A quick intro: if you’re unfamilliar how to make an email template (see How to Make a Sexy Email Template), and what you should know to market via email ( see Email Promotion Basics), you might want to check these links out first.
Once you have an established template, it’s best not to attempt a radical change. Use the template as it was designed, simply replacing an image or editing the content. Structural changes – like the positioning of images, or the addition of something entirely new will create unintended problems.
Why is that? To accomodate the 20+ programs that let you view html emails, designers have to take special consideration on how we build the initial templates. In other words, something that looks great in Outlook, can look crappy in Gmail. So we tend to stick to the basics of html when building your intial template. In most cases all you need to do is edit text, or swap out a picture.
If you’re looking to do something different than what the layout can handle, it’s best to have a new template created. Editing it yourself in Word or Outlook can have many unintended effects. (note: developers don’t use Microsoft products to design emails becasue they suck.) Even though the email looks great on your computer after the edit, in truth Microsoft assumes that everyone will be using the same software to view the final results. So it adds code – hidden codes which only Microsoft understands. The end results are pictures appearing in bad places, and emails that client will never understand.
You’ll spend hours trying to edit and figure it out, and in the end the results keep getting worse.
Email is not as simple as it used to be. With all of the inbrowser editing capabilities, people assume that what you see is what your recipients will see. Nothing can be farther from the truth. That’s why developers have established the Email Standards Project, and it’s our hope that one day most email programs will treat your emails in the same way.
Filed under: Email Marketing, Tools of the Trade | Tagged: email template
