AI Email Design Strategies for Higher Conversions

For SaaS teams, email design is no longer just about crafting something beautiful – it’s about delivering brand-consistent, compatible, and high-performing experiences at scale.

Designing emails at scale sounds simple until you try to do it across 5 different segments or create 10 variations of the email. This is where AI steps in—not to replace designers but to support them.

In this guide, we will explore how AI email design is evolving, why it’s a hard problem to solve, and how tools like Mailmodo are making design at scale possible.

What is AI email design?

AI email design refers to the use of artificial intelligence to create and optimize email designs and templates instead of manually designing each element of an email.

While the use of AI to write subject lines and content for emails is popular, it’s not common knowledge that you can also use AI in the email design process to generate layouts that align with your brand guidelines and make use of your brand kit and revamp existing templates that you may already be using to optimize the performance of your campaigns.

Think of it as a collaborative intelligence layer that makes email creation smarter and faster as compared to traditional email designing. It also allows frees up more time for you to focus on the creative aspects and overall planning of the campaigns and designs.

Traditional vs. AI-assisted email designing

Why email design using AI is a huge challenge

Designing beautiful, brand-consistent emails at scale is still one of the trickiest parts of email marketing and AI, while helpful, hasn’t fully cracked the code yet. Here’s why:

• Email client compatibility is a nightmare: Emails don’t render the same way across clients like Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. An email that looks perfect in one client may appear broken in another. AI-generated emails still require thorough testing and QA because even small layout issues can harm user experience and brand credibility.
• Brand consistency requires more than logos: While AI can be trained on brand guidelines, ensuring pixel-perfect brand consistency — across typography, spacing, layout patterns, and color hierarchy — may be challenging. especially when multiple teams or campaigns are involved. AI helps, but it’s not flawless yet.
• Scalability vs. creativity: AI can accelerate production, but when personalization increases, so do design variants. Manual customization becomes unsustainable — and AI-generated layouts often lack the human touch needed for engaging and well-converting designs.
• Tools can only solve some pieces: Most AI tools solve a part of the workflow — generating content, creating a layout, or testing for rendering issues — but not all three together. Stitching together different tools for design, testing, and optimization slows teams down and increases the chance of errors.

Where AI fits in the email design workflow

AI is changing how email campaigns are built — not by replacing designers, but by speeding up the process from concept to launch. Here’s how AI fits into different stages of the email design workflow:

1. Template generation from prompts

Traditionally, building an email layout involves dragging content blocks or writing HTML. With AI, that changes. You can simply describe:

• The goal of your email (e.g., announce a product launch)

• The primary CTA (e.g., “Book a Demo”)

• Any specific elements you want to include (e.g., testimonial, product image)

AI then generates a ready-to-edit email template — including layout, placeholder content, and design structure — aligned to your stated goal. This saves hours of manual design work, especially for marketers without design expertise.

2. Applying brand guidelines automatically

AI allows you to define your brand’s colors, typography, logo, and preferred styles — and then apply these settings automatically to any new email template that’s generated. This ensures visual consistency across campaigns, especially when multiple team members are involved. While AI can’t replace full brand governance, it reduces the risk of style drift and speeds up the design process.

3. Optimization through performance and data

AI systems can also recommend design improvements by analyzing past campaign performance — suggesting layout tweaks, CTA placements, or content block reordering. This turns design into an iterative process where AI helps test and learn, not just create.

How Mailmodo helps integrate AI with email design

When it comes to integrating AI with email design, the trend is towards AI-assisted creation rather than fully AI-generated emails. Brands are using AI to:

• Create base templates aligned with brand guidelines
• Speed up variant creation

Having said that, most marketing teams rely on human QA and design refinements to ensure quality and compatibility. Today, Mailmodo makes AI-powered email design more practical and scalable by doing 2 main things:

• Generate on-brand templates: Use AI to generate email templates from scratch that follow your brand guidelines. You can simply input the content of the email or newsletter and Mailmodo’s AI-template generator will generate a full-fledged email template from scatch.
• Optimize existing templates: Have older templates that aren’t performing? Mailmodo’s Remix with AI feature can help you revamp your email template and optimize the emails for better conversions, while keeping brand consistency intact.

Best practices for AI email design

There are several compelling parts of AI in email design, and its adaptability across campaign types and user journeys. Here are some best practices to be aware of:

• Start with a strong brand system: Before bringing AI into the mix, define your brand essentials — fonts, color palette, logo usage rules, preferred layouts, and reusable content blocks.
• Use clean, structured design data: AI models rely on structured inputs to generate high-quality outputs. Keep your templates and layout components clean, standardized, and modular.
• Always test across clients and devices: AI can speed up design, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for real-world testing. Preview your emails across all major email clients and screen sizes to catch rendering issues before they reach your audience.
• Keep human creativity in the loop: AI should enhance your workflow — not replace it. Use it for structure, speed, and optimization, but rely on human input for storytelling, emotional tone, and strategic messaging. The best results come when AI and human creativity work together.

Takeaways

Beyond engagement, AI dramatically reduces time-to-send by streamlining everything from design to copywriting. It allows you to test more variables in less time, thanks to AI-driven optimization tools.

AI in email design is evolving fast — but for now, it's best used as a co-pilot, not a replacement. With the right tools and workflows, like Mailmodo, you can strike the balance between speed, scalability, and brand integrity.