This is part of a series aimed at improving your outcomes with govDelivery emails. Keep an eye on govCommunity for more helpful and informative ideas.
Best Practices
A common use of the image/text block is the thumbnail story type. Use a medium-sized H2 heading, a brief paragraph, and a single call to action. To get the best outcomes, I use these techniques…
Put the H2 heading on its own line, with a text block. This will make the heading easier to read on mobile devices, and easier to pick out when scrolling.
- Right-align the thumbnail image. This lets your reader move from text to text, rather than having to hunt for the text around the image.
- Use the right sized image. My rule of thumb is to use the default image size that you get once the image has been uploaded – this is about 185px wide and takes up around half of the width on a mobile device.
- Always use text-wrapping. This allows the text to flow around the image, and take up whatever room is available. If you don’t turn text-wrapping on, you will get some pretty messy mobile outcomes. Below you will see where you find the settings for text-wrapping and for image alignment in the image/text tool.

Common mistakes to avoid
Thumbnail image is too large squishing text on mobile

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Didn’t turn text-wrapping on.

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About the Author
Huck Tate is a govDelivery expert at Granicus, who spends much of his time helping Granicus customers design beautiful and effective email templates.