Vital Tips You Must Know When Designing E-mails

• March 4th, 2013
• Articles

When designing and developing email newsletter campaigns you need to be aware of the fact that they play by their own set of rules, and are fairly different from designing and coding a website. This article we have tried to equip you with best tips to make you an expert when it comes to designing emails.

Keep the width 600px

This has to be one of most important tips. E-mail designs must consist of a width of at THE most 600px, in order to prevent the receiver of the email having to scroll vertically, in order to read  the whole entire context of that email. A sure way to ensure the most important context of your email is being read to place the most important context in the top left corner.

E-mail client testing

Its important to ensure that your email displays correctly in popular email clients gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail. Its also essential that testing is done on desktop email clients outlook, thunderbird etc, as well as mobile and tablet email apps. If you have a huge email mailing list the last thing you want is, for your email not to be displaying as desired in one most popular email clients or apps.

Be aware of the fact that images may not load

You may spend a fortune on hand picking the perfect selection of stock photography, but may not always serve any real purpose as the image may not always load, because some email clients prohibit images from loading unless the user decides to see them. Its also essential that important information is not included with images, because may be missed if user chooses not to load images.

Bigstock: Couple having fun

Do not use background images

Background images are stripped away from most major email clients. It’s essential to only use solid colours, so avoid investing too much time in designing pretty background images, which may not even been seen by most users receiving the email.

Shutterstock: Natural Background

Make the unsubscribe option clair and visible

Allow the option for people to unsubscribe from receiving emails from your mailing list as clear and as visible as possible. It does not make sense to make the unsubscribe option difficult to find, because the user will only mark the email as spam meaning that you will only be sending a huge amount of emails to users spam folder.

You can one use HTML and Inline CSS

Everything you’ve been told not to do when coding a website is the complete opposite when it comes to coding emails. You have layout limitations. You can only use tables, in order position images and content within email campaigns. Inline CSS can only be used to control typography i.e fonts, colours, line height etc.

Bigstock: HTML  code

Wrapping up…

I hope you have been enlightened upon the best practices for creating email newsletters, and i hope this article can serve as a great reference point. A checklist when developing email campaigns.