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Sep
3

A Perfect Email Template Design
Posted at 12:02 pm | Comments (0)

Most of the time we all see promotional emails hitting our inbox, spam or junk folder, which sometimes becomes frustrating to unsubscribe or delete ‘m all. I usually try not to be so harsh with these emails, with the intention of obtaining some good idea/opportunity, I try to see some of them, not always, but sometimesJ.

I have noticed that many a times the alignments, background and positions used in the email are inappropriate. So, there is a scope for all of us to know the best practices to follow while designing the email templates. We provide solutions for email campaigns and it is on our top priority to ensure that all the emails we design, gets open and looks exactly the same way we have designed it for the end-user to see in any mailing software e.g. Outlook, Gmail, Lotus, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc. I thought of sharing with you some of the points that we consider while designing the email templates to ensure that design remains intact in whatever mail software you use.

Let’s have a quick look at some of the points:

• The document type for your email template should be HTML 4.01 or onwards and not XHTML as following its strict guidelines is not feasible in this context.
• In case your email template has international audience and can support multiple languages then use UTF-8 in Meta tags.
• Always use
  <table>and have all the contents inside it and do not forget to use absolute width (650 px if you are not using any campaign monitor to design the template and 600 px if you are using some kind of campaign monitor, as most of the campaign monitors renders emails correctly in this specified size).
• It is important to know that mail software downloads the emails locally and then shows it to the user (i.e. you) thus, make sure we use absolute references for images and links (e.g. http://www.yourwebsite/folder/imagename) instead of using (./folder/imagename).
• Do not try to use external CSS/style when you are designing email templates, always use inline CSS/style e.g. .
• Another point which is very important, do not use background images to beautify your email templates, as not all the mailing software shows background images, instead use background-color.
• Not all the mail software allow the flash to run so, try to avoid it.

Keep in mind the above steps while designing your email template and I am sure you will see improvement and happy clients. Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences here.

Cheers,

Team eBizneeds