Avoiding HTML Email Design Mistakes
October 1st, 2008
In order to gain the most exposure possible when sending htm email campaigns, keep in mind there are many design factors that can effect your total number of emails opened. Building your html using the tips below can help improve the performance of all your campaigns.
- Build emails in old school HTML – use as much HTML as possible to describe your message and use tables with strict HTML.
- Avoid CSS – CSS will not appear correctly on many new platforms such as Gmail, Outlook 2007, etc. Use tags such as the font, b, strong and spacer images to format emails.
- Use ALT tags – use ALT tags to describe areas of your email for calls to action, short descriptions and header copy.
- Avoid too many images – too many images will weight your email as possible spam preventing the email from being delivered by ISPs such as Google, Yahoo and company email server spam filters. Optimize your image size to the lowest size possible without losing too much quality.
- Avoid SPAM phrases and characters – key words such as $, !, buy now will have a negative weight on your emails.
- Avoid DIVs, Layers, Javascript, Flash – using rich media and scripting is a big no-no to spam filters. Again, advanced formatting will kill your email formatting and delivery.
- Not testing – by not testing your campaigns on many email browsers, you take the risk that your message will not appear to a large group of subscribers. Know your list and what email browsers to test.
