Which fonts and webfonts can you use in your newsletter?
Every email client and every device displays a newsletter in its own way. Because of this, a design or a special font may look different in the inbox than you intended. This also creates limitations when using background images, videos, forms and JavaScript.
Even with a custom template (Joe), a lot is possible, though not everything. Modern email clients such as Apple Mail and Thunderbird can handle almost as much as web browsers and cause few problems. Less is possible with older email clients, and Outlook in particular is known for its poor rendering. In addition, a large proportion of newsletters are read on mobile devices or online, for instance via Gmail. You can read how these differences work out in practice in why your newsletter differs from the preview.
Using safe fonts and webfonts
Many email clients can only display fonts that are installed on the recipient’s computer. Safe choices are Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia and Courier New. You can also use fonts like Calibri and Tahoma, provided you select a fallback option (for example Tahoma, and if that is not available: Arial).
In the Laposta editor, you can also choose from many special fonts: so-called webfonts. With a webfont, the design of the characters is retrieved via the internet, meaning the font does not need to be installed on the recipient’s computer. Google has a large collection of free fonts at fonts.google.com.
Almost every modern website uses webfonts nowadays, as this is no problem for web browsers. A number of email clients lag behind web browsers in terms of functionality and cannot display webfonts (yet). Instead, those clients show a font that is installed on the recipient’s computer and resembles it as closely as possible. Therefore, always choose a fallback from the safe list when using a webfont. That fallback determines what your newsletter will look like for those subscribers.
Webfont support per email client
It is estimated that about half of the leading email clients support webfonts. A significant proportion of your subscribers will therefore see the chosen font, while an equally large proportion will fall back on a web-safe alternative:
Because a few widely used clients do not support webfonts, not everyone will see your chosen font in their inbox. However, anyone who opens the web version of your newsletter will always see the webfont. Would you like to see what your font looks like for your subscribers? Send a testmail to email addresses across different email clients to compare the results.