Shopify Email Design and SMS Creative

An email can look perfect in a design file and fall apart in Outlook. What you're paying for is design that survives real inboxes, so vet for that first.

Judge sent emails, not mockups. Subscribe to the newsletters of two or three brands in their portfolio, or ask for test sends. Open them on your phone, in dark mode and in a desktop mail client. Polished mockups on a portfolio site tell you nothing about rendering.

Check whether they build in your platform. Some designers deliver flat images and leave your team to assemble them. Others build templates directly in your email platform, with editable modules and live text. The second costs more and saves hours every week afterwards.

Ask how they test. A serious designer previews every template across the main email clients and devices before handover, and can show you the results. If the answer is "we send it to ourselves", expect surprises in the first campaign.

Look at how much of the email is real text. Emails built as one large image are quick to design and bad for everyone else. They can't be read with images blocked, screen readers skip them, and spam filters tend to treat them with suspicion.

Confirm what you get at handover. Editable templates, a module library, documented fonts and colours, and instructions your team can follow. Design files alone aren't a deliverable if nobody on your side can turn them into emails.

Red flags. No questions about which platform you use. A portfolio of long, beautiful scroll-stoppers with no mobile versions shown. Per-email pricing with no system behind it, which means paying for every campaign indefinitely.

Email clients are the least predictable screens your brand appears on. Each one renders HTML its own way, and choices that look minor in a design file decide whether the email works.

Live text over sliced images. Put headlines, body copy and buttons in live text, and keep images for products and lifestyle shots. Live text shows with images blocked, scales on small screens, reads aloud for screen readers and takes seconds to edit next week.

Design for dark mode on purpose. Some clients invert colours fully, some partially, some not at all. A black logo on a transparent background disappears in a dark inbox. Use a logo with a light outline or solid backing, keep dark text out of images, and check every template in dark mode before it ships.

Keep emails short enough to arrive whole. Gmail clips long, heavy messages behind a "View entire message" link, often taking the footer and unsubscribe link with them. Lean code and fewer sections keep you clear.

Start from the phone. Single column, body text readable without zooming, buttons sized for a thumb, and the main offer visible before the first scroll.

Build a module library, not a folder of one-offs. A master template with a set of approved modules (hero, product grid, text block, review, banner, footer) lets your team assemble a campaign in an hour instead of briefing a new design every week. Most email platforms, including Shopify Messaging (formerly Shopify Email), let you save custom templates, so the system lives where the team already works.

Email design is priced by the template, by the flow or by the month. Typical ranges:

Most engagements cover some combination of these: