Does my email look big in this?

In this article 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 new designs are perfect, we review printed material over and over before we send it to the presses, 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 ten 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 and avoids your email being rejected by some email readers.
• Ensure images are correctly sized on the server (and not relying on code to resize them in the email) and are in RGB format, @ 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, Google Mail, Outlook and Lotus Notes if possible. These are the five most popular email clients.

For more information about building your own html email templates, take a look at the guides our design team have written, available in the Designer Zone.

Leave it to the professionals...

If this is all a bit 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 custom built email template in a wide variety of email clients (Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010, Hotmail, Google Mail, Virgin Mail, Orange Mail, Yahoo Mail, Thunderbird, Opera, Mac Mail and Lotus Notes). 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.