Email Marketing News and Tips

In the email marketing world, delivering your content may be the simplest thing about marketing with email.  The more challenging part of email marketing is crafting your content so that it will be read and so that it will also be viewed as you intend.  There are many different reasons why your content may not be viewed correctly, but those issues may not be readily apparent to you.

Email Viewers

In the email marketing world, HTML has become the way to produce graphical content for your recipients.  Unfortunately, the email client world hasn’t kept pace with browser technology advancements.  So, while in the browser world we on the verge of standards like HTML 5, in the email client world we’re just barely supporting cascading style sheets (CSS).  Keep in mind that CSS was designed and released in 1994.  In some cases, CSS still isn’t supported in email clients.

Clients

The most common consumer standalone email clients today include Outlook (primarily 2003 and above), Thunderbird, Mac Mail and Entourage.  Although, there are many many more clients available for use. For portable devices, these email readers include Blackberry, Nokia and iPhone/iPod Touch.  For web mail, these include Yahoo, Windows Live Mail (MSN / Hotmail), Gmail and AOL mail.

For PC/Mac based clients, these clients are fully capable of rendering standard HTML email fare.  These clients are the most capable clients.  That means, these clients will offer the richest formatting options with HTML.  With every other client besides these standalone email readers, these lesser clients will be far less capable and have far more restrictions on formatting.  Thus, these restrictions will affect your email’s end result when viewed.

For web based viewing of emails, the restrictions on CSS and other formatting are quite apparent.  In some cases, CSS is completely stripped from the email leaving the email to look like a disaster when viewed.

Trouble In Paradise

The trouble with creating content starts, though, when even one person in your list uses a lesser capable viewer.  What do you do?  Well, you can compromise.  That is, you can tailor your email content to the least capable client.  This will nearly ensure that every email client will render your content as you intend.  In that process of compromise, however, you may lose many of your formatting options.  This may leave your HTML email flat and unimpressive.  You may be forced to use this option if you don’t know what clients your recipients are using… and in many cases, you can’t easily know without asking.

Formatting Smart

HTML has come a long way since the early days.  But, in email, we’re still at least 10 years behind the current HTML technology trends.  So, while people are using div to place objects about the page in 2010, in email you still need to use tables because these advanced placement options don’t work.

Creation of email content can be a challenge that requires you to step back in time and understand the limitations.  However, if you want to market properly, you need to be up for that challenge when producing your content.  Otherwise, your creatives may format improperly.

Compromising

Because email HTML rendering is still firmly seated in 1990s technology, you won’t get all of the bells and whistles of a modern browser.  So, when creating content for email viewing, you may need to compromise your artistic design to accommodate the older technology requirements.  For example, if you have an already designed web site that you want to use as cut and paste reference, this may require you to redesign that modern design (that may be using div tags which don’t work in an email client) into tables that will properly format in an email client.  This conversion process adds time to how fast you can deploy a given email campaign.  So, you should factor this conversion time into your campaign’s expectations.  Further, depending on content, it could take anywhere between 1-2 days to convert your existing web page into content suitable for sending emails.

Web Design Tools

Design tools such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage are great at designing web pages.  Unfortunately, they weren’t designed with email in mind.  So, if you decide to design your email content in these tools, you will need to review the resulting generated HTML for proper email formatting.  You may then need to rework that HTML to comply with email HTML standards so that your creative looks good in Outlook or Thunderbird.

Testing and more testing

It cannot be stressed enough that you need to test your HTML email in every email client you can get your hands on.  If you do not test, your recipients may not see what you have envisioned.  So, it’s always critical that you test sending and viewing emails in clients you know that your recipients are using.

Professional Services

Boomerang has extensive experience creating content properly for email applications.  As such, our professional services staff is fully experienced with the proper ways to format an email for best impact and presentation.  So, if you are new to email marketing, ask questions and use experienced staff to format your email properly.  You don’t want to hear of surprises.  Once you become experienced with creating content for email, you can then move forward with creation yourself using whatever tools you like.

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