If you've ever had to create HTML emails, I'm betting you found it to be a messy and confusing process. I know I have.
For the first year or so of Webvanta's existence, we just sent plain text emails. But ultimately we felt that there was just too much lost—as much as some folks disparage HTML emails, the reality is that they are far more readable than plain text if done well.
If you use an email marketing service, as you should if you're sending more than the very occasional bulk email, it will provide some sort of template-based email authoring tool. Unfortunately, I've found them all to be lacking in various ways when it comes to creating emails.
I've concluded that the best approach is to maintain your own HTML template, and hand-code the emails. Then you can paste that content into whatever email service you're using.
This leaves you with the need to create a good HTML email template, and this is easier said than done. In the web world, we're all accustomed to taking half-a-dozen browsers into account. In the ugly world of HTML email, we have literally several dozen email clients to consider. Not only that, their support for HTML is far more limited and inconsistent than in the browser world. (See the Email Standards Project for details.)
Sadly, two of the most common email clients—Microsoft Outlook and Google's Gmail—are two of the worst:
Fortunately, the importance of HTML email as a marketing medium has led to the creation of a lot of expertise about how to deal with this mess.
The key is to imagine that you're back in 1999, except worse, and to completely reset your ideas about best practices. HTML design for email has it's own warped world of best practices, which include:
Since you can't rely on anything in the normal web world to learn how to create good HTML email, you need different resources. There's now an excellent book available on the subject: Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works, by Matthew Patterson.
Matthew works at Campaign Monitor, one of the better email marketing services, and he's had the misfortune of looking at many thousands of HTML emails. He's distilled this experience into a compact book that will get you well up the learning curve. You can read a couple of sample chapters on the web if you need more convincing.
I wish the book went into more detail in a number of areas, but it's a quick read and it will make you more knowledgeable on the subject than the vast majority of designers. It covers much more than just how to code for bad HTML renderers; it starts with the goals of HTML email, how the email environment differs from the web, and how to design accordingly.
You can also find lots of resources about HTML email on the web. Here's a few that I found particularly useful:
You don't need to start from scratch; there are lots of email templates available that give you a tested starting point. Here's a few good sources:
When you have your HTML email coded, a great service for seeing how it looks in lots of email programs, browsers, and on various phones is Litmus. Starting at $49/month ($99/month if you want analytics and spam testing), it isn't cheap, but if you're doing a lot of email marketing it is probably worth it.
Once you're ready to send your HTML emails, you'll probably want to use an email marketing service. There's dozens of them out there, known by the in-crowd as ESPs (email service providers). Choosing one can be almost as confusing as coding your HTML email. We've been around the block with lots of them, but that's a story for another post.
Reader Comments
1 comments
But, it doen't work
From: Ralph, 07/14/10 04:12 PM
Howdy, I send html email straight to the garbage. It is bad security to even render the html emails and they so rarely have any useful content that I don't mind giving them up. Good day