How To Design and Build An Email In Klaviyo

Picture this: You put on your thinking cap, came up with a brilliant email concept, and wrote copy that you know is going to be an absolute hit with your target audience – now you just need to figure out how to bring your email to life so that you can hit send and start raking in revenue. 

Luckily, you’re in the right place! Keep reading for a step-by-step walkthrough on how to design an email and then build it in one of the most popular Email Service Providers (ESPs) for eCommerce businesses, Klaviyo. 

Email Design Basics: How To Create A Visually Appealing Email

Step 1: Nail Your Branding 

Before you start designing, it's important to establish strong design guidelines for your brand. This includes your logo, fonts, color palettes, icons, and other recurring graphic elements. When creating your brand guidelines, be sure to consider your target audience. For instance, bright colors and cartoon-like imagery may resonate well with child-centric brands, while companies appealing to an upscale adult audience may find more success opting for clean, minimalistic graphics. 

Step 2: Choose A Design Software

Once you’ve finalized your brand’s design guidelines, the next step is to select a design software. While there are several options that can get the job done, our team favors Figma due to its intuitive interface and exceptional collaboration capabilities. 

Step 3: Build The Skeleton Of Your Email 

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for – now that you’ve perfected your branding and selected a graphic design software, you can finally start designing your email. Begin by creating a basic layout tailored to your email’s structure. The elements to map out include the header, hero image, email body, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and footer. In Figma, you can use grids to help align and organize big paragraphs to create a dynamic flow. The most commonly used formats for arranging blocks of text are the zig-zag and inverted pyramid patterns. 

Step 4: Get Creative 

This is the fun part. Now that you have your email’s skeleton laid out, it’s time to get creative and fill in the blanks. Play with your brand’s chosen fonts and colors to create an eye-catching email that emphasizes the most important information. Use a gif or strong static image to create an engaging hero area, consider colored buttons so that your CTAs pop, and balance white space to increase readability and prevent readers from feeling visually overwhelmed.  

Step 5: Optimize The Email Design For Mobile and Dark Mode 

The last step in the design process is to optimize your newly created email for mobile and dark mode. When it comes to mobile, you want to make sure that the text and visuals will be easily readable on smaller devices, and that CTA buttons are big enough for recipients to tap on while using their smartphones. When optimizing for dark mode, it’s vital to consider how colors – especially blacks and whites – will transpose when readers switch between dark mode and light mode on their devices. You may need to add an outline or shadow to elements like icons or logos to ensure they remain visible. 

Email Implementation Basics: How To Build An Email In Klaviyo

Step 1: Export The Needed Components From Figma 

Ideally, emails will contain a combination of text blocks, live feeds, and images. Carefully examine your email design to determine which elements will be text-based, which will involve the use of live product feeds, and which visuals – such as logos, pictures, and certain buttons – will need to be exported individually. Once you’ve identified which elements will be built directly in Klaviyo and which will need to be imported into it, you can export the needed visuals from Figma. A best practice is to export them at 2x their natural size to ensure image clarity. 

Step 2: Create A Campaign In Klaviyo 

When building a campaign in Klaviyo you have two main options: you can either start from scratch or you can duplicate an existing campaign and make the relevant updates. Duplicating a previously created email may save you time if your email contains any evergreen elements – like a header and footer – whose visuals and links will remain the same. 

Step 3: Input Your Audience, Subject Line, And Preview Text  

Before you can build a new email or alter the design of a duplicated email in Klaviyo, you’ll need to input the required send information. This involves selecting which lists and segments should be included and excluded, as well as entering your desired subject line and preview text. 

Step 4: Configure The Defaults For Your Email 

The next step in building your email or template is to assign its defaults. This includes choosing the background color or image for the content, as well as selecting body and heading fonts. If you don’t see your brand’s desired fonts in Klaviyo you will need to import them into the system. Pro tip: Be sure to select and assign fallback fonts that are both web-safe and email-safe. 

Step 5: Build Each Section Of The Email 

Using Klaviyo’s drag-and-drop interface, you can now build (or edit, if you duplicated a previous campaign) your email. Add or replace images, text, dynamic product feeds, and buttons until the email in Klaviyo matches the mockup you created in Figma. Be sure to link a valid URL to any images or hyperlinked text areas. 

Step 6: Optimize For Mobile 

We know what you’re thinking: Didn’t we do this already? Not quite! Just like you optimized your email design for mobile in Figma, you now need to do the same in Klaviyo. While you may be tempted to skip this step, we assure you it’s well worth the effort. After all, over 40% of email views come from mobile phones. 

To optimize your email for mobile, you’ll need to switch to the mobile view in Klaviyo’s email builder. Check the email in its entirety to see if any adjustments are needed. Potential changes can include updating padding and margin values, or stacking blocks that were previously horizontal to display vertically for ease of viewing on a smaller screen.

 Step 7: Test The Email

You’re almost at the finish line! The email has been built and now it just needs to be tested to ensure that your masterpiece displays as it should across different devices and platforms. We recommend a two-part approach when it comes to email testing.

First, send a test email to your own inbox. When testing the email, you’ll want to ensure that it renders correctly on both your desktop and mobile phone, as well as in both light mode and dark mode on your smartphone. You should also click all areas that contain links to confirm that you are directed accordingly to a live (and relevant) URL. 

Since it’s impossible to personally test an email on every type of device, we then recommend utilizing a tool such as Email on Acid or Litmus to see how the email displays across other smartphones, tablets, and email clients. 

Thoroughly testing your email before sending it allows you to identify and troubleshoot any potential issues and ensure that your recipients have a smooth and enjoyable experience when interacting with your email. 

Step 8: Deploy The Email  

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’ve designed, built, and tested an email – now all that’s left to do is send it!  Klaviyo allows you to either schedule a campaign for a future date and time or send it immediately. When opting to schedule an email, you can select for your segment to receive the email simultaneously, have the email sent to audience members gradually, or even have Klaviyo’s AI determine the ideal send time and deploy it accordingly. Remember that send time is a major component of email marketing strategy, so choose wisely! 

Conclusion 

As you can see, a lot of time, effort, and expertise goes into designing, building, and deploying a successful eCommerce email. Thankfully, your business doesn’t have to do it all alone. Book a free discovery call with our email experts today to learn how we can help you elevate your marketing strategy and maximize your ROI.