Warning: My email CTR dropped 40% in 3 weeks after a design change

I run a weekly newsletter for a small ecom brand, and last month I decided to update our template to look more modern. Swapped out the plain text headers for fancy images and added more buttons. By week 2, our open rate stayed the same but click-throughs tanked from 8% to 4.8%. Realized the images weren't showing up for half my subscribers on Outlook and Gmail, and the buttons blended into the background on mobile. I checked with my email tool and sure enough, rendering issues were flagged. Has anyone else had a simple redesign backfire this hard without warning?

3 comments

3 Comments

mark_thomas1mo ago

My campaign dropped 35% after adding a CTA image that broke on Apple Mail.

iris5741mo ago

Bet your open rates tanked on dark mode too.

jamesf261mo ago

dark mode messes with so many things. had the same issue with a client campaign last year until i started using inline css for backgrounds on all images. @mark_thomas you might want to check if your CTA image had a transparent background cause apple mail strips those out sometimes. i just switched to solid color backgrounds and it helped a ton.