Email Marketing Best Practices

Designing a rich email campaign is different from designing a web page. Because there are so many various email clients that interpret html differently, it is difficult to design something that will be viewed by all clients. Follow a few rules to get your message across most email clients while staying out of the spam folder at the same time.

  • Design email in a table for positioning elements (yes, use a TABLE)
  • All CSS must be inline and nothing fancy. Remember, you are not sending a stylesheet with your email. Use CSS to pick your color and font, that’s about it.
  • Do not rely on graphics to portray your message as many clients disable them. If you do use graphics, use the alt tag to describe and make sure there is alternate text. Messages must hold up without the use of graphics.
  • When sending a postcard style message, be sure to balance the email by also using some html text. Graphic only messages are a sign of spam, and would be flagged as such.
  • Tell recipients why they have received your message, such as “you signed up for our email list at www…”
  • Provide an unsubscribe link
  • Consider using 3rd party services such as MailChimp for tracking important statistics such as click-through rates. Consider incorporating a landing page into your website that will capture traffic that is funneled back to the site directly from the email campaign.

Email Marketing in Various Browsers: A Test

The email campaign was developed for 5 Seasons Brewing Company in Sandy Springs, Ga. Both the email newsletter and the email post card were tested by emailing them to various email clients. Microsoft Outlook fared well once I turned on the graphics. Alt tags become very important here because some text needs to display in place of the empty images. The alt tags do not display well on a black background, unless there is a way to change the default display of the alt tag text.

The Yahoo account held up very well on the trial run, looking exactly as intended. However, after adding a link to the company’s website in the header graphic, the hyperlink shows around the graphic despite the border set to “n”. Some separation is seen between the 2 tables.

The student AIA email account displayed it fundamentally correct, but caused some interference in the line spacing. Negative margins and letterspacing looked the worst in the AIA email account.

Recommendations to the client will be to consider adopting a landing page into the company website to track traffic to the site from the email campaign (clicks from the header or link). Also, on-line reservations should be available through a link.