Avoiding Email Rendering and Email Design Disasters
Nothing can kill a well-written marketing message than a problem with email rendering or email design. There are a lot of moving parts to the email marketing process, and it will serve one well to be cognisant of all the parts.
Our blog is an excellent source of information for the email marketer, as is our email newsletter and our whitepaper.
Below is a snippet from the whitepaper Driving email marketing ROI after the inox, illustrating a critical and often overlooked aspect of email marketing and design: email html is not the same as the html you use for a Web site. If your email marketing design is built as if it’s a Web page, be careful.
For example, there are several tags you want to avoid in your email design because they don’t function well in all email clients. Some will even get your email flagged as spam or kept out by an ISP. These tags can affect rendering, but really your first goal is to get your email delivered, so just don’t use them. The risky tags are:
- <Body> elements meaning background color on a page or setting page margins because it’s ripped out in Web clients: the open and close body tags are ripped out
- Page margins “0″
- Background images, whether for the page, a table, a cell; none of these are supported. You can use background colors for tables and cells but not images
- Layers are a fun way to control some functionality as well as layout, but they don’t work in email, so don’t use them
- Rollovers, at mouse state; these don’t work because they’re dictated with JavaScript, which you’re not using in your email, remember?
- Forms <form method=”get || post” action://…….>; if you have a post or even a get form method, it won’t work
For more email marketing and design information, download the whitepaper.
