Act-On does not natively have a Dark Mode feature in the Email Composer. However, there are things that you can do to design your messages up for success in Dark Mode. Continue reading for our key recommendations.

What is Dark Mode?

Dark Mode is an accessibility feature that directly impacts the way your contacts will view your email. Normally, emails are viewed with a default white background and black text. Dark Mode will show light-colored (usually white) text on a dark background instead. Dark Mode is growing in popularity because it reduces eye strain and can even help preserve battery life for devices. Many devices will allow you to auto-switch to Dark Mode in the evenings, for example.

This feature is now available on many devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and modern operating systems such as Windows 10 and MacOS X.

Because of its popularity, it is very important to design your email for Dark Mode. To get the best results from your email campaigns, you want your email to look professional and stay easy to read in the Dark Mode environment.

How to design an email for Dark Mode

What should you do to make sure your email is optimized for Dark Mode?

Design with a Black Background

This might seem obvious, but it works. The primary difference in Dark Mode is that the email's background will be changed to black. If you design your email with a black background, then you already know what to expect in Dark Mode.

When designing an email for Dark Mode, you may or may not wish to use transparent images. When email clients change the background from white to black, the background of the image is the background of the email. This may help prevent unwanted white boxes, however, it may also cause problems with your image display, as you can see with our brand logo here:

Use High Contrast Text

Use high contrast text and background colors. This way when the colors are inverted in Dark Mode, the text remains easily readable. If you don't do this, your text may be difficult to read on a black background.

Test Your Emails

Test your Emails on devices with Dark Mode enabled to see how they render! Act-On also makes this easy with our native integration with Litmus, so you can easily see how your Email will render across a wide range of devices and clients.

Testing is incredibly important because it can reveal unintended results in Dark Mode, such as this problem with rounded corners: