Best practices for email infographics in 2025

With billions of emails sent every day, digital marketing professionals have to work harder than ever to make their campaigns stand out.

Infographics are a great tool for increasing recipient responsiveness, holding the reader’s attention and driving home important messages.

In this article, we discuss what an infographic is, including why you should use them to increase engagement in your email marketing campaigns. We also explore when to use them and what a high-converting infographic template looks like.

What is an infographic?

An infographic is a visual representation of information or data. It’s a type of content that can be a collection of images, graphs, statistics and other visually appealing imagery, similar to a poster.

Here’s part of an infographic example we created that explains how email deliverability works:

Source: https://www.pipedrive.com/

Instead of overwhelming the reader with long blocks of text, the infographic uses bold colors, shapes and lines to draw attention to each part of the content and lead the eye down the page.

There are many different types of infographics you can use in your digital marketing efforts, including:

• Timelines. You can use timeline infographics to plot information in a time progression context (e.g., looking back on the previous year).

• Processes. You can use process infographics to explain the steps in a strategy or process (e.g., 10 steps to get started).

• Statistics. You can compile marketing statistics in an infographic to present data-heavy information and facts visually.

• Comparisons. You can compare two sets of data visualizations in an infographic to contrast options, plans or your brand against competitors.

• Geographical. You can use geographical infographics to map out location-based or demographical information (e.g., where your offices are).

In email marketing, an infographic offers content marketers an opportunity to appeal to readers across the whole funnel with more memorable visuals.

Clever infographic design can help convey complex ideas, spread brand awareness through color scheme variation and different fonts and establish thought leadership.

How can infographics help an email marketing campaign?

Images and graphics can capture and retain your subscribers’ attention more effectively than long blocks of text.

According to Venngage, original infographics are the most successful types of visual content for marketers. Charts and data visualizations, specifically, are the most widely used.

Source: https://www.pipedrive.com

Email marketing also has a return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent, so it’s no wonder many marketers capitalize on the platform.

You can combine these successful visuals with this lucrative platform to boost conversions and sales.

You can also use high-quality infographics to facilitate your entire digital marketing strategy, including your…:

• Social media marketing strategy to create more shareable, eye-catching posts that lead to a larger following and more customers

• Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to encourage backlinks (inbound links to your site) that may correlate with higher rankings

• Content marketing strategy to break up wordy blog posts and white papers with visuals and make them more engaging

You can also repurpose infographics from each of these platforms within your emails to get more results from the effort you put into creating them.

Here are three more ways infographics can help your email marketing campaigns:

Infographics make scanning easy

Infographics work so well because, as eye-tracking studies show, people scan information when reading online. People also don’t tend to read linearly, which means readers may skip over key information unless guided there by design.

Alternating images and text with an infographic helps keep the reader’s attention every step of the way. Doing so increases the chances that the information you want recipients to see will be noticed, internalized and acted upon.

Infographics provide readers with value

Each successful email marketing campaign has to begin with a goal. Whether it’s to invite target audiences to support a campaign, buy a product or share the content with their friends, a goal keeps your message focused and relevant.

To achieve that goal, every email you send should have value tied to it. For example, if you want people to buy your new soda, you could offer a 25% discount and free shipping.

When you’re trying to convey more complex ideas (e.g., how to automate your tax returns), infographics can provide value by visually summarizing data and information in a more engaging way.

The visual nature of infographics makes them highly shareable

The visual nature of infographics means a marketer can convey complex information in a novel, engaging manner. It’s this format that can make email content more in-depth, impactful, thought-provoking and memorable.

Readers can easily copy and paste the infographic into a social media post or article of their own and link to your site. Doing so can help you build brand awareness, attract new audiences and appear more trustworthy as a company.

6 best practices for using email marketing infographics in your campaigns

Infographic emails can help you achieve goals at different stages of your marketing campaigns and sales cycles.

Here are six ways you can use infographics to enhance your email marketing campaigns:

1. Educate the reader in a welcome email

You can use welcome emails with infographics to engage and educate the reader on your product, service or mission. You can also use them to encourage people to take certain steps, like onboarding.

Collaborative workspace Miro breaks down how to get started on its platform with a three-step process infographic.

When platforms have many features, it can be overwhelming for new users.

Breaking onboarding down into three steps with a small graphic for each draws attention to its simplicity and makes it more likely users will begin exploring the platform rather than be discouraged by it.

2. Agitate a pain point in a new campaign

At the beginning of a campaign, infographics can help to agitate a pain point your target audience might have.

Doing so can convince them to research your solution in more depth and push them toward a purchasing decision.

Infographics don’t need to be complex to achieve this goal, either.

Sleep company Casper uses the wording “Bye bye, back pain” with a simple illustration of two types of pillows it offers.

The clean design and white space around these elements draw attention to the pain (back pain) and solution (Casper’s pillows).

Casper could even take this infographic further using a process-style design to open with the pain and then highlight the steps it offers to solve it.

3. Present data points when nurturing

During the lead nurturing phase in a series of email newsletters, you can use infographics to present convincing data points that demonstrate why your product is the best choice.

Instead of writing, “We help businesses increase conversion rates by 10%”, you can get creative with how you present this fact.

Online lending marketplace LendingTree uses an International Women’s Day email to highlight relevant stats from its blog posts.

For example, “95% of women are not following any financial experts on social media” is in a self-contained box with an image of a woman next to it.

The important numbers themselves stand out in large, green font with a “Read more” link underneath.

Some subscribers may be intrigued by these chunks of visual information and click through to each of the blogs to learn more.

Reading several of these posts could entice someone to finally sign up or make a purchase.

4. Compare your product to a competitor

You may already use your landing page or blog content to compare your pricing plans or features.

However, you can also use comparison infographics in your emails to compare your offer to a competitor’s.

Here’s a simple example from fictional website builder Estimando that uses ticks to convey the features each product includes.

Instead of feeling too wordy or self-promotional, the mix of clear and transparent icons conveys the features some products have and others don’t.

Thanks to this design choice, the comparison feels balanced with minimal wording while subtly conveying which products are more feature-rich than the others.

5. Drive home a promotional call to action

You can use infographics in promotional emails to drive home a CTA with emotionally stimulating visuals.

In this example, nonprofit Charity: Water opens with a moving photograph of two smiling kids washing their hair under clear water.

Nonprofits have to market their services a little differently from other businesses. As consumers aren’t directly receiving anything in return, storytelling has to convey where their funds go.

In this email, Charity: Water talks about its project to bring safe, clean drinking water to every person in Rulindo, Rwanda.

Visuals below include a small icon of the district itself and small portraits of people (perhaps from Rulindo) floating around a stat that conveys the success of the project.

Instead of directly asking for donations with the CTA, the nonprofit entices subscribers to “learn about our work” to continue the story and evoke emotions that can lead to more donations.

6. Round up customer stats

With roundups like Spotify Wrapped turning into viral favorites, personal data visualizations are becoming more common.

You can repurpose your own customer data for weekly, monthly or annual email newsletters.

For example, the nonprofit DonorsChoose uses colorful icons and single lines of text to convey how successfully its users have been on the platform.

The significant numbers are highlighted in big, bold font in their own lines to draw attention to them. There are also a few colorful yet simple icons to keep it fun and stop it from being too text-heavy.

A roundup infographic like this is a simple way of keeping users engaged with your product by personalizing their experience.

Doing so often helps build deeper connections with your company as you offer content that makes customers feel special.

How to create an effective email marketing infographic template for free

Infographics can seem tricky to create from scratch but you don’t have to be a graphic designer.

There are plenty of free online marketing tools you can use to create your infographic, including:

1. Canva

2. Piktochart

3. Venngage

4. Snappa

5. Visme

These free tools offer hundreds of infographic templates with different layouts, color schemes and display sizes.

Once you’ve chosen an appropriate template, you can break down designing your own business infographics into six steps:

1. Pinpoint the goal of your infographic (e.g., explain a complex process simply)

2. Draft out your key points

3. Compile the data you need to support your points

4. Customize your template with your brand’s colors and fonts

5. Format it for email dimensions (most design platforms have built-in capabilities for this)

6. Send a test email with your infographic to yourself before you send it to your list

Once you’re happy with your design, you can use email marketing software like Pipedrive’s Campaigns to customize the rest of your layout and track the effectiveness of each infographic.

Final thoughts

Infographics can help you produce more engaging, interactive email marketing campaigns.

With the amount of data and text we constantly sift through, simplifying your reader’s experience is vital to increase email open rates and conversions.

Use different types of infographics regularly to solidify your brand image, educate your audience and improve the overall effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.

Find out how you can supplement these with a marketing automation tool like Pipedrive to handle the repetitive tasks while you focus on being creative with your content.