Creating HTML Emails

Augmented · 8 May 2007 at 10:09

As much as I've tried to avoid getting involved in designing emails, I've unfortunately been tasked with creating an HTML email. It's a product promotion; so going to be pretty much a sliced graphic and some links (wrapped in <tables> with inline CSS :erk

. Even so, I've got little to no knoweldge of potential pitfalls and so on. Read a couple of articles from Sitepoint and ALA so far, but still a little lost as to the best dimensions to aim for, the major dos and don'ts etc.

Anyone got any good articles/tutorials on creating HTML emails?

Nate · 8 May 2007 at 11:21

I have been looking into similar things and have come up quite stumped. Also not be really able to find out how much html to use before it gets classed as spam!

Augmented · 8 May 2007 at 11:27

Yeah, seems like it's a good idea to include plenty of good text copy to stop spam filters being triggered.

From what I've gathered so far, <500px is recommended and avoid any <head>,<html> or <body> as they'll be stripped.

http://mailchimp.blogs.com/blog/2006/01/im_a_web_design.html and their PDF have been good-reading so far: http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/gen_email_design.phtml

Beansprout · 8 May 2007 at 11:32

The 3 rules of HTML emails:

1) Do not talk about HTML emails
2) Do not talk about HTML emails
3) Do not talk about HTML emails

Apart from that, you'll be fine

The main thing is to put a link at the top along the lines of "if you can't see this email, please click here" with a link to an online version.

Also, try to avoid typical spam patterns such as a banner-size linked image at the top and then a chunk of text. Common new spam practice

I don't think the spam filters will be too mean as spam e-mails aren't generally big, complex HTML documents.

As long as you include the inline CSS, and the aforementioned link to the online copy, you *should* be ok. Obviously then test the email with the popular mail clients (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOHell, Outlook) to be sure!

Augmented · 8 May 2007 at 11:51

Beansprout said:
The 3 rules of HTML emails:

1) Do not talk about HTML emails
2) Do not talk about HTML emails
3) Do not talk about HTML emails

Apart from that, you'll be fine

The fourth rule; if someone bounces, opts-out or reports you as junk, the spamming stops.

The main thing is to put a link at the top along the lines of "if you can't see this email, please click here" with a link to an online version.

Sure. This email I'm working on will be linked to a specific landing page, so there will be a back-up in place. I've read that multipart/alternative emails are recommended - HTML version is accompanied by a plain text version so the client can fall-back if they're unable to render the HTML - still looking into that though.

Beansprout · 8 May 2007 at 12:45

Augmented said:
Sure. This email I'm working on will be linked to a specific landing page, so there will be a back-up in place. I've read that multipart/alternative emails are recommended - HTML version is accompanied by a plain text version so the client can fall-back if they're unable to render the HTML - still looking into that though.

That's sounds neat - not considered that before