Some ecommerce brands send emails that look almost like landing pages, while others send emails that are mostly text and feel much closer to something a founder or team member might have written directly.
A founder introduction, a product launch, and a personalized recommendation email are doing different jobs, so there’s no reason they should all use the same amount of design.
The right format depends mainly on what the campaign needs to accomplish and how the brand naturally communicates.
Use text-heavy emails when the message itself is doing the work
Text-heavy emails make sense when the main value of the email is in what the customer needs to read or understand.
Good examples include:
- founder introduction emails
- brand and team updates
- brand stories
- educational emails
- personal announcements
- simple reminders
Imagine a founder introducing themselves to a new subscriber.
A heavily designed template with a large banner, several product blocks, and multiple calls to action can make the message feel like another promotional email.
A short note may work better because the email is supposed to feel personal.
The same applies when the brand needs to explain something. If you are telling customers why a product was created, explaining a new policy, or sharing a useful piece of education, the copy may be more important than the design around it.
Adobe’s email design guide makes a smaller version of the same point: even a text-based email can be well designed, as long as it stays clear and easy to read.
The important question is whether design helps the customer understand the message or simply adds more around it.
Use more design when the customer needs to see the product
For many ecommerce campaigns, the visual is part of the selling.
That is especially true for:
- product launches
- new collections
- product recommendations
- cross-sell campaigns
- gift guides
- category campaigns
- sales involving several products
If you are launching a new clothing collection, describing each item in paragraphs of text makes little sense.
The customer needs to see the products.
The same is true for a recommendation email. Product imagery, names, prices, and clear links make it much easier for someone to understand what is being recommended and decide whether they want to explore further.
In those cases, design is not there to make the email look impressive. It is helping the customer make the decision, and that is an important distinction.
A design-heavy email earns its complexity when the visuals make the message easier to understand or easier to shop.
Brand identity changes how far you should go in either direction
Campaign type is not the only thing that matters; the brand itself should influence how much design feels natural.
A brand built around simplicity may rarely need elaborate email layouts.
Its version of a product launch might be one strong image, a short explanation, and one clear CTA, and that may be completely right for the brand.
A fashion, beauty, furniture, food, or other visually led brand may naturally depend much more on imagery.
A brand can be visually rich in one campaign and extremely simple in another, as long as both still feel like the same brand. The goal is not to decide whether your brand is a “text email brand” or a “designed email brand.”
It is to decide how much design the message actually needs.
The same brand should use different formats for different campaigns
This is where the choice becomes much clearer. A brand could reasonably send all of the following:
| Campaign | Good starting format |
|---|---|
| Founder hello | Text-heavy |
| Brand story | Text-heavy or light design |
| Educational email | Text-heavy or hybrid |
| Product launch | Design-heavy |
| New collection | Design-heavy |
| Product recommendations | Design-heavy |
| Cross-sell | Design-heavy or hybrid |
| Simple reminder | Text-heavy |
| Founder announcement of a new product | Text-heavy or hybrid |
A founder announcement can still include a product image; a recommendation email does not need to contain fifteen separate design blocks; and a product launch can be visually strong without becoming cluttered.
There is often a large middle ground.
An email can have:
- one image and short copy
- a founder note followed by a product block
- a simple hero followed by a few recommendations
- clean typography with one CTA
- mostly text with one piece of visual proof
Test the format when both approaches could reasonably work
There are campaigns where either format could make sense.
A product launch is a good example.
One version might be highly visual and show the product immediately, while another might come from the founder, explain why the product exists, and use only one image. Both are legitimate approaches and both are worth testing.
But the useful question is not: Does text beat design for our brand?
That is too broad.
The better question is: For this type of campaign and this audience, which format helps the email do its job better?
- If the goal is product discovery, look at product clicks and purchases.
- If the goal is education, look at whether customers continue into the relevant product or category.
- If the goal is a launch, look beyond opens and ask which format actually generated stronger buying behavior.
An email should not be judged in isolation either. What matters is what happens next in the customer journey.
So, which works better: design-heavy or text-heavy ecommerce emails?
Use more text when the message itself is the reason to read. Use more design when seeing, comparing, or discovering the product helps the customer buy. Then adapt either approach to how your brand naturally communicates.
The best email format is not the one your brand uses most often; it’s the one that best fits the job of the campaign.
Nexie is a retention marketing agent for e-commerce brands. It reads your customer data across engagement, recency, category interest and lifetime value together, surfaces the audiences worth campaigning to, and builds those campaigns for your team to review and approve, inside the guardrails and marketing policies you set. See how it works →