Guide to HTML Emailers
What's good for your website is not so for emailers
There is often a belief that if your web designer can make your website he can surely make a simple emailer. He sure can, but if he builds the emailer like he makes your website in most likelyhood its going to be a fair mess.
The problem comes because there are many different browsers and there are many different email clients. each has its own way of displaying html emailers. What looks perfect in Outlook may look completely broken in gmail. When images do not load by default the greatly designed emailer may show nothing of interest to the user to entice him to load images.
It is common knowledge that a good web designer will use css to code your web pages. But when building emailers most of these well laid out practices need to well go out of the window.
Why? Firstly a large number of the messages will be viewed not in web browser, but in an email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Unfortunately email clients have very different levels of standards compliance to browsers, both generally speaking and in particular in relations to CSS.
Secondly even when viewed in a browser, using webmail services such as Hotmail or Google Mail they face their own set of problems. Messages here are presented as a web page within a web page, which affects the way they finally get displayed.
In order to ensure that the HTML in the message doesn't cause the browser to incorrectly display the webmail service itself, most webmail providers alter the content of HTML email and actually remove certain parts of the html markup. In most cases it is the content placed in the <head> section of the website and that's typically where your traditional website designer would have put a whole lot of the styles.
This can range from something simple like changing the font used in the message to be the same as that in the email client, right up to completely removing all of the information that relates to the layout of the message.
How does this impact who you choose to do your email campaigns?
With a multitude of email service providers and clients it is a challenging task to ensure that your emailers look consistent across all platforms. It is a skill that we at Interface have acquired over years of sending hundreds of emailers. This takes into account the correct coding and construction to enable your communication to display correctly across all platforms and yet not get caught in spam filters.
Clearly making successful cross platform emailers is not something that even a great web designer would find easy to adjust to. As professional email marketer's we believe our time tested approach offers our clients the best possible results thus maximising the bang for the buck
Trivia - Did you know ?
- Outlook 2007 only shows the first frame of a gif animation and does not actually allow the animation to play
- If you do not specify the width and height of all images the default loaded view in most email clients will break the layout
- A single image based mailer is more likely to be considered spam than one that has a balance of text and images
- Mismatching vertical cells causes layout to break in Outlook 2007
- You can embed images in an emailer so that they show by default without the user having to right click and download images
