If you include a custom font at the top of your font stack, Outlook will ignore all of your fallback fonts and instead display Times New Roman. But fear not! As with most Outlook bugs, there are ways to get around this.

We covered this topic in 2015, and the blog was hugely popular. We offered one technique to help create working custom font stacks, but our readers had a lot of other ideas!

In this blog we’ll repeat our last technique, as well as a few of submitted by our readers. We tested all of these techniques to make sure that they work, but they may or may not work for you depending on how your email is coded and how your ESP modifies your code upon sending. Hopefully, at least one will do the job!

There are loads of web font services available, but Google Fonts is our favorite. The service is totally free, and you can download the web fonts to your computer if you’re mocking up designs in Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, or another design software.

If you don’t find a font you’d like to use in the 800 or so available on Google Fonts, here are some alternative websites which offer web fonts licensed for use in email, on a paid basis:

• MyFonts
• Commercial Type
• Font Spring
• Font Shop
• You Work for Them
• Village
• Process Type Foundry

As with many things in email, web fonts aren’t 100% compatible across all email clients. Generally, the following email clients have good support for web fonts:

– iOS Mail
– Apple Mail
– Android (default mail client, not Gmail app)
– Outlook 2000
– Outlook.com app
– Thunderbird

If you do opt to use web fonts in your emails, it’s vital that you choose the right fallback font, should a subscriber use an email client that doesn’t support web fonts. Again, if you are using Campaign Monitor’s email builder, we take care of serving up a suitable fallback font for you. If you are coding, though, read the next section.

The vertical design of your email is incredibly important, and you don’t want it to fall apart when your second or third font choice is displayed. So you need to consider the x-height of the web font that you’ve chosen and choose a web safe font that has a similar x-height.