A quick list of e-mail design tips

There are a few important things that you should pay attention to when designing your HTML e-mail campaigns if you want them to look consistent across all the major e-mail and webmail clients.

Each e-mail client or webmail provider have their own anomalies or problems when it comes to display some HTML e-mail content.  If you do not pay attention to these problems, you could find that a large portion of your recipients cannot read your e-mail or it looks nothing like you expected it to!

These quick tips are not specific to Suite26, they are important to bare in mind regardless of where your campaign is being sent from.

  • Outlook 2007 will not display background images most of the time.   Therefore you should avoid using background images in your HTML and CSS unless you are confident that your e-mail will look just as good and still be readable without them.

  • Most e-mail and webmail clients do not support external stylesheets.   Gmail does not support embedded stylesheets.   The best way to ensure consistent styles is to use inline styles (ie; <div style="border: 1px solid red;">).

  • Don't use CSS positioning for layouts.   Support for this is flaky and unreliable.   Although it is very much frowned upon in normal web design, you should use tables for layout when desiging HTML e-mails.

  • Ensure that your campaign is still readable and makes sense when the images are not displayed.   Most e-mail clients disable the images as standard nowadays so your e-mail content needs to get across to the recipient without them.

  • Get the right balance of text and images.   As a general rule there should be more text content than image content or you message will increase the change of being flagged as spam.

  • Don't just put a single image as the content of your e-mail - almost every ISP will block a message like that as spam.

  • Don't use Flash, image maps or forms.   The support for these are flaky at best and non-existent at worst.

  • Include a View Online link at the top of your e-mail for users who have problems reading your e-mail.

  • ALWAYS include an unsubscribe link.

  • Most importantly test your campaigns.   Register some e-mail addresses with the free webmail services (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) and try sending your campaigns to these addresses.

These aren't meant to be 100% solid rules, but if you follow these you have a very good chance of your campaign being sucessfully delivered and looking consistent and as expected to your recipients.