Best Free Responsive Email Templates & Sites With Them

What is a responsive email template?

A responsive email template is an email layout that is designed to fit and adapt to every device. It usually features readable text, optimized images, and touch-friendly elements. The word “responsive” means that in “response” to a screen or window size, email template size changes as well. Using professional responsive email templates, you can save time and create an effective email marketing campaign for your business.

What are the benefits of using it?

Emailing is in the top-3 activities of smartphone users, and 45% of people use smartphones for shopping. It implies that by making emails mobile-friendly, you’ll get more sales — your subscribers will read your emails on smartphones, click through them, and shop right away without getting out of bed. 

But it’s not the only benefit of responsive email templates for your business — here are some of the less obvious:

• Reaching a broader audience.  A non-optimized email will be harder to read — the font size will be too small to read on a small screen. This can be a problem for people with visual impairments. So, responsive email templates will help you create more accessible brand communications.
• Ensuring a frictionless experience. Responsive email templates will allow subscribers to perform target actions with ease — even on smartphones. For example, bigger CTA buttons with a large and bold “Buy now” written on them will be clicked on with a thumb in less than a second. The ease, in its turn, will drive conversions.
• Creating a better brand image. Cut-off subject lines, wacky mobile layouts, and other non-optimized email issues don’t give a good lasting impression — your customers will probably cringe at your messy emails and engage with them less. Meanwhile, responsive email templates will allow your brand to keep your messages immaculate on all devices and ensure a good reputation.
• Saving time on email production. If you compile every email campaign from scratch, even in the best no-code email builder ever, it will take you hours. Even worse, you’ll end up with an inconsistent look across campaigns and other mistakes. A responsive email template will ensure you have a starting point for each campaign, all your branded emails look the same, and no bugs show up for smartphone users.

11 best free responsive email templates

Here, we’ve gathered some of the best free responsive email template design ideas — all of them are templates from Selzy email builder. We’ll show you desktop and mobile versions of all these templates — just scroll the carousels to see more. Keep reading to get some inspo for your next email marketing campaign!

Welcome

Welcome emails are the ones you send after a customer subscribes to your newsletter. The purpose of this type of email is to express your gratitude and briefly introduce your brand. This responsive template gets straight to the point: it greets the subscribers, lists the available services, and has a call to action. You can customize and design it to match your brand’s aesthetics.

Transactional

Businesses send transactional emails to confirm the order, share the order status updates, or similar operations. This template is short and simple. Although it doesn’t have too much going on, it is quite informative. 

By the way, we made these screenshots in the Selzy builder itself! It allows users to see (and even edit separately) the mobile version of the email they’re working on with a push of one button.

Promotional

Promotional emails serve as advertisements for deals, new products, and other things your business can offer. This responsive template includes a countdown timer GIF that creates a sense of urgency and motivates your customers to claim the offer. You can also edit this template in Selzy and add more cool elements to boost the efficiency of your email marketing campaign.

Announcements

Announcement emails are used to let the subscribers know about a new product or a recent update. In this responsive template, you can also add a preview of your product or a call-to-action button.

Newsletters

Businesses may start sending newsletters when they want to share some news about the company, let the subscribers know about new services, or notify them about updates. You can design this responsive template the way you want — the empty spaces let you be as creative as possible. For example, you can change the graphics or background colors.

By the way, the Selzy team used a similar template for our email marketing newsletter.

Surveys

Surveys are a great way to gather feedback from your customers. Survey emails are usually short and simple. In this template, the most important element is a CTA button encouraging the audience to participate.

Commercial offers

Emails with commercial offers are meant to attract customers by sharing a discount code or letting the audience know about other offers. In this template, you can add a picture of your products or introduce your service.

Abandoned cart

Abandoned cart emails serve as a reminder to the customers who haven’t finished checking out on your website. Using this template, you can also add an image of your product to remind the customers about their purchase.

Events

If you want to let your audience know about your event, you can use a simple template. Make sure to include the date and other important details. This email includes separate blocks for all the necessary intel like webinar hosts, time, and a sign-up button.

Holidays

Holiday emails are a great way to remind your subscribers about yourself and express your gratitude. This type of email is usually short and simple. Although this is a Christmas email template, you can customize the visuals and use it for other holidays.

9 websites with free responsive email templates

Are you ready to design your customized responsive email? Then check out some of the best sites with free responsive email templates that we’ve gathered below!

Selzy

Selzy is a service that provides marketing automation tools. In its new email builder, you can find over 40 responsive email templates for different types of email campaigns. The templates are organized by themes and the collection is regularly updated. There’s no need to download any additional software. You can customize and design your emails and make them match your brand’s aesthetics.

Brevo

Brevo is a platform that helps businesses with email automation and other parts of customer relations. In their responsive email templates collection, you can find templates for sending various types of emails, such as e-commerce, SaaS, nonprofit, holiday, content, and blog.

Stripo

Unlike Brevo and Selzy, Stripo doesn’t include the whole email marketing software functionality — it’s a standalone no-code email builder. It provides a lot of beautiful responsive templates for many occasions you can use as a starting point. You can choose from the pre-made template collection or request a custom template in your brand’s aesthetics.

MailBakery

MailBakery is an agency that provides HTML email template design and coding services. However, you can find many premium and free pre-made email templates good for various use cases and business niches, such as e-commerce, real estate, and others. Or, like in the case of Stripo, order a custom one.

Litmus

Litmus is another email marketing service that provides email testing, personalization, design, and other features. The templates are divided by category and suggested use, so everyone can find something that works for their business.

MJML

MJML is a responsive email framework by Mailjet. It involves semantic HTML syntax, which allows users to create responsive templates with fewer lines of code. You can read the docs and start designing and coding templates yourself. But if you’re in a pinch, get one of the various free email templates that are categorized by tags, such as welcome, newsletter, transactional, and others.

Dyspatch

Dyspatch is an interactive email builder. It supports AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages. This framework created by Google allows users to build app-like emails with complex interactive mechanics from quizzes to full-on games.

Aside from AMP blocks, Dyspatch also offers responsive templates, although not too many. The service is free, so you can use it as many times as you want.

Antwort

Antwort is a collection of 3 responsive email templates available for download on GitHub for free. The templates include a Single Column Fluid Layout, Two Columns, and Three Columns. The columns become rows when viewed on mobile devices.

Mosaico

Mosaico is another free email template builder. It is a great solution if you want to create a unique email template for your brand from scratch. The service allows you to make custom responsive templates and provides template blocks. It is an open-source product and you can download its complete codebase from GitHub.

Tips for choosing mobile-friendly responsive email templates

So, how do you choose a professional responsive email template that meets your needs? Here are some of the tips you can follow to choose the best templates for your marketing campaign.

• Identify your requirements. If you’re choosing a responsive email template, we suggest opting for simpler designs without too many decorative images or funky layouts. That way, your mobile version will be as crisp and readable and the desktop one, and the versions will look very similar if not identical. Other requirements to consider would be the dark mode-friendly color scheme, proper fonts that render correctly in all email clients, and so on.
• Check if there’s a test option. It is recommended to try out the template and its features before launching a campaign. By doing that, you can put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes and check what your emails look like on different screen sizes and in different email clients.
• Read the reviews. Just like any other service or product, reviews and feedback are the best way to learn about its strengths and weaknesses. So, check out websites like G2 while choosing your email builder.

Conclusion

Responsive email templates are a great solution for businesses of any size. They can drastically decrease your email production time, and their responsive nature makes your email campaigns accessible to all users. We shared a selection of Selzy’s responsive email templates and a list of other tools, from simple template collections to full-on ESPs with many sophisticated email marketing features.

Want to get a taste of responsive email design now? Get a free Selzy account and fool around with our cool new builder and the collection of templates.