What is an Email Designer: Responsibilities & Opportunities

Email • Email DesignNataly Birch and Ekta Swarnkar • Published: April 08, 2025 • Updated: April 11, 2025 • 9 minutes READ

Whether it’s a great outfit or a well-designed email, people notice. They’re more likely to click when something looks and feels right. It’s simple: Good design gets attention. 

But don’t confuse email design with just “looking pretty”. It’s more about how your message flows, how people interact with it, and what sticks after they’re done reading. And getting that right takes more than just “good taste.”

Who is an email designer? What are their responsibilities? How can you reduce the costs of hiring one without sacrificing quality through a simple solution? Let’s answer these questions.

Let’s break it down.

Who Is an Email Designer?

Email designers plan and create the visual layout, structure, and overall look of digital newsletters. They’re responsible for how an email feels, how easy it is to use, and the impression it leaves on the reader. Their job is to make sure the message not only looks great but actually works, so they spend more time optimizing the email for conversions and engagements.

Email designers collaborate with marketers, developers, and other teams to turn campaign ideas into designs that reflect the brand’s style and goals. A good email designer understands both the creative and technical sides, like what will or won’t work across email clients, how to keep designs accessible, and how to guide readers through the content without friction.

8 Key Responsibilities of an Email Designer

An email designer focuses on the visual and design aspects of an email. They’re not to be confused with email developers, who mainly write code to add functionality. However, with no-code email-building platforms like Postcards, their roles can overlap. For example, an email designer can easily use drag-and-drop features to build emails while focusing on design. Here are the main responsibilities of an email designer:

1. Strategize and Set Goals

Email designers work closely with clients, stakeholders, email marketers, and strategists to plan email campaigns and set realistic goals. As design accounts for the correct message delivery and customers’ decision-making, a designer should understand what needs to be done to accomplish its mission.

Every email campaign and type of digital newsletter (transactional, behavioral, or informative) must be carefully planned before being shaped. Good wireframing underlies a strong foundation for marketing efforts.

2. Create Visual Assets

Email designers focus on the visual aspects of a brand’s communication. They craft every tiny detail of a digital newsletter’s appearance and atmosphere, including graphic elements, hero images, promo banners, illustrations, supporting visual material, icons, navigational cues, call-to-action buttons, etc.

As generic solutions become less popular due to their banality and lack of personality, email designers must create customized, branded solutions to ensure every connection’s authenticity.

Winter email from Postcards

3. Design a Color Scheme

Many email strategists overlook color schemes while focusing on ways to increase engagement and conversions. However, colors play a key role in achieving these goals. They shape how recipients interpret the message and influence their emotions. Beyond enhancing visual appeal or setting the right mood, the right colors can drive decisions and encourage action.

Email designers understand this well. That’s why they treat creating a color scheme as one of their first steps. They choose colors that reflect the brand’s identity and support the email’s purpose, both psychologically and emotionally.

4. Plan Email Structures

A well-thought-out hierarchical structure allows recipients to find relevant information quickly. It’s critical for companies to deliver the key message because subscribers tend to scan rather than read email body copy word by word.

Email designers facilitate a logical flow for users and ensure they effortlessly comprehend the content hierarchy and locate key details quickly. They arrange and display information concisely, prioritize essential elements, and highlight the main points.

5. Create an Engaging Layout

Layout forms the foundation of every email design, no matter the goal, type, or content. It influences not only the appearance and aesthetics but also the overall impression and functionality, key factors for engaging subscribers and delivering the brand message effectively. A strong layout guides readers through the copy, emphasizes important details, and shapes the entire user experience.

Email designers focus on building layouts that are functional, flexible, well-structured, and engaging. They rely on their expertise to apply core design principles—like balance, contrast, unity, and visual hierarchy—to create a solid framework that supports marketing goals without overwhelming the reader.

6. Empower Message Delivery

It’s not enough to address customers’ pain points with a product’s features or create personalized offers for subscribers to act and convert. Modern customers need much more than simple numbers—they need to be persuaded with visual appeal. Email design is a time-proven instrument for convincing your target audience to follow the lead with the design psychology underlying the majority of successful advertising and marketing campaigns.

The Von Restorff effect, Hick’s law, and The Gestalt Principles might be applied to digital newsletters to influence customer-decision. Email designers introduce these principles without overwhelming readers or scaring them away with too much pressure. They elaborate on techniques that turn the basic design into a high-converting tool.

7. Strengthen Brand Identity

A digital newsletter reinforces a company’s brand while supporting email marketing goals. When emails reflect the company’s personality and style, they strengthen its image, build trust, and boost credibility. A consistent look across emails, social media, and print makes the brand feel professional and authentic.

Email designers follow the company’s visual identity guidelines and often create a style guide for different campaigns. They include key elements like the logo, mascot, typography, and colors in every template to keep branding consistent and connect better with subscribers.

8. Keep Current with Design Trends

Even though email clients lack comprehensive support for modern HTML and CSS techniques, this doesn’t mean email design lags in trends. As one of the most popular ways to communicate with customers, it must follow mainstream to ensure the conversation is not stale or boring.

Therefore, one of the main responsibilities of email designers is to track and keep up with current trends. Adopting them in time, they show that the business is responsive to consumer preferences and understands their evolving tastes.

Following trends can be tricky due to limitations, the specificity of marketing strategy, the preferences of the target audience, and the company’s resources. On top of that, trends come and go, so your email might look outdated at some point. It takes a professional email designer to understand what is good for the company and what is not right now.

Halloween email template from Postcards

Additional Responsibilities

Depending on the role in the company, in-house email designers may also perform the following tasks:

• Collaborate with the marketing team and analysts to understand and craft solutions that resonate with the current audience’s demands, preferences, and expectations.
• Think through and craft reusable email design templates or elements.
• Create a style guide for different types of emails, including promo, informational, behavioral, and transactional.
• Test email designs across screen sizes, browsers, devices, and operating systems to ensure high-quality cross-platform message delivery.
• Optimize email design to meet accessibility standards, make email less resource-consuming, and avoid spam filters.
• Stay updated with the best email marketing, design, and coding practices to ensure their solutions allow marketers and coders to achieve their goals effectively.
• Troubleshoot issues caused by incompatibility of design solution and coding.
• Manage email design projects from planning to deployment.
• Analyze key performance metrics to surface areas for improvement in design, user experience, and engagement.
• Ensure the brand’s consistency and coherency in the channel and align email campaigns with overall digital marketing efforts.
• Ensure compliance with email marketing regulations (CAN-SPAM, GDPR).
• Ensure email design and assets follow industry standards and best practices.
• Document setup and creation process using Ms-Word, Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and other tools.

To get started, read our post on how to be a great email designer.

5 Reasons Why are Email Designers Important

Email design isn’t the same as web design. It comes with its own set of challenges, limitations, and technical considerations. Understanding these differences shows why email designers play such a vital role in shaping successful email campaigns.

1. Working Within Limitations

Unlike web design, email design has strict limitations. Designers can’t use modern techniques like animations, layered elements, or parallax effects because many email clients don’t support them. These technical constraints require email designers to be creative within a narrow set of options.

Even though email designers aren’t coders, they still need to understand what works in email environments. Knowing which elements might break or display poorly helps avoid design issues before they happen.

2. Ensuring Compatibility Across Email Clients

One of the biggest challenges in email design is mailbox compatibility. Subscribers use different email clients (like Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail), and each renders emails differently. A layout that looks great in one inbox might look broken in another.

Email designers are responsible for making sure every email looks consistent across devices, browsers, and platforms. They carefully plan how each element appears and behaves to protect the user experience, no matter what platform the recipient uses.

3. Going Beyond Image-Only Emails

Emails shouldn’t rely on a single image. Many mailbox providers block images by default, and image-only emails often get flagged as spam. Designers need to use a balance of images and live text to ensure the message gets through and stays accessible.

4. Making Emails Accessible

Whether someone is reading in the dark, using a screen reader, or dealing with temporary issues like glare or motion, accessible design ensures everyone can interact with the email. This means using readable fonts, good contrast, clear hierarchy, and proper HTML structure.

5. Driving Marketing Success

Email designers also help brands stand out in crowded inboxes. They use design strategies, personalization, and segmentation to turn a simple message into a meaningful interaction—one that reinforces brand identity and builds long-term relationships.

Sales email template from Postcards

Email Designer Job Requirements and Skills

Responsible for translating the customer’s thoughts and marketer’s concepts into a visually appealing design that drives results, email designers are more than just artists who shape ideas through graphical instruments. Their duties include designing the overall layout and aesthetic, making the most of users’ short attention spans, increasing conversions, and building a strong brand identity through consistent and authentic communication.

To excel as a email designer, it’s crucial to fulfill certain responsibilities, which are often reflected in job requirements:

• Be skilled in art discipline with a thorough attention to detail and pixel-perfect attitude.
• Be proficient in HTML and CSS and know the ins and outs of the technical aspects of email design.
• Understand email design limitations.
• Have experience with email marketing platforms to analyze email campaigns for better optimization.
• Have the ability to create responsive, mobile-friendly, and cross-platform solutions.
• Have the ability to craft visual assets from scratch.
• Be experienced with debugging tools to test emails across various clients, browsers, devices and operating systems.
• Develop email templates and promotional content.
• Able to work with tight deadlines and production schedules.
• Have strong communication skills and a team player attitude to collaborate with cross-function teams, marketing, and clients to shape ideas accurately.

To sum up, an email designer should be well-versed and have experience with graphic-editing software (like Photoshop or Dreamweaver), HTML and CSS, email client compatibility, email accessibility standards, law regulations and compliances (Anti-Spam Act or GDPR), responsiveness and mobile-friendliness, typography, color psychology, analytics, optimization and testing.

How Much Does It Cost to Hire an Email Designer?

Email designers play a key role in creating engaging, high-converting campaigns. Hiring one can be a smart investment—but the cost depends on how you choose to work with them.

• In-House Email Designer: Expect to pay around $89,093 per year, with typical salaries ranging from $80,486 to $98,427, according to Salary.com. This is the most expensive option but gives you access to a dedicated professional who understands your brand deeply. Costs can vary based on their education, certifications, and years of experience.
• Agency Partnership: Agencies usually charge between $2,500 and $10,000, either as a monthly retainer or per project. While this option may be costly, it gives you access to a full team of experts who can manage everything from design to strategy. You also avoid administrative costs like insurance or employee benefits.
• Freelance Email Designer: Freelancers typically charge between $10 and $200 per hour, depending on their experience and skill level. This is a flexible, often cost-effective option. Some freelancers also offer fixed pricing for specific projects, which helps with budget planning.

Want to Lower Your Costs Even More?

Consider using a tool like Postcards. It helps streamline email design with ready-made components and templates, reducing production time and costs—especially useful if you’re managing emails in-house or working with freelancers.

 

Get Started With Postcards for Free

Why Use Postcards to Design Your Emails

One of the most effective ways to cut production costs and speed up email creation is by using a professional email template builder. These tools allow you to visually build responsive, accessible, and cross-platform newsletters—without writing a single line of code.

With a simple drag-and-drop interface and built-in design tools, an email builder can support your marketing team or even serve as a cost-effective alternative to outsourcing or hiring a full-time designer.

Postcards is one of the best template builders available today. Here’s what it offers:

• 100+ Pre-built Design Blocks: Choose from a wide range of pixel-perfect, responsive, and client-compatible blocks for promos, transactional emails, A/B tests, multilingual campaigns, and more.
• Pre-made Templates for Every Use Case: Customize templates for welcome emails, promotions, abandoned cart reminders, and recurring campaigns with minimal effort.
• Collaborative Workflow: Invite your team to work on the same project in real-time without disrupting the design process.
• Cross-platform Testing & Preview: Instantly preview your design on various platforms and share it with team members to gather feedback.
• AI-powered Copywriting Assistant: Use the built-in ChatGPT-powered assistant to generate effective, on-brand copy in minutes.
• One-click Export: Export your email design with a single click and use it with your favorite email marketing platform in seconds.

Postcards empower you to design your own emails effectively without worrying about learning code. You choose one of our conversion-optimized email templates, add your content and images, and customize it for your target audience all by using a drag-and-drop email editor. It’s effortless and completely free to use!

Get Started With Postcards for Free