Getting Started

Your HTML email could look brilliant on your own computer - and look absolutely terrible on someone else's computer. If you are not familiar with HTML you will probably spend ages wondering what went wrong, why it looked just fine before you sent it and why it looks so terrible on being sent. The reason is such emails display differently on different email clients. You need to ensure that your email is suitable for the majority of email clients and not just your own email client. Basically, in order for your email to look good you need to ensure that your email gets displayed in the way that you intended it to look.

There are also a number of HTML design tips that you can follow and implement in your email in order for it to display correctly and look good.

So before you send out your email, ask yourself - does my HTML email look alright?

Universal Formatting

So how do you manage to get your HTML email to look great in most email clients? Achieving this is no small feat; there are no standards when it comes to these emails. Your email may look great when you use Gmail and it may look completely distorted when you use Outlook. To solve this problem, a number of email marketers suggest that you stick to basic designs and keep your email as simple as possible. Another suggestion is that you get a designer to create a customized template to work from.

This problem gets even more complicated when you look at how certain email client creators such as Microsoft go back to older HTML standards when it comes to email clients that are relatively new. Microsoft did this with Outlook 2007; it does not have as much CSS support as its last version.

However, there is always a way around this issue. There are a number of things you can try to optimize your HTML email in order for it to work well and look good with most of the email clients. You could run your HTML code through a validation service. This service will notice and fix any large coding mistakes such as forgetting to put end tags. You could also use an email testing service to test your email. Another option is to test your HTML email on your own. You can make a test group comprising of various email addresses of different email clients and test your email with all of them. You can even try to use HTML email templates that have already been tested.

Conclusion

There are also a number of HTML design tips that you can follow and implement in your email in order for it to display correctly and look good. So before you send out your email, ask yourself - does my HTML email look alright? If you don't think it does, you know how to make it look good!


About the Author

Jamie Colbs is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( Html Email Newsletter Templates - Benchmark Email ) a leading Web and permission-based service for sending email newsletters.