What web-safe fonts should I use for global audiences?
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Here's the thing: you're sending to people reading Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. not just English speakers. Your font choice either works for all of them or fails for half. Arial and Tahoma are your best bets. Both have extensive character maps covering Latin (Western and Eastern European), Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian), Greek, and tons of other writing systems. They're installed on virtually every OS and render consistently across email clients.
For Asian languages, let the system handle it. Specify "sans-serif" as your fallback and let each operating system pick the right font for its users. Windows defaults to SimSun for Chinese, Meiryo for Japanese, Malgun Gothic for Korean. These fonts are built for their scripts. much better than forcing Arial to render characters it wasn't designed for. Your font stack should look like this: font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif;
That said, your brand probably wants custom fonts. Go ahead and use them for headers where web font loading's more likely to work. But stick with safe fonts for body copy. Think about it this way. A beautiful custom font that renders as boxes for half your audience is worse than boring Arial that everyone reads. Your job is readability first, pretty second.
Next step: Take your current template and test it across a few email clients with different email client CSS support. That'll show you exactly where fallbacks kick in. If you're building new templates, start with the safe stack above and add web fonts on top if your ESP supports them.
Related: internationalization, email design best practices.
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