Tip #1 Multipart-Alternative

When setting up your emails and newsletters you will want to have the HTML email display in “Multipart alternative format. What this means is that the email has the plain text and the html versions embedded. This is so that all those “plain text” folks out there can still view the email if they don’t choose to see it in HTML. There are several systems that can help you with this.

Tip #2 Images

With HTML you won’t be sending email files as attachments. Instead, you will have the images hosted on your server and the email’s code will have absolute paths to the images. This means that you will have to use your server’s web address in the code so that the images are actually embedded within the email. It sounds tricky, but it’s actually pretty straight forward. Once you try it a few times you will have it down.

Tip #3 Preview Pane

When you are designing your newsletters or other emails for email marketing you need to design it for the preview pane. This will give you a maximum of 600 pixels to work with and 500 pixels is probably playing it safer. The reason why is that the vast majority of recipients will not double click the email to open it to wide screen. So, don’t design it for full screen. Instead, design the email for how it is most likely to be viewed.

Tip #4

Don’t try to use CSS In emails to get the appearance you have in mind. It’s not reliable in email and won’t work right. Instead, use font tags, shim.gifs, and tables because they are what will allow you to create the “Look” you are going for.

Related posts:

• How to Use HTML – An Email
• HTML Newsletter
• HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language

You have your newsletter written and are excited about sending it out to your subscribers. The last thing is to use some HTML to get the newsletter to the level you want it to be and for it to look its best. The problem is, you don’t know that much about HTML. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to learn and while there are many different things you will need to learn the following tips will help you along the way to ensure that your newsletters look great while displaying correctly across email platforms.

When it comes to background colors and that is that many times they won’t work. This is especially true with email applications that are web based like Hotmail or Gmail. That because the body tag will be eliminated in favor of the web based mail application’s logo. HTML email is not as advanced as some people might imagine and the old methods that worked years ago are still being used. That means if you want the email to have a background color the easiest way to do it is to use a 100% wide table and assign it a bgcolor. Then, you’ll have your background color.

Something else you will need to keep in mind is the plain text version. Lots of coders think about this at the very end and then do a sloppy job. The problem with this is that many spam filters will assume that this is trash and will send it straight to the junk folder.

Spam filters are very sensitive to emails from email marketers anyway so if you do anything a little off it’s likely the email will go to the trash. Don’t let this happen to you. Instead, pay attention to the plain text version of your email and ensure that it is correct so it will be delivered as is. With plain text emails it is recommended to hard wrap them at 60 characters or as many as 70 characters. You need to create a ruler across the top of your plain text editor. Just take any letter and type it 60 times or more across the top. Don’t use Microsoft Word, but rather an editor for plain text. Type your content and when you reach the end of the ruler hit return.

Related posts:

• HTML Newsletter
• Email Marketing
• Changing HTML into XHTML