What font should you use for your email?

Typography is one of the most important aspects of your brand.

The fonts you choose can give your messaging an extra layer of personality and style. But, unfortunately, email didn't get the memo. 

To understand why, we need to talk about web safe fonts.

What are web safe fonts?

Web safe fonts are fonts that almost all computers (and therefore users) have pre-installed.

They're stored in your local font directory. So when an email arrives using a web safe font, your email client can quickly pull it in and display the text exactly how it was designed.

The five main web safe fonts are:

• Helvetica
• Georgia
• Arial
• Verdana
• Times New Roman

Now, obviously, your brand can't stand out by using the same five fonts as everyone else. That's where web fonts come in.

What are web fonts?

Web fonts are fonts that live on a server, the most popular of which are Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts.

Unlike web safe fonts, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to web fonts. So you can really stand out from the crowd in your users' inboxes.

But there's a catch: not all email clients can pull these fonts from their servers, which is where fallback fonts come in.

What are fallback fonts?

A fallback font is the web safe font you want to use if the web font can't be displayed in the user's email client.

This appears in the email's code as a priority list, for example: font-family: 'Roboto', Verdana, sans-serif;

In this scenario, Roboto (a web font) is the preferred choice and Verdana (a web safe font) is the backup. And in the very unlikely case that neither of those is available, the email client will use it's default sans-serif font.

Copilot.cx's email creator automatically gives you a list of fonts that work in most email clients. And whichever font you choose, our system will add the best-matching fallback font automatically.