for any of our client's email module libraries.

Here's how to do that. Start your next email design template process by building a simple email containing your brand's full color palette, logos and iconography. All you need in there are live HTML blocks of the brand colors with their hex codes on them for reference as well as all of the logos and icons you plan on using. Run this basic email through a render testing service like Litmus or Email On Acid, where you can see how your email will render across all the inboxes.

When you do this, you can see what automatic color inversions are being applied to your brand's colors. This can help you decide which colors and color combinations to avoid entirely when you design your new email and which ones to use cautiously. Because remember inboxes are always changing the rules on email marketers. There's a chance that your custom dark mode code may not always work. So you need to be designing with colors and combinations that will work in all scenarios.

If you like this type of content, you can take a deeper dive into our article, Dark Mode Design & Code Basics for Email Marketers, which is on our website at clydegolden.com. Clyde Golden is a world class email marketing agency. We're here to help you create thoughtful and relevant content that leads your prospects through the buyer journey and onto a long lasting relationship with your brand.

Thanks again for watching and as always let us know how we can help.

Further Reading