alternative to fallback fonts

Question

I have a client that only wants to use their custom fonts on emails and doesn’t like the fallback fonts that klaviyo sometimes defaults to. So I’ve been having to design emails in Canva, slicing the image into sections and uploading the PNG sections into Klaviyo.

So far we haven’t seen any negative effect on open and click rates but is there a workaround besides designing and uploading the entire email as an image?

Ideally, I’d love to design in Klaviyo so I can repurpose emails in the future. Having to design every email is a bit time consuming…

Thanks!

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Best answer by ebusiness pros 8 May 2023, 19:17

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ebusiness pros · Accepted Answer

@heyjessromerototally understandable you don’t want to spend time building all email elements in Canva before taking them to Klaviyo!@Akers Digitaland @Ashley I.have both given you useful feedback...This information is something you might also want to share with your client, so they can appreciate how the benefit of having emails that are dynamically resized for mobile and easily read by all recipients can often outweigh the desire to have 100% perfect brand consistency.One thing they forgot to mention is that you can specify which fallback font in Klaviyo should be used for all of your emails. So you (maybe together with your client for their peace of mind/ approval) can examine the available fallback fonts, and choose the one that is closest to the preferred brand font.Approximately50% (or more) of the people on any brand’s email list are opening emails on their phones and/ or tablets. So if you’re using custom images created in Canva, those won’t adjust the font size for headers, body text, etc. Anything between 14-16 px font size that will be readable on a desktop devicewhen designing in Canva will most likely be unreadable on a mobile device.Unless the font is an elaborate script font that has a clearly noticeable difference between the brand standard and the Klaviyo fallback font, most of the people on your list won’t notice a subtle difference IF their email client doesn’t display the custom font.If your client has the budget available to add this service, you could use a tool like Litmus to examine how the email built in Klaviyo will display in different email clients, and then check on the ratios of that brand’s list to determine what percentage have Gmail email addresses, vs. Outlook, etc. That will help you give your client confidence in what % of the list will already get emails with the custom font that’s specified in Klaviyo, and what % of the list will actually see emails with the fallback font…Warmly,Gabrielle,Klaviyo Champion & Marketing Lead at ebusiness pros

Akers Digital · Answer

This isn't really a Klaviyo issue. A lot of email clients won't recognize custom fonts. The fonts used in Klaviyo are the most commonly recognized by email clients.

Using image based emails has some downsides:

- isn't responsive to mobile

- can't use dynamic sources

- slows down deployment of emails (simple copy changes mean you need to make a new image).

We've done a bunch of ab testing using images vs the editor and haven't found any significant differences in open rates or click rates. The biggest difference for us is the speed to get emails deployed from a design standpoint.

Hope that helps!

alternative to fallback fonts

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