Email Marketing News and Tips

When you are producing your content for your email marketing campaign, it is enticing to create your content in tools such as Microsoft Word. After all, most recent versions of Microsoft Word save to HTML easily. Well, here’s some reasons why you’ll want to look at the resulting HTML code before you email it out.

Word Processing Packages

Word processors, such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer, allow you to save your document as HTML. The issue, however, isn’t in that it can produce HTML, it’s that these packages were designed as word processors and not specifically for web design. Tools such as DreamWeaver and, to some extent, FrontPage were specifically designed to create HTML. Word processors were originally designed to format documents for printing on a printer.

Thus, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice can produce HTML that may not be as compatible in all of the browsers as you might expect. They might also include styles and formatting that just don’t render well 100% of the time. Here are some steps to improve your HTML documents:

Step 1: Test the saved HTML in Firefox 2 and 3 and IE 6 and 7. If it renders correctly in these browsers, then you can move to step 2.

Step 2: Send out a test email containing your HTML and view the results in Outlook, Thunderbird and also in Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

The issue with word processors is that they don’t produce the most efficient or compatible HTML for email use. Specifically, Microsoft’s tools are known for being fully compatible with other Microsoft products, namely IE, but many times format incorrectly when viewed on non-MS browsers such as Firefox, Opera or Safari.

Web Design Applications

Web designers usually choose to use applications such as Adobe (Formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage to produce their web designs for both web and email use. A tool like this provides for the most optimized result you can get in HTML design. Specifically, Dreamweaver allows you to optimize your page to work best even for users who have very slow speed connections. Word processors do not offer this flexibility. In some cases, Word processors might even produce issues such as code that takes too long to render.

Online Web Design Tools

Web based design tools are similar to Dreamweaver, but they are usually much lighter weight. They work well to produce HTML content in a visual way and are likely to produce much better content than a word processor. These tools should produce comparable quality to Dreamweaver which the exception of optimization. If you know your audience is all on dialup modems, you’d probably do better to design your HTML in Dreamweaver and use their optimization tools to enhance the end user’s experience instead of using a web based design tool.

Problems that can result from bad HTML

Using a tool not specifically designed to produce HTML can reduce the quality of your HTML document. Such issues include:

Problem: Lines that are too long (not enough line breaks)
Effect: Recipient sees partial lines or lines that have ! in the middle
Solution: Use an HTML editor that is line length aware or manually break the lines after you finalize your output

Problem: Unnecessary tags are included
Effect: May be scored higher by spam filters
Resolution: Use a more sophisticated tool or manually edit out unnecessary tags

Problem: Not compatible with all browsers
Effect: Some tools produce HTML targeted to one browser
Resolution: Use a more sophisticated tool or remove incompatible tags/code

Problem: HTML does not render correctly on Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo Mail
Resolution: Some resulting code from word processors might create CSS or other styles that conflict with those web based tools. As a result, the web based email tools strip out the offending codes and, as a result, causes the final email to not be viewed correctly.

Email Marketing Campaign Effects

As a result of poor underlying HTML code, your campaign may be far less effective than you might expect. You want to make sure your HTML code ends up fully compatible with all browsers and email readers. This allows any user reading from any browser or any email client to have the same experience as everyone else. The most important factor is testing. You want to always test your final HTML to ensure that it works in as many browsers and email clients as possible.

It’s difficult enough to get the emails into the inbox, but once you get your email in front of the recipient, you want to make sure your recipients can read it as you envisioned. If you don’t understand how to read HTML that well and want to ensure maximum compatibility, Boomerang offers a Professional Service team who can help you out.

Finally, it’s always a good idea to have your email marketing provider add a link to a hosted page in case the HTML email message ends up unreadable.