Our Darktober series covers quick-wins and deep dives into how you can make your email designs look great in dark mode, the benefits, and the do’s and don’ts! We’re starting off the series with the age old question - Is dark mode worth it?

“Only 2% of my subscribers use dark mode” 

If you know your audience and have figures on how many of your recipients are using dark mode, this is a great place to start a discussion on whether or not you need to think about supporting it. Depending on the size of your audience, 2% could be a large proportion - a database with 1 million recipients is 20,000 email subscribers. Still a large chunk! 

There are varying levels of support you can implement for dark mode. The least you can do is make sure your email is legible - and this can be as little as swapping some colors and amending the way you import images into your campaigns. The highest level would be designing a bespoke dark mode version of your email, if you do only have 2% of users in dark mode, maybe this isn’t worth the investment right now.

Supporting Dark Mode

Template set-up

Hopefully you are lucky enough to have an Email design system, modules, template shells and components or similar that you create your emails from. Making sure elements that are in every campaign such as company logos, social media icons or static modules that are used repeatedly without modification can be legible in dark mode enabled clients. 

For example below - ensuring any icons or dark skinny transparent images are set up to look good if the background color changes to a dark black or grey:

If all of your images work on the principle that the background color is provided by the HTML or CSS - it will naturally change within email clients:

With no changes to the code and just an adjustment in how you import and set up images you can make your email more legible and supported across email clients.

Choosing colours

Each email client has its own algorithm for inverting or changing the colours you set in your campaigns. If you have access to an email testing platform, such as Litmus or Email on Acid - you can add your colors into a simple HTML table and test them out, or even send them to your live devices with dark mode enabled.

Bespoke designs

If your subscriber base is relatively low percentage of dark mode users, balancing the cost of a bespoke dark mode design where budgets and resources are stretched already - it may not be worth it.

So - Is it worth it?

Emails that render nicely and show cohesion with your brand across all channels has been proven to increase ROI, also it is proven that when your email is not legible or renders badly that it costs you. Small changes in design and campaign creation can have a big impact.

At Action Rocket we can help you figure out how many of your subscribers are using dark mode before taking the plunge on bespoke or lengthy dark mode support - we think you should have all the facts first before spending your budget on dark mode. Throughout Darktober and into 2021 our aim is to get every brand dark mode ready. We are helping brands review how dark mode affects them from a quick review, to in depth audits. As well as supporting updating your email design systems and bespoke templates, we have you covered. Just email hello@actionrocket.co and we will be in touch.

Pro tip: if you are an email coder - don’t implement any meta tags, media queries or dark mode hacks until you have to. Email clients will render your emails with inversion or leave them alone (Apple Mail/iOS) if you do nothing, and this could be the safest option! But we have a bunch of blog posts to help you if you need to code that perfect dark mode email design 🤓