The benefits of Dark Mode were analyzed in the early days of home computers with monochrome CRT (Cathode-ray tube) monitors that displayed greenish text on a black screen. Some old text editors also used white text on a black background. But the last few years have witnessed the evolution of Dark Mode like never before. iPhone Mail, iPad Mail, Gmail App ( both Android and iOS), Outlook App (both Android and iOS), Apple Mail, Outlook 2019 (both Mac OS and Windows), Outlook.com, and Hey.com are just a few among those who have integrated Dark Mode reading option.
The recent discovery of the benefits of using Dark Mode in different social media platforms has taken the digital world by storm. But the most beneficial factor for Dark Mode reading is the increasing rate of email deliverability. Emails that allow their users to set Dark Mode manually or their device can automatically detect the user’s preferred color scheme has seen massive success in its purpose. The most important factor to your email sender reputation and deliverability is the recipient engagement and Dark Mode has proved its success in this area. It is one of the most advanced mobile UI changes that impact the way your audience views your emails.
Dark Mode’s reversed color scheme of using light-colored text, typography, UI elements, and iconography on top of a dark background reduces the light emitted by screens. Thus, maintaining the contrasting colors essential for readability and relieving eye strain. It also allows users to adjust brightness and contrast when in low-light environments, helping them conserve battery power and extend the screen lifespan of devices.
With more and more users configuring their inbox in Dark Mode, if your email is not optimized for it, the inbox might try to automatically adjust your email to be compatible with it, thereby inverting colors to the point where email is no longer legible. Or your email might appear with its original light rendering, causing a poor user experience as against the Dark Mode UI. In return, the recipients might mark your message as spam or unsubscribe from your email list.
Here are a few tips to optimize your emails for Dark Mode, which will help you achieve email marketing success by driving opens, clicks, and forwards:
Select your colors right
The colors you use in the background, foreground, call-to-action-buttons, and fonts play a huge role in optimizing your emails for Dark Mode. It is important to implement a dark mode preferred color scheme to have better control over the design. Avoid using pure black and pure white for large text paragraphs since it elevates the eye strain.
Maintain a balanced contrast
You need to carefully select darker background colors and lighter foreground colors for a good readability contrast and accessibility standards. Highly saturated colors can be jarring and cause visual vibration, making you lose your subscribers.
Consider different email clients
Every email client renders email differently. Some email clients will show an email the same way regardless of whether the inbox is set on light or dark mode, while some render emails with a light background that can automatically switch around the color scheme to make the background dark, and some would still like to read it in Light Mode.
Use transparent images
A transparent image over a dark background-color will allow you to stay consistent with the old design. This also prevents your email’s images from becoming white boxes on a black background. If your logo is black and you are using a transparent image for your logo, you need to add a white outline to the black font to improve its readability and sometimes almost saving it from disappearing.
Use plain-text emails
A plain-text email will render light text on a dark background, making your email easy to read and to create. Thus, try using plain-text messages instead of a polished HTML-heavy email wherever possible.
Enable Dark Mode in email client user agents
Include <meta name=”color-scheme” content=”light dark”><meta name=”supported-color-schemes” content=”light dark”> in your <head> tag to ensure that Dark Mode is enabled in your email for subscribers that have Dark Mode turned on.
Test your email designs
Since different inbox providers render Dark Mode preferences in various ways, it is vital to ensure testing your emails in different inboxes across clients, devices, and browsers. Also, test your emails in both light and dark settings. The email legibility should also be checked for poor text font, background color combinations and confirm that your content isn’t disappearing in the dark.
Email rendering is a complicated process as an email that looks great in one client might look broken in another. Therefore it is ideal to optimize your emails for Dark Mode so that it doesn’t have any impact on how your HTML email is rendered and your email looks exactly the same, irrespective if the app is set to Light or Dark Mode. To boost the sender reputation, you need to keep with the trend and design Dark-Mode-friendly emails. Dark Mode’s capability to allow your UI to invert light colors to dark and dark colors to light to increase your email readability can bring remarkable success to your digital marketing campaigns and to your business growth.
