And how you can create such beauty without a designer

Email design isn't just about looking pretty. Properly placed emphasis, color palette, and typography all guide the reader's attention and even improve your business metrics.

The importance of design becomes obvious when you remember how people read emails: quickly and casually. The design needs to grab the subscriber's attention from the very first banner and convince them to keep scrolling, so they notice the offer and take the target action.

In this article, we're sharing HTML email templates that caught our attention and do a great job of driving sales.

Why do you need templates?

Responsive HTML templates ensure that all users see your campaign the same way, regardless of the device they open it on.

Ready-made templates let you create campaigns faster: spend less time on design and building a logical structure, and quickly make necessary changes.

Plus, basic HTML knowledge is enough to build an email from a template. Just download a suitable sample and fill it with your own content.

Below, we want to share our personal top picks for sales email templates. You can download and use them as a ready-made tool to boost your company's capabilities.

Mardi Gras email template for «Grand Restaurant» by Stripo

First, about the campaign itself. The first emphasis is on appetizing dishes, highlighted by a minimalist design. The second is on brand style. It's less obvious, but it also does its job well: it shapes the venue's image in the recipient's mind and gives a small «spoiler» of the atmosphere they can expect inside.

The template lets you create a sales-driving campaign with uniquely shaped buttons, clickable banners, and responsive markup needed to make sure your email displays correctly on all screens.

[Download for free and use it]

«Sweet Treats» by Unisender

A design that immediately draws attention to what matters most: the event, the offer, the target action.

Prominent buttons make the CTA effect more obvious. Using this template, you'll highlight the products you need and emphasize the offer, since there's nothing extraneous in it. Just insert your text, products, links, and write the footer — everything else is basically ready already!

[Available for free download]

«Focus» template

Perfect for an online store or showroom. This template helps focus users' attention on products and their details.

Prominent buttons, minimalist design, clean, modern typography. An additional large banner before the footer lets you highlight a sale, offer, or product category.

Pay attention to the product descriptions: here you can make the font size larger and the description itself shorter. This makes it easier for subscribers to read the email.

[If you like it, download it here for free]

«You Should Hurry» by Unisender

The main advantage is the built-in, customizable countdown timer. A timer is a simple, effective tool that nudges the reader to hurry up and, most importantly, makes it easy to remember how many days the discount is still valid. It works much better than a simple «Hurry up» in the text.

Use this template to tell customers about discounts or a sale, and be sure to showcase your best items — the layout has room for four products. You can also place entire categories there, or add extra blocks: just copy and paste the product elements.

Round it out with delivery information, contact details, and a CTA.

«Unrivaled Black Friday» by Stripo

A great template with an unusual structure. Here you can get a bit more creative with the text and communicate important information in detail right on the banner.

This email template is convenient to use for a campaign that highlights product USPs in detail, or to explain to users how a loyalty program works.

The «broken» structure can also be edited to suit your needs, but we recommend keeping its uniqueness — such emails don't often land in the inbox, and that makes them stand out more.

Another plus is the beautifully designed signature. Accent icons and headings are already in place, but the footer isn't visually cluttered — there's plenty of «breathing room».

[Download]

How else can you improve your campaign design?

Don't stop working on your design, even if it seems like everything is already perfect. Here's what you should do regularly.

• Collect references. A trained eye really helps when you face a tricky design challenge, and it develops your taste. Draw inspiration from major brands, find the best designs, and think about how to stand out from competitors. Look for the best examples on Really Good Emails or Email-Competitors.
• Experiment. Form hypotheses and test each one in practice. And once you get the results, build new hypotheses based on them.
• Test. After creating the design, it's crucial to check how the HTML email will look in your recipients' inboxes. Test the email on different email clients ahead of time, and make sure it's accessible on different versions of mobile devices.

• Create several templates for different types of emails. Templates should follow your recognizable corporate style. If you create several email types at once, you'll save even more time when launching campaigns and get more room for those very experiments and tests.

• Aim for a WOW effect. Add counters, polls, mascots, APNG, or AMP to your campaigns. These elements grab attention and boost engagement.

• Use email templates for your newsletters. Yes, you can do this too, if you want.

Top services where you can download HTML email templates

• Stripo — an intuitive, flexible email template builder.
• Unisender — a marketing automation service. Here you can create email campaigns, chatbots, and send SMS and Viber messages. Plus, there's plenty to choose from: over 100 free templates are available for download!
• Free Newsletter Template — a library of graphic elements for websites, where you can also find email templates and examples.
• SendPulse — templates from a popular CRM platform for marketing and sales