Selecting a font for your campaign is very important for brand consistency and reading legibility. However, not all email clients display fonts equally.
Each email client (ie: Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Apple Mail etc..) will have its own set of fonts that it supports and it will display your campaign in the intended style if the font is compatible with that system. If your selected font is not compatible with that email client, it will be displayed via a fallback font style (or worse, unreadable characters).
What are web-safe fonts?
The fonts available for you to use in your campaign are known as Web/Email Safe Fonts. This is a list of fonts that the majority of devices and email clients support by default.
Using a web-safe font in your campaign means that all your subscribers will see the text in the exact same way.
Some of the popular web-safe fonts are Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Verdana and Times New Roman. These typefaces also have great readability for desktop and mobile devices.
The full list of available fonts is:
| Arial | Palatino Linotype |
| Comic Sans MS | Book Antiqua |
| Courier New | Impact |
| Georgia | Lucida Sans Unicode |
| Helvetica | Calibri |
| Tahoma | Garamond |
| Times New Roman | Century Gothic |
| Trebuchet MS | Arial Black |
| Verdana | Copperplate Gothic Light |
Can I import or use other fonts?
Simply put, you can't. Or rather, you shouldn't due to a lack of support.
As the majority of email clients only have a specific list of supported fonts, using any other font in your campaign will result in the majority of your recipients not viewing your message in the intended style and will be forced to read it via their email client's fallback or may not be able to read your content at all.
You should generally choose an email-safe font that matches your brand and identify. Generally, designers will provide a safe fallback font to be used in-place of the custom font within the brand guidelines of an organisation.