Email Marketing News and Tips

Let’s admit it: HTML email designers are hired to create decent-looking newsletters that are dressed with a solid layout, styles, colors, graphics, etc to go along with content. Personally, I love incorporating these into my HTML emails simply because they add flavor to the message. This is not to say plain old text emails are not as effective. It’s just that I prefer a little more pizazz - without overdoing it. You can use an internal or external CSS file in your HTML code. In addition, you can use in-line styles.

In my HTML email newsletters, I use CSS Properties to dress up the elements a bit such as text, borders, cells. After a few tests, I believe the following CSS properties are safest to use when displaying in major email readers, Web-based or PC-based:

• background-color
• border
• color
• font-size
• font-style
• font-weight
• letter-spacing
• line-height
• padding
• text-align
• text-decoration
• text-indent
• text-transform
• vertical-align
• width
• word-spacing

I’m sure there are more properties that can be used safely but these are the main ones I use.

Below are screenshots of a sample HTML email sent to my email accounts:

Outlook 2000:

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Hotmail:

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Gmail (as viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0):

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Gmail (as viewed in Firefox 3.0.10):

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Yahoo:

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As you can see, the results are consistent across these email readers. In conclusion, the CSS properties listed above should be safe to use in your HTML email newsletters.