Karlyn Morissette: Email basics

Email marketing is probably one of the easiest and most cost effective things you can do but if you have e-mails that look awful when they are delivered, you've missed the point! What a lot of people don't realize when they first start designing email templates is that there IS NO STANDARD. Email clients don't abide by WC3 standards (though, God willing, the Email Standards Project is on it) so you have to take extra care when designing your templates to make sure they work over multiple environments. Here are some rules of thumb:

1) KEEP IT SIMPLE! Use a simple, tables-based layout.

2) If you're going to use CSS, you can ONLY use inline styles: Gmail does not currently support embedded style sheets and I'm guessing you have more than a few users on there. To make it even more fun, they and Outlook 2007 only support the following properties:

background-color
border
color
font-family
font-size
font-style
font-variant
font-weight
letter-spacing
line-height
margin
padding
text-align
text-decoration
text-transform

3) Always assume that your images are going to be turned off. Use a simple header and a simple footer (and if you're really feeling saucy, a picture in the body) but make sure the pertinent information is in text form! Keep your headers/footers to 600 pixels wide.

4) Keep your text simple and to the point. Give your users ONE THING and ONE THING ONLY to do. "Here, click this link!" If you don't have a call to action for your users, you probably want to rethinking sending an email in the first place.

5) TEST, TEST, TEST! You have a few options when it comes to testing:

Set up a bunch of accounts in a bunch of different e-mail clients...though this often proves to be more trouble than its ultimately worth given the alternatives.
Use an ESP that will test for you. For example, right now we are using a service that gives us screen shots in all the major clients, with images on and off.
Campaign Monitor offers a great service where they will give you screen shots of your template in over a dozen e-mail clients for $10 a pop.
If you can get your hands on a handheld, its not the worst idea in the world to test what your e-mail looks like in Versamail and in different web-based clients, particiularly if you are targeting an older audience.

If whatever you are using to send your email doesn't give you basic metrics, do yourself a favor and instrument it with Google Analytics. They have a URL Builder that will easily build you a custom URL to be able to track click throughs and conversions, which is particularly important for those of you running e-commerce sites!

Once you get your basic templates down, it becomes relatively easy from there. Happy emailing!

UPDATE: In an effort to get Gmail to see the light, the Email Standards Project has started "Project Gmail Grimace":