Email design for salons: why one big Canva image isn’t enough

I love Canva. I use it, most of my clients use it, and for social graphics it’s brilliant. This guide isn’t telling you to stop using it. It’s about using it the right way, so your emails look as considered as the rest of your brand and still work in every inbox. If you haven’t set up your list yet or you’re unsure about the UK rules, start with my guide to email marketing for salons and clinics, then come back here for the design side.

Yes, as long as you know which kind of Canva email you’re making. There are two very different routes.

The one that causes problems is designing your newsletter as a poster or social graphic, words and button included, exporting it as a PNG or JPG and dropping it into your email as one picture. To your client’s email app, that’s a photo with almost no real text around it, and it causes every problem in the next section.

The one that can work is Canva’s own Canva Email design type. You build the email from text boxes, buttons and layout blocks, then export it as HTML or send it straight to platforms such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Flodesk. Built that way, your words stay as real text. It still has limits worth knowing before you commit:

For a one-off campaign, Canva Email is a reasonable option. For a regular newsletter, I still prefer building in your email platform’s own editor, because you can edit, reuse and personalise it without starting over. The rest of this guide explains why.

Gmail and Apple Mail show images by default, but not every app does. Microsoft says classic Outlook blocks automatic picture downloads by default, workplace email is often locked down, and some people switch images off to save data or avoid tracking. If your whole email is one image, those readers see a grey box and a small prompt to show pictures.

Picture a salon that sends a beautiful Christmas voucher email, designed in Canva with gold lettering and a festive photo. A client opens it in Outlook at work and finds a blank rectangle. She doesn’t click to load it, she moves on to the next email, and the offer is never seen.

Someone using a screen reader hears the alt text of an image, not the words painted onto it. If there’s no alt text, or it just says “newsletter”, the whole email says nothing to them. You can’t sensibly squeeze a full newsletter into alt text either.

Your phone number, your address and your opening hours are all just pixels in an image. Nobody can tap the number to call you or copy the address into a map. Clients can’t search their inbox for “voucher” in December and find it again.

Links suffer too. An image is normally one link or no link, so “book a facial”, “buy a voucher” and “follow us on Instagram” all end up going to the same place, and you can’t tell from your reports which one people wanted.

A Canva design is usually made wide enough to look good on a laptop. On a phone, the email app shrinks the whole image to fit the screen, and the text inside it shrinks with it. Body copy that looked perfectly readable while you were designing turns into tiny print your client has to pinch and zoom. Real text keeps its size, so it stays readable.

A tall, high resolution image can be a large file. On a train with one bar of signal it loads a strip at a time, and people scroll past before they’ve seen what it’s about.

Emails that are mostly image with very little text can look suspicious to some spam filters, partly because hiding words inside images is a trick spammers have used. It won’t automatically send you to junk, and your sending reputation and authentication matter far more, but it’s one more thing working against you.

Here’s how I’d do it if you’re building your own. All of this happens inside the editor in your email platform. Canva stays involved, just for the graphics.

Use the blocks your platform gives you: text blocks, image blocks and button blocks. Type your headings and paragraphs as live text. It can look a little plainer while you’re editing, but it shows up straight away, reads well on a phone and can be read aloud by a screen reader. Build it once as a saved template with your colours, fonts, header and footer locked in, and each newsletter after that is a case of swapping words and photos.

Most email templates are built around 600 to 640 pixels wide, and that’s still a sensible size. Stick mainly to a single column so it stacks neatly on a phone. Side-by-side columns can work for things like two treatments next to each other, but they need careful checking on mobile, and one column is hard to get wrong.

Set body text at around 16px, with headings clearly bigger, and keep paragraphs short. Left-align anything longer than a line or two, because centred paragraphs are tiring to read. Check your text colour against your background with a contrast checker, aiming for at least the 4.5:1 ratio WCAG sets for normal text. Pale grey or blush text on cream is the usual casualty.

Custom brand fonts usually don’t display in Gmail or desktop Outlook. The email app swaps in a default instead, and in some versions of Outlook that’s Times New Roman, which is rarely the look you were going for. Most editors let you choose a web-safe fallback, so pick one close to your brand font. Georgia suits an elegant serif, and Arial or Helvetica suits a clean sans serif. Apple Mail and the iPhone Mail app will show your real web font if your platform supports adding one, so your Apple readers get the full look and everyone else gets a tidy fallback.

If your brand leans on a pretty script font, you can put one short heading into an image with alt text that says the same words. Keep everything else as real text. My guide to choosing brand colours and fonts goes into pairing fonts that sit well together.

Use your editor’s button block rather than a picture of a button. A real button shows up even with images switched off, it’s easy to tap with a thumb and you can link it wherever you like. Aim for one main button per email, such as “Book your facial” or “Buy a voucher”. If everything is a button, nothing stands out. Link it to the exact booking page for that treatment, not your homepage.

Every meaningful image should have alt text that describes it for a person, like “Treatment room with fresh towels and a lit candle” or “Gift voucher tied with a cream ribbon”. If an image includes words, such as “20% off lash lifts this November”, put those words in the alt text too, and ideally in the text underneath, so nobody misses the offer. Purely decorative images, like a divider line, can have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.

Export from Canva at a sensible size. Around twice the width the image will show at is plenty for sharp phone screens, so about 1200px wide for a full-width image. Then run it through a compressor such as TinyPNG before uploading. JPGs are usually smaller than PNGs for photos, and animated GIFs can get very heavy, so keep any animation short and small.

Gmail clips emails once the code behind them reaches roughly 102KB, a figure Google doesn’t publish but that email testing tools such as Litmus document. It shows a “View entire message” link instead, and anything below the cut, often your footer and unsubscribe link, gets hidden. Images themselves don’t count towards it, but the code does. Very long newsletters with lots of sections are the usual cause, and so is text pasted straight from Word, which brings a lot of hidden formatting with it. Paste as plain text and keep each email focused.

A consistent header with your logo tells people who the email is from before they’ve read a word. The footer needs to make clear who you are and include a working unsubscribe link, which UK rules require in every marketing email. If you trade as a limited company, your company name, registration number and registered office belong there too under the trading disclosure rules, and most email platforms insist on a postal address anyway. Add your booking link and social links, save it all in your master template, and you’ll never forget them.

This is the part most people skip, and it’s where the problems hide. Before every send:

Canva is still my favourite way for clients to make the graphics that go inside an email. A seasonal header image for the top of your newsletter. A photo of your new treatment room with a soft border. A voucher graphic, with the offer also written as real text underneath it.

Make those in Canva, download them as images and drop them into image blocks in your email platform, between your real text and your button. You keep the look you love, and the email still works when it lands. If you use the same colours and fonts as your Instagram graphics, people will recognise you in their inbox too. When you’re short of things to put in them, my salon marketing ideas has plenty to work from.

Everything above is completely doable on your own, though the first template does take time and getting it to behave in Outlook can eat an evening. If you’d rather spend that time with clients, it’s something I do, so get in touch and tell me what you’re using now.

Yes. Canva is ideal for the images inside your email, and its Canva Email design type can export a proper HTML email if you build it from text and button blocks. What doesn’t work is sending the whole newsletter as one flat image, which causes problems with blocked images, tiny text on phones and accessibility. For a regular newsletter, building in your email platform’s own editor is usually easier to maintain.

Around 600 to 640px wide is the usual size and still works well, laid out mainly in a single column. Keep images compressed so the email loads quickly on mobile data. Keep the code behind the email under roughly 102KB too, because that’s where Gmail starts clipping messages.

Outlook, especially the classic desktop version on Windows, handles email code differently to most other apps. It blocks images by default until the reader allows them, ignores custom fonts and can shift spacing around. Building with your platform’s standard blocks, setting fallback fonts and sending yourself a test in Outlook all help.

Sometimes. Apple Mail and the iPhone Mail app will show web fonts, but Gmail and desktop Outlook usually won’t and swap in a default. Set a close web-safe fallback such as Georgia or Arial so your email still looks considered wherever it’s opened.

Most email platforms create one automatically alongside your designed version, and it’s sensible to have. Some people and some email apps prefer it. Give it a quick read before you send so it isn’t full of stray links or odd characters.