

If you’re using Google Fonts, we’ll get there in a minute. You should be able to get this from the service providing your fonts, or from your IT team if they’re being self-hosted. To use web fonts in email, as in web pages, you’ll need a URL that references the font file(s) that you want to use. How do we use them? Get the font file’s URL It may also be worth looking at any metrics you have on which email clients your recipients are using to see if it’s worth the effort of implementation. Yes, but only if you're not using a Microsoft email addressįor those email clients that are listed as “no” above, we’ll discuss any known issues and/or possible workarounds for them a little later. Only certain email clients can support web fonts, and some of the ones that don’t may surprise you (although if you’ve done email marketing for any length of time, some of them won’t).

And some licenses differentiate between use in web pages versus use in emails, so be sure to check. In the case of emails, every time an email is opened counts as a page view, so if you have an email going out to a million contacts, that’s the potential for a million page views in one shot. Something to keep in mind regarding licenses: it’s very important to note that not all font licenses include online usage in their agreements, and those that do often have a certain limit on the amount of page views.
WEBFONT IN EMAIL LICENSE
You can also host the font files on your own servers if you have the license to do so. Most commonly, web fonts are hosted on a commercial service and loaded into the asset the most common are Google Fonts (free) and Adobe Fonts (not free) there are other font services available as well.
WEBFONT IN EMAIL HOW TO
But before we open that can of worms, let’s first discuss how to use them in the first place. The main sticking point is going to be what email clients your recipients are using. Do web fonts work in email?Īs with so many questions in Marketing, it depends. Okay, but email development is still stuck in the ‘90s, at best. More importantly, web fonts allow your branding to carry over without having to rely on images, which may be turned off by default on the recipient’s email client, and cause potential accessibility issues. So how do you make your emails stand out more in the inbox? The use of different fonts can help differentiate your emails from the rest just as much as an eye-catching layout. For serif fonts, you’re going to see Times New Roman most often not only is it widely used from a design standpoint, but it’s also most frequently used as a default for when other fonts fail to load (which is something we’ll discuss later). If it’s not Arial, it’s Verdana or Tahoma. Arial is the most widely used font online* anywhere you look, you’re likely to see it, including email. You’ll notice, if you look at enough emails, that they all start to look the same, at least from a typographical point of view. That’s a decent list, but it doesn’t allow for much differentiation. When you hear “web-safe fonts”, that’s what the term is referring to.

For a very long time, emails have been limited to the fonts that are installed by default on user’s computers. Web-Safe Fontsīefore we get into the “how”, let’s first discuss the “why”. “They’re the web fonts we’ve adopted as part of our new branding”, they respond, “and it’s critical they are used in our upcoming launch.”

You send a note back, asking where these fonts came from. You review the layout and read through the specifications and notice that they’re calling for the use of some… unusual fonts that you haven’t seen before. Then, a ticket from the Creative Department shows up in your inbox they have a flashy new email design to be built out to go along with your latest rebranding efforts. You know how it goes you’re in the flow, cranking out code.
