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Designing HTML Email Messages – Guidelines to ensure your message is displayed correctly
Designing colourful and graphical HTML email messages is a lot more complicated than designing web pages. Additional factors you have to bear in mind include:
  • ISP’s and SPAM filters blocking certain HTML codes

  • Recipients bandwidth and email account storage limitations

  • Limitations of particular email clients


What tool should I develop my messages in?

Always use a specialist HTML editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver to build your messages. While packages such as Microsoft Word claim the ability to save messages in HTML files, in reality they are not particularly competent at the task.

Microsoft Word in particular will add a whole host of junk code in your message that will inflate the email size beyond acceptable limits. As an example of this a recent project the design team at Emailcenter under took was to convert a HTML document created in Word. The file size was originally 120KB but on completion it was only 14KB.


Can I include JavaScript, Flash or streaming video?

The simple answer to this is no. This is because:

  • ISP’s are starting to strip this out of your messages

  • Many email clients still cannot support these formats

  • Many consumers and businesses still do not have the bandwidth to cope with large flash presentations or streaming video

If you do need to use these technologies include them on your landing pages only.

Other web technologies that should be avoided include:

  • Cascading style sheets

  • Dynamic HTML (DHTML)

  • HTML page property tags in the body tag such as ALINK and VLINK

Many email clients simply cannot support these or choose simply to ignore them.


Managing the email size

It is vital to keep the message size as small as possible, particularly in consumer email campaigns. Recipients all have limits on the amount of email storage they can have and if this is exceeded your message will not be delivered.


Tips to help reduce the email size

  • Do not use embedded images. Always link images from your website.

  • Never use attachments but place a link through to the document on your website

The file size of the email is based upon the length of the HTML code, not on the images used in the email as many people think. Tools in HTML editors like Dreamweaver will enable you to remove any excess code that is increasing the file size.


Problems with particular email clients

Each email client such as Outlook, Hotmail or Lotus Notes has its own method for interpreting HTML email messages. This means a recipient with a Hotmail account might be see the email differently than someone using Outlook.

The best way to overcome this is to test your emails before sending it to your list. Create test email accounts with all of the major ISP’s such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL and make sure you have access to Outlook and Outlook Express to view the message.

Examples of particular issues you might find include:

  • Hotmail and other web based email accounts will change fonts and turn all text links into a dark blue font colour

  • Older versions of AOL and Lotus Notes will struggle to handle certain HTML codes

To overcome any issues implement the following points into your email marketing campaigns:

  • Where possible segment your list so you send an altered HTML to Hotmail and AOL users to accommodate their email clients limitations

  • Include a link at the top of the email to a hosted version of the email. This will allow users who cannot see the email the opportunity to view it correctly

  • At the subscription and opt-in point allow the user to choose between text and HTML

  • Enable the user to change their subscription between text and HTML at any time


What should I use to send the emails?

If you are using anything other than a specialist email marketing or mailing list program you will encounter problems. This will mean you have to put your addresses in the BCC field. Again this is another thing ISP’s tend to block email messages because of.

If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express you will also find issues with code that the software will put into your HTML causing potential errors in how you want the email to function or look when the recipient opens it.

A solution such as Maxemail will take your HTML as you intend it and deliver it to your recipients one by one also giving you the opportunity to add personalisation. You can also send your emails in MIME format allowing you to deliver a text version of the email if the recipients email server cannot cope with the HTML version.