Email Marketing – Don’t Let HTML Trip You Up

Made Essential Reading on 22 February 2010 Richard Turrell

HTML emails can be as much of a banana skin to the seasoned designer as they are to the rookie marketer. Although it is often a key requirement that HTML email design reflects your offline brand, you must also think about how this will work for your email recipient.

I have outlined five golden rules for HTML design that will point you in the right direction and let you learn from my own experiences!

Never put key messages in images
If your recipient has images disabled they will not see the key messaging of your email. If it is unavoidable make sure that you cover all avenues and include any key messaging in the body text as well.

Are your Alt Tags acting up?

A simple oversight such as an incorrectly named Alt Tag can be all it takes for a recipient to turn away from your email. Try not to leave anything to the recipients’ imagination, if the top left corner is a company logo, call it just that. Honesty will always win over trickery in the world of email marketing.

Web design is not the same as email design

This is the downfall of many experienced website designers that are asked to build HTML emails for the first time. Put simply, if you use best practice web design and CSS your email will not render as you had planned. The only way to address this is that all fonts, spacing etc must be defined using good old fashioned hand coded HTML. The simpler the code, the more likely it will work in your recipient’s mailbox.

I’ll take the long code road

This is something that can make you look very amateur, very quickly and has caused many issues for many companies. Taking short cuts like using the euro sign (€) instead of the ASCII code can instantly change the meaning of your email. Some examples that I have received recently include:
“resumé” as “resum”, “€100” as “100” or “crème fraîche” as “crme frache”.

Who said that? White text is not alright

Have you ever opened an email where it appears to be missing sections, most importantly the legal footer? This may be down to something as obvious as using white text on a dark background. If the recipient’s email client does not render the background correctly the white text will more than likely be placed on a white background, an ingenious camouflage that can be easily avoided.

There is only one way to make sure that your HTML is effective and that is to test, test and test some more. Test using different email clients (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Hotmail, BT, Webmail), test on different machines, even test on mobile devices. The more time you invest in testing the less likely you are to slip up on a HTML banana skin.