Does my
Email look big in this?
This month we look at email rendering. How can you ensure that your delivered email looks the same as your design?
As marketers we spend hours ensuring that our design work looks right. We review printed material before we send it and we go through our website with a fine tooth comb. However, far too many of us neglect to test our emails before sending them to our database. Every day thousands of marketing emails are poorly rendered and brands are being damaged.
Our designers have spent the last six years perfecting the art of email template design. Here are their top five tips for ensuring your email renders in the maximum number of email clients.
Top five design tips
- Build the email using Tables for layout - this is the most stable way to format HTML emails across most email readers;
- Stylesheets are a no-no - email readers commonly ignore these. Use <font> tags or inline styles instead;
- Use Web Standard fonts only (colours, sizes, families) - your email will render these more consistently;
- Never embed images - always host them on a web server. This ensures a much smaller email size. It also avoids your email being rejected by some email readers;
- Ensure images are correctly sized and are RGB. Save them at 72 dpi resolution and optimised to .gif or .jpg format.
The most important thing is to test your email before you send it. Always make sure you test in Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Lotus Notes and Outlook. These are the five most popular email clients.
Leave it to the professionals...
If this is too much, we suggest finding an email marketing provider that will build and test a re-usable template for you.
At NewZapp we test every email template in a wide variety of email clients before we release them for use.
"This doesn't cost a penny extra."
You'll be able to re-use your template as often as you like. Safe in the knowledge that it's been tested and approved by our expert design team.
NewZapp starts at just £600 a year. Take a look at our website or contact us for more details. |
