Whats the best way to send out an HTML Email marketing shot??

[Notorious Lee]

I have designed an email shot using raw HTML coding which appears fine.

However, in Microsoft Outlook 2003 if the user as the option "edit & read messages in word" enabled it throws out alignment, etc. I do know Word does add & change the coding.

What do you guys normally do when designing email shots so they have a consistent look whichever way they are viewed & sent?

The email shot was designed using tables which I know mail clients won't recognize certain html tags.

Thanks

 

[Tripnologist]

We do them old school in tables and no CSS.

CSS support across mail clients is sketchy to say the least.

 

[simisker]

[...] What do you guys normally do when designing email shots so they have a consistent look whichever way they are viewed & sent? [...]

Personally, I don't get too hung-up on absolutely rigid pixel-perfect consistency across the board. Given the myriad clients out there, I make sure that there's graceful degradation going on, and that both the message and call to action are accessible no matter what.

Get it consistent for the biggies - which, depressingly, includes Lotus Notes if you're doing B2B stuff - and make sure it's readable in all others.

So yes: tables for layout, as structurally simple as possible. This should be easily attainable given that it's an e-shot, not a newsletter.

Inline CSS at every opportunity, sometimes doubling up with deprecated font tags under certain conditions [background/text clashes when style-less, for instance].

Design flexibility into your e-shot. Don't rely on specifiying widths or heights as they're all over the place in terms of client interpretation.

Consider images a luxury, not a right. This includes background images [Outlook 2007 doesn't bother showing them].

Speaking of which: Outlook 2007 is the biggest swine client, but if you can't do test sends before a live send, you may never know how badly it'll render your design until it's too late. A neat way of checking is to open the e-shot in Word 2007, as it uses the same rendering engine and thus gives a good representation of what all those lucky Outlook 2007 users will see.

Never put forms in an e-mail. Just no, nay, never.