According to facebook, a quarter of their users access their accounts through mobile phone devices and are twice as active as regular users.

The figures have risen from 5 million users in 2008 (source) to 150 million in 2010 (source) with 50 million of those new users coming in the last 6 months.  This, it seems is just the beginning.  With Android software being open to all phone manufacturers, there is a flood of affordable Smartphone devices coming into the market leaving these figures undoubtedly rising further.

In a presentation earlier in the year, Mary Meeker, head of global technology research at Morgan Stanley, forecast that mobile browsing would surpass desktop browsing within the next 5 years.

So what does this have to do with email marketing?  Well, if there is an increase in mobile usage, there will be a drop in actual PC/Laptop usage times.  That drop in usage I attribute to the casual Internet user.  The main goal when they usually log on is to have a quick check of their Social Networking, Email, and one or two select other sites that they will always visit.  Ultimately though, their agenda isn’t more than that.

In the past, a good number of these may actually end up aimlessly surfing the Internet for a long period of time as they have no real purpose to the session – a point where they would be more susceptible to marketing messages and exploring around the site and beyond their original intentions.

With mobile users, if they are intending to search for an item to buy, they will be more specific in their searches.  You will see browsing times drop, due to a lack of browser capability compared to desktop browsers.

Research from late last year also backs up this claim, stating that “60% of consumers have encountered a problem when accessing a website from their mobile phone during the past 12 months”. 

The main factors that caused this are:

• Slow load times (73%)
• Experiencing errors and crashes on the mobile site (51%)
• Formatting of the mobile site makes it difficult to use (48%)
• Mobile site not functioning as expected (45%)

With no unlimited amount of tabs and browsers running simultaneously, users would get frustrated trying to mimic their actions on a desktop browser, so their habits will consequently be different.

This does though, throw up opportunities for email marketers; ones that are already in place.

Recipients more tuned in?

Whilst the mobile browser will have a decrease in ability to browse, this also decreases the amount of things they can be doing at the same time.  This could lead to users paying more attention to your message than before, as long as it is readable and you have got your timing right….

For more on mobile email design, check out this style campaign blog, a great resource for design ideas.

Landing Pages

If the mobile browser user experience is an issue in conversion rates, then it is a marketers duty to ensure that this problem is limited as much as possible.  Landing pages optimised to mobile browsing is the best available solution, and so should be considered in the planning process.  Furthermore, sites that retain their customers details such as billing and delivery addresses being automatically loaded after the user supplies email address and password, will also help in limiting the users poor browsing experience.

The importance of timing

With mobile email marketing, you are potentially plugged into contacting them all the time.  The timing of when they will be receptive though will differ to that of a send to a desktop recipient.

Maybe your mobile recipients are on the train home from work and with not much else to do, will pay much more attention to your message than at any other point.

On the other hand, you could catch them out with friends, and if the email is not relevant it could be instantly dismissed.

Timing will be incredibly important and something that will have to be tested to get the most out of your campaigns.

If we’re looking to the future, I can envisage the sending process of email marketing evolving to be more intuitive to each subscriber; more of an advanced trigger mechanism based on  the subscriber’s past history opposed to a bulk send, which is the usual way to carry out an email campaign now.

Less is More

If we’re going to look at the best way to achieve success from mobile recipients, we are going to be looking at shorter email campaigns, with straight to the point content.

Indeed, Mary Meeker in her presentation even notes that “One of the implications of mobile access is a growth in ecommerce, featuring things such as location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc.”

Coupons, location specific and time limited offers could be a lot more effective with mobile marketing, catching people on the move and enticing them into your store, bar, restaurant, event etc.

Less may also mean more in the case of sending frequency, with a useful statistic drawn from the comprehensive guide on mobile email over on Mark Brownlow’s blog post (well worth a read) that stated “mobile email users less tolerant of higher-frequency emails than “traditional” email users”.  Although I personally believe that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case and that this is drawn from people receiving desktop emails to their mobile devices; I’ll be going more into frequency strategies in my next post.

This is something that happens to a lot of people and can be very easily fixed.

The chances are you are using Outlook 2007 as your email client, and that uses a different rendering engine to other desktop and web-based clients and affects people who have used the image resizing tool within their campaign to get their images to the right size.

When the email is sent to Outlook 2007, the client removes the code that resizes the image and leaves it in its original (and normally huge) state; making your campaign look ugly, and unprofessional.

The Solution: Images need to be uploaded to mailingmanager in their desired size to prevent this from happening.  A major hurdle for a lot of people with this is that they don’t have the software to do this.  Luckily, we at mailingmanager have found a great, free bit of software for you to use.  View the tool on CNET and download it and remove this problem from ever happening again.

Are you a Mac user?  Try this app from the Apple site.

The email keeps doing weird things after I’ve saved it (content disappearing, layout moving around, text changing font and size)

This is a very common problem we hear and some poor people keep struggling through it, re-doing the campaign again, only to find it reoccur after saving again.

The problem is down to copying and pasting from Microsoft Word, email, or from any word processing software that defines the font type and size.  The reason it causes this problem is because it doesn’t use html code to change the font format and instead uses code that WYSIWYG html editors can’t read and display correctly.  The result is that the WYSIWYG, in its attempt to make sense of the unrecognised code, will break and distort the email causing erratic (and sometimes drastic) changes to the email, leaving your shouting profanities at the screen!

The Solution: Never, ever copy and paste from Microsoft Word, Publisher, Outlook, or any other word processing program that can alter font formatting.  You have two options really:

Either type directly into the editor or, alternatively if you want to copy and paste from an existing document, paste it into the Notepad prior to pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor and then you will not bring any dodgy coding over with it.

The Email keeps expanding in size when I…

….put links in

We’ve seen this enough times for this to be mentioned as advisory to not do.  A lot of times people will put in a link such as:

http://www.mailingmanager.co.uk/reallylongurl/inasubsectionofthesite/reallylongpagename.html

This will be inserted into the email how it is above.  The problem with doing this is that the link will not split onto two lines and will instead just continue on the same line, causing it to push out the size of your email, and make it lose its desired shape.

The Solution: The link needs to be put into a hyperlink to stop this problem from happening.  Just have it inserted behind wording such as “view the rest of this article” or “read more” and you will remove this problem.

….put images in

You may have taken our advice above and resized the images to your desired size and then gone to insert it, only to find that when you do insert it, it pushes out the width of the email.

The Solution: It is a pretty simple one; the image is too big.  The reason this is included is because people normally do the whole campaign before realising this mistake.

When they look at it though, they normally see the image as having space on either side of it, making them presume that it can’t be the image causing the problem.  What they sometimes miss is that most tables have a padding value in it that makes the images and text not touch the sides to give it a nice overall look.  You can reduce the padding if you want the image to fit, but we personally recommend shrinking that image a little bit more.

These are our most common issues that we receive.  If you keep having a recurring issue that you want solving, please post a comment below or email support@mailingmanager.co.uk with the problem and we will give you the solution.

Over the past year we have seen some parts of the email marketing industry progress and become more prominent whilst we have also seen announcements which mean certain aspects of email marketing will stay the same for quite some time.

Domain Based Reputation

One of the big issues to arise for me is ISP’s adoption of domain based reputation.  There’s a couple of great articles on it here:

Times are changing for E-Mail Marketing
The coming gold rush with domain based reputation

In a (very small) nutshell, this potentially could mean that you’re accountable for your sending practices regardless of how many different IP’s or ESP’s you go through.

Although in this Return Path post it does point out that rather than being the sole solution to everyone’s problems, it will more likely be another tool for ISP’s to adopt to be more accurate with their reputation filtering.

So what does this mean to you?  Well, basically it’s another step forward in promoting good sending practices and sending relevant emails.  Those of you who are conscientious about your sending practices and campaign content, will see your campaigns strive, whilst those who don’t will see their campaigns continue to lose effectiveness.

Engagement

The best way to adapt to domain based reputation filtering is to keep your subscribers engaged in the emails you send out.  Engagement has become a more prominent issue throughout 2009, and I can see that continuing through 2010.

This post from Mark Brownlow brings up a great point “organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender’s messages”.

As reputation filtering progresses, so does the definition of spam.  Marketers still looking towards what the law defines as spam will ultimately fail as its definition is now the opinion of each person you send to; legal terms won’t stop a recipient from disengaging or pressing the “this is spam” button.

Have a look at a previous post I wrote for inspiration on how to maintain engagement.

Preference Centres

Another way to keep your recipients engaged is through preference centres.  Okay, not a new subject but it has continued to grow in popularity since it was introduced.

Preference centres are an alternative to unsubscribe links.  They will allow your subscribers to choose what they receive from you.  In theory, this should reduce the levels of unsubscribes you receive – great.  This in turn will allow your subscribers to also choose what emails they receive, which should keep them more engaged in your messages – also great.

So why not use them for your campaigns? Read more here:

Why an email preference center matters
Preference centres and positive unsubscribe processes

Strategy

The new year is a great time for marketers to start to plan ahead for the year.  A post I wrote last year outlines how some campaigns become stale and fall into a rut.  Eventually you could see your recipients becoming emotionally unsubscribed from your messages – an email marketers’ nightmare.

So with the new year in place, why not try planning out a full years campaigns using the email campaign life cycle model?  The idea is that by setting out your campaigns with a definite end to it, it will keep you engaged in your own campaigns as well as your recipients.

Design

News in 2009 was that Microsoft confirming that Outlook 2010 will keep the same rendering engine as Outlook 2007. Despite a big uproar from the email marketing community, the engine in Outlook 2010 will keep the design side of the industry limited.

Here’s an email design essentials post I wrote a while back to help you on your way in this area.

For all designers out there, here is the only guidesheet you need.

To celebrate, we’ve decided to do a double blog post series with our IHM web design team.

This series is a look from two different angles of the email marketing world.  My posts will be based upon the fundamentals of email marketing whilst Chris’s (one of our designers) posts will be based purely on the design aspects of the campaign.

First up is Chris’s choice of email – One from Font Shop Digest.

The subject line is a bit of a tame affair (Digest | FontShop News | October 27, 2009).  It repeats the send from name in the Subject Line which is never impressive and it doesn’t really entice me into opening the email. 

In terms of offering some improvement of the subject line; it’s a bit tough as I know virtually nothing about the font industry (about the last 10 minutes looking on their site) but if they could mention what the main feature of the email is in the subject line, that may see an increase in interested openers.

My Suggestion: “This months new and exclusive fonts plus all the latest news”

Okay so onto the actual email itself.  The first thing you nice is the date – I mean, there’s no way to miss it; it’s huge. I eventually decided though, this isn’t a bad thing. 

The logo is near by so that the branding is still coming across and it gives the beginning of the email a quirk to it – something I’m sure the design community love.  The addition of a link to the font that has been used to create the date is something which I quite liked as well; the large date initially draws the eye and then there is a clear call-to-action to satisfy any further interest.

The email itself is nicely put together – the obvious gripe I’m going to have with it is due to the overuse of images in the email – the ratio is in the favour of the images far too much.  Understandably, it is going to be an uphill struggle for a font company to advertise their fonts without having them as images and in there defence, they have made use of text wherever possible so I can’t really make improvements on what they have done.

They do get minus points for the use of the search function in the email – nice idea, if it worked in most email clients.  As it doesn’t, it’s a bit of a waste.

In terms of the campaign on a whole, it has more than just a sales pitch which means that even if the recipient isn’t interested in purchasing at the time of the email, there is still interesting content for them to read through; meaning the recipients interest is maintained throughout.

You can view Chris’ take on this email here

Now I’m not passionate about many things, but I went as far as joining Twitter to actually voice my discontent at this news (yes, I wasn’t on twitter before – @mailingmanager by the way).

So why am I so passionate about this?  Well, my main reason is that having Outlook 2010 not changing from its 2007 rendering ways, means Email Marketing is essentially left with the same design limitations for years to come.  So whilst the Web world can continue to grow and try out (I assume) great new things, we’re left working with tables for years to come. 

Don’t get me wrong, if they had changed the rendering engine, it really wouldn’t have changed too much for us at the present as a lot of people would be continuing to use outlook 2007 and we’d have to continue to base our designs on ensuring it renders in this program.  There would though, be those possibilities in the future for designs to start to change and barriers to be broken down.

Anyway, foot stamping over.  So what does this actually mean for us right now?  Well, not a whole lot really.  We’ll still be pretty much sticking to the same rendering rules as far as I know, so it’s business as usual.  If you’re unsure on what this is, have a look at one of my previous posts about email design essentials.

Keep a look out for a really in depth email design post coming soon giving you all the CSS coding you can use.

Also, join the stand against Outlook 2010 using the MS Word rendering tool here: http://www.fixoutlook.org/

The effects of images on email inbox delivery

So we had a thought about fully image based emails and how it might be possible to increase the deliverability of them by extensively using the alt tags to raise the image to text ratio.

Basically, the thought process was that Spam filters only read the emails they have received in code view anyway.  So if the content of the email was just inserted into the alt tags, the spam filter could still see the content and give it a more favourable score.

Using the Delivery Monitor system, we used one of our clients emails to test (thanks go out to Crimestoppers for letting us use their email – see the email here).

We sent out 5 variations of the email which are as follows:

Email sent at 10:35 – Full Image, No Alt Text

Email sent at 10:45 – Full Image, Alt Text Included

Email sent at 11:10 – Email split into multiple images, Alt Text Included

Email sent at 11:15 – Email split into multiple images, No Alt Text

Email sent at 12:25 – Full HTML

View the accompanying results here.

Though it can be argued that the Alt Text helped a bit with deliverability, there really isn’t a great gap between each variation.  What this did manage to do though, is outline how important it is to get a decent HTML designed newsletter created.

When you look at the inbox deliverability drop between image and html based email, are you willing to sacrifice a fifth of your subscriber list out of laziness?

A way of judging forwards without the forwards stats

I’ve always found the forward to a friend reporting system a bit of a pain as it is always so much easier to just click forward in your email client than go through the long winded approach that we have to use.

The only successful way I’ve found for this to work is to offer some kind of promotion code in the forward to a friend process, which allows them discount once the forward to a friend form is completed.

This though, really doesn’t manage to capture the “true forwards”, of people who have forwarded an email on to colleagues or friends as they found it interesting.

Now to my point.  Can I just say now that this is just an observation and in terms of getting a lot out of it, I’m unsure you can really use it as a metric.  This is really just something we realised in the office.

Sometimes you will find an email address has multiple opens within a really close amount of time.  This, it would be logical to say, is actually evidence of that person forwarding their email onto colleagues and friends.  The opens will still be registered to the original recipients address as the email has that users ID in it, but to say they opened it 6 or 7 times within two minutes seems a bit much.  

And yes, I know that this theory has a superb amount of holes in it but it may be worth considering that those multiple opens could actually be unique opens from people not on your mailing list.  Just a bit of food for thought for you.

So how do you ensure that your email ends up being opened in your recipients’ ever increasing inbox?

Well, don’t you worry as I’ve decided to do a quick checklist of the really important things to remember and I’ll try and link back to previous posts so you can read on in detail on areas you may be a little rusty on.

The first place to start would probably be with the initial list building.  Making your emails as relevant as possible to your recipients is (as I’ve said far too many times) the key to making a success out of your campaigns.

This always means that a self built list is far, far more useful than a purchased list.  By having a self built list you’re giving yourself a great headstart over any competitors that have chosen the other route.  Have a read of my post “increasing active subscribers” to get a few tips on how to get the most out of your sign up process.

Whilst you’re looking at that post, also have a look at “using transactional emails as a promotional tool” for inspiration on your thank you/receipt emails.

Some of you may be sitting there smugly, knowing full well you have a self-built list, but that’s merely the start of the battle.  You must still make sure you’re sending relevant emails to these people.  You may have several different areas of your company and not each area appeals to each recipient.  So how do you go about targeting those different sectors of your audience I hear you cry?

Have a look at my post “passive segmentation” for ideas on how it should be done.

So with your list self-built and sufficiently segmented, you young padwan, are ready for the next stage: design.

This year it isn’t just about ensuring your designs match the standard requirements, though it does help as a foundation for your campaign (here’s the “email design essentials” to help you).  You will have to really make a great first impression on your recipients when they open.  One subject that was brought up a while ago was videos and animated gifs in emails, which I personally didn’t cover on this blog but you can follow the discussions here (plenty of links in this post as well so you can get the full story).Though, as you will read, there are limitations to it all, it is a great trick to draw someone’s attention straight to a certain area.

Design aspect aside, the content of your email must be something that is always heavily considered.  Try to be regular but at the same time, don’t send for the sake of sending.  You want each email to be as interesting as possible and something that your recipients will be happy to open the next time.  A way to do this is without too much trouble is by linking to social media.  A friend of mine who works in the AOL music department was directing users to the site by hosting the latest buzz videos interlaced with their own recent videos.  A great way to grab the recipients engagement with your content.  For a further thought on this, take a look at “viralability: forward to the future”.

Now onto the final bit, unsubscribing.  Though this has in the past been a one-click affair, 2009 is the year to increase your efforts on the unsubscribing efforts.  Take a look at “preference centres and positive unsubscribe processes” for further assistance.  I’ve put a few great links at the bottom of that post to help you further.

So this year you will have to not only attract your customers but also compete against a greater amount of emails in your recipients’ inbox.

Fear not though!  We’re going to point out what you should be looking out for and then give you a couple of ideas on how to distinguish yourself from the competition.

The first thing to do is start to look back at your years statistics.  Try and look at them to see any emerging patterns:

• Yearly Trends (open rates increasing/decreasing)
  • What has changed during the year? Make a note to use for future planning.
  • If you are not already, make sure you’re split testing your campaigns to makes sure you know what makes your recipients react.
  • If you have changed nothing but are still seeing negative results for the year, it may be that your campaign has become stale and un-interesting.  Definitely time for a rethink.

• Any anomalies in results (positive or negative)
  • Look at the campaigns that have out of the ordinary results – what was different?
  • Subject lines, Special Offers, Design etc. should all be looked at to get ideas for your upcoming campaign.

By really spending some time going through the stats, you can get a feel for what turns your customers on/off from your mails.

Re-Energise Campaign

One thing to look out for is a gradually turned off customer base.  If you’ve seen your open stats gradually decrease over the year, it could be that your recipients are slowly growing tired of the same email format you are sending.

A re-energise campaign is in order to get those lost opens back.  Sales, competitions and other similar, out of the ordinary campaigns will re-ignite a lot of your subscribers interest within your campaign.

It could also be a case that you are sending too regularly to your recipients.  Many email experts have always stressed about making each and every email you send interesting and not just sending one for the sake of sending.

Relevant, interesting emails, every email, is the key to a better conversion rate. 

Subject Line

I’m signed up to that Google alerts email for email marketing and some of the ones I’ve recently received have been along the lines of “2009: The year of the subject line”. 

If you’re unsure about subject lines and how to get the most out of them, here are a whole bunch of links that should really get you up to date.

Writing Effective Subject Lines

Subject Line Review

Step Out From the Croud

I know this is really easy for me to say and so much harder for you to do but you have to think of a way to distinguish yourself from the competition.

As there will be more companies using email marketing than before, this point becomes even more valuable than before.

I have previously talked about emails with viralability.  Such an email can have a massive impact not only on business itself but also exposure to new potential customers and if you can think of something which can have this effect, you’re on to a winner.

Themed campaigns can make your emails stand out as well as keeping your newsletters different throughout the year which will keep your recipients interest maintained.

Theme’s could be seasonal or in line with the current news stories or maybe evolve around major events.  All of which should grab their attention (depending your company).

Design

Keeping your newsletters design up to date is another thing worth considering.  Are the call to actions clear and visible?  Is the email engaging and professional?  You can go to my article on the basics for email design and make sure you’re considering everything.

But now people are looking further and I think probably the biggest buzz around email marketing is videos and animated gifs in emails.  Perhaps the big trend on 2009?   Only in moderation hopefully.

Hopefully this has given you some good ideas on where to take your 2009 email marketing campaign. Remember to keep A/B Split testing everything you do and learn from each mistake and success that occurs.

So let’s take the laptop as an example.  I’m going to want a laptop once every three or four years, depending on the quality.  I would assume that the majority of people would have a similar habit to me on this.

During this time, I want to receive as much information and offers about laptops as I can possibly get so that I can make a well informed decision for the best price I can find.

I would be happy to see a more frequent email campaign coming from any of the laptop companies that I have signed up for; and any computer specialist retailers should really be sending a higher frequency of emails.

You see, as soon as I buy my laptop, I’m not going to be slightly interested in what they have to say anymore, and will unsubscribe from them.  They really only have a very short time frame in which to grab a large majority of their recipients attention, and more importantly, convert them to sales.

At the other end of the spectrum though, are companies that really don’t need to send that many emails at all.  I help a friend with his email campaigns for a valve company.  Now as I’m sure you can guess, the world of valve sales isn’t the fastest paced and intense of marketplaces and he only really does a bi-annual email with latest developments.

When you look at his customers and recipients, they still tend to have a quite high brand loyalty and therefore will not need reminding of his companies presence but can just try to maybe persuade potential customers with new developments.

Again a general rule is to keep the emails more regular than that to ensure that the potential customers’ interest is sustained, but I think that anything more than a bi-annual campaign would be more damaging to a customer’s interest and may cause the subscriber to switch off from the newsletter as the messages get watered down with irrelevant content.

So I think that the frequency of your campaigns isn’t as important as how well received it will be.  Make sure that the campaign you send out isn’t just for the sake of sending an email out but is full of relevant, intriguing information that will maintain your recipient’s interest.

If that means that you must decrease or increase your email activity, don’t be scared off by rules telling you otherwise.

The width of your email should be at a maximum 650px wide.  This is so the subscriber doesn’t have to scroll left and right to view the emails message.

Also, another basic one which should never be forgotten.  Try to keep all colours and fonts used in the email websafe.  You may have a fantastic and weird font that suits your companies image, but that doesn’t mean the rest of your subscribers do. 

Keep it websafe otherwise your text will revert to the default font for them and you don’t want that happening.

Try and keep your coding as clean and as minimal as possible.  Don’t start putting tables in tables in tables (you get the idea)… You’re just asking for rendering issues!

Text to Image Ratio

Basic: A while back now email clients started to reject image rich emails as spammers were managing to avoid the spam word filters by just creating large images with their message in it.

As a basic rule, I usually suggest to clients that they have a 70% text to 30% image ratio in their emails to ensure that deliverability is kept to a high level.  Though this may raise a designing problem, it’s something that any legitimate company should undertake to ensure that the recipients actually get the chance to read your message. 

Advanced: There are of course ways to get around these problems; whitelisting and accreditation.  Whitelisting is the cheapest solution to you and essentially requires your recipients to mark you as a safe sender in their inboxes.  This way, it allows you to send whichever message you like to your subscribers and they will always receive them in their inboxes. 

The only problem with the whitelisting technique is actually getting them to do this for your company and so, isn’t a viable option if you want image rich emails and a guarantee of inbox deliverability.

A way which does guarantee the delivery into an inbox is the accreditation method.  This though, is a vastly more expensive method and usually is more viable for a medium to large company.  The major accreditation companies are as follows:

Habeas – http://www.habeas.com/Services/For-Senders/SafeList/

Sender Score Certified – http://www.returnpath.net/senderscore/

Goodmail – http://www.goodmailsystems.com/

Surety Mail – http://www.isipp.com/suretymail.php

Certified Senders Alliance – http://www.certified-senders.eu/index_en.htm

Advanced Tip: Avoid 1px x 1px Spacer Gifs

Spacer Gifs have been used to force widths into tables in your email and you should try and avoid this – many clients mark these as spam.

Background Images

Basic: This is generally a no-no in todays email marketing world.  A lot of you I’m sure, are wondering why I’m even mentioning this anymore but you’d be surprised by how many people still don’t know this.

A few of the email clients won’t show background images anymore which basically means that your email will look awful in about 30% of your recipients inboxes – a risk that isn’t worth taking.

Advanced: Okay, so you may still like to use background images as they can really improve the look of your template greatly.  The best way I’ve found around this is to make a standard template that will look nice without the background images and then start to insert the background images after the basic template is created. 

This way, you can feel safe that the 30% of recipients that won’t see the background images will still have a professional looking email message whilst the others will see an enhanced message.   

Tip: Background Colours

Those pesky email clients may also remove your background colours as well.  Best thing to do is put a 100% width table behind all of it and insert your background colour into that.  Then place your newsletter within that table.

Advanced: CSS in Email Design

Quite a lot of the major email clients will block any css created within the <head> tags in the html code and will not render them in the email.  This, can cause server issues with how your email looks and will leave the fonts defaulting back to its original state; usually black font, Times New Roman.

To avoid this, always use css as an inline tag instead if you are to use css at all.  That way you can keep your css to below the <body> tags.  Learn more about css inline tags here or just don’t use it at all and stick to the good old fashioned html font designing.

Basic Tip: Don’t Copy and Paste content from Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word tends to add extra code into the HTML code which can cause rendering issues in your email.  This is also the case for creating whole HTML files in Word and then using them for an email campaign. 

If you think you may have inadvertently done this for a campaign, use this link to try and remove the extra code.

Advanced Tip: Make sure the email is HTML Valid

A great way to ensure that you don’t have any rendering issues is to ensure that your email is html valid.  You can check that here.

Design for an imageless preview

Most email clients don’t show your images as default.  This is due to a point I previously mentioned about spammers using images to get their messages across or sending offensive material through to you. 

The email clients decided that by initially blocking the images from being shown, they could let the subscriber decide whether or not they knew who the email was from and whether they wanted to view the images.

A clever email marketer will bare this in mind when they’re creating their campaign and will ensure that they can either get the message across or entice them to open the whole of the email.

This is another reason to adopt the text to image ratio I mentioned earlier.

Tip: Using Alt tags on images can help to deliver an extra message to people who have images turned off as default.

Remember the Preview Pane

Many of your recipients will view the email initially through their preview pane.  As a designer, your job should be to try and get your message across to them in that short section of the email so as to entice them in further.

Tip: Try and include the main point of the email in this top bit to try and entice them to explore your email.

And there you have it. Keep to these guidelines and tips and you should be creating great-looking, effective emails. I hope this has helped you out and if I’ve missed any, please leave a comment to let everyone know.