Email Marketing and HTML Email (Part 2)
In a previous post, Ryan took us through some of the things not to use when creating html for email marketing campaigns. To follow-up, he now goes through some things that work pretty well!
So, what kind of html should we use in our email campaigns Ryan?
Number 1: Do use nested tables to create your HTML email layout.
This may seem counter intuitive for modern web designers but you should look at HTML email as being several years behind the current web standards.
Sample Code:
Nested tables Code
Number 2: Also include a plain text part with your HTML email message.
If you send a HTML only message, some spam filters will block these messages, and some other recipients will only receive a blank message (those who have email clients configured not to view HTML emails). Therefore it is important to also include a text only part. GroupMail (and I’m sure other email clients) allow you to send text only and html emails together [more].
Adding Text Only Version to GroupMail:
GroupMail plain-text
Number 3: Define styling in your HTML email using standard HTML attributes
Standard HTML attributes include height and width for images, font style etc. If you use CSS it should also be defined directly within the HTML tag.
Good advice, anything else that might be useful?
Number 4: Test test and test some more.
The more testing you can do the better idea you will have as to what works for your needs.
What about images, should they be embedded or linked to?
Hmm, this is a little tricky. Personally, I use embedded images, but I ensure that the images are small and optimized to a web resolution of ideally 72ppi [That looks like another blog post to me!].
However, this is really is a personal choice and there are pro’s and cons for both, you can view some of these here.
Would you recommend any software for creating the html messages?
Well, GroupMail includes it’s own wysiwyg html editor which works pretty well, but if you want to go with something a little more robust, I’d recommend Adobe Photoshop for manipulating images, and Dreamweaver for the html.
Any final thoughts?
It’s a good idea to either create email accounts with as many of email clients as possible – create both web-based and desktop clients, or alternatively use an email analysis tool in order to test your html email across a number of popular clients (Email on Acid is really cool & free).
So there you have it .. some practical html tips for your email campaigns. If there is anything you feel we’ve missed, leave a comment!
Hi Ryan and All,
My org wants to send out an email to a small group of users daily to update/inform/send them of new content from one of my org’s blogs.
As new content are added daily to the blog, I would like to ask if there is a way stream the blog’s new additions dynamically into an email template as summaries or even the whole page, each day automatically?
Is it then possible to set GroupMail5 to automatically send this daily changing email out without human intervention.
Thanks and Regards.
@gadenp, automating this process is not currently possible using GroupMail. If you use something like http://feedburner.google.com it will manage your email subscriptions to your blog and send an email automatically. Similarly if you use WordPress for your blogging platform they recently released a widget to do something similar http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/blog-subscription-widget/ there are likely similar options for other blogging platforms.
While these approaches “automate” the process, they may be a bit restrictive in how much you can customize your template to match the design/look you require, plus not sure they give you access to the peoples email addresses.
Ironically, we did up until recently have a facility in GroupMail where it integrated into a RSS feed agregator service so that you could pick the posts you require and insert them directly into your email message. The service we were using dropped this aspect of their service, hence we had to remove from GroupMail, but we are looking at doing something similar again.
Hope this helps, if you want to discuss in more detail what you want to achieve with your blog / email integration, leave a comment to let me know.
Hi, I have a small problem that is driving me crazy! I have created an html newsletter that will be sent through GroupMail and I have everything working (styles, tables, most images which are being linked to externally) except my background images will not appear, no matter what I do! I have background=”url link here” in all my ‘s and for some reason, when I receive my test email, the background images are missing and they are attached to the email.
Please help me! I’m desperate and need to send this newsletter for our client today!
Thank you in advance!!
Hi Vanessa,
If you are testing from GroupMail to Outlook 2007 or Gmail then the images background won’t show up. This is due to the fact that background images are not supported within Outlook 2007 or Gmail and thererfore will either be included as an attachment or ignored altogether.
So, we wouldn’t recommend using background images!
If you want to email support, we might have some other workarounds which might help.
I want ti insert small video clips as well as the normal pictures currently permitted. How is the question. Best Garth
Hi Garth,
Most Email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail etc. don’t support video in email. As far as I’m aware the only major Email client that can view an imbedded video is Mac Mail.
I’d recommend you use an image of your video in your Email and have it hyper linked to the actual video on your website.
If you need any help with this, contact our support team.
Rob
Hi,
Is there any chance that GM will suport iso-8859-2 in the Subject line?
I just can’t use any of native symbols there – it is a big disadvantage.
Thanks for any answ.
kp
Heavy user of the GM.
Hi,
I am using GroupMail to send an html e-mail to donors. Every time I bring in the htlm from Dreamweaver, GroupMail adds extra spaces where it doesn’t belong. I’m not sure why this is happening and would love any advice anyone has to offer! I have tried fixing this a billion different ways but can’t figure out what’s going on.
@kp I will need to do some testing to see what the problem is with that particular encoding in the subject line and I will get back to you with the results
@Kaela could you attach the html file to an email and send to support@infacta.com we will check out what the problem is
Thank You Dave
I’m waiting for Your reply.
Here’s some describtion:
When i use native symbols in subject line, most recipients see it like this:
=?ISO-8859-2?Q?Bardzo serdecznie dzi=EAkuj=EA za =BFyczenia z okazji Dnia Edukacji Narodow=
kp
Hi kp,
A couple of questions
What text are you entering in the Subject Line ?
What language version of Windows are you running ?
In menu GroupMail->Tools->Message Related Options, what do you have selected in the “Character Set” dropdown ?
Text in subject line:
Bardzo serdecznie dzi?kuj? za ?yczenia ?wi?teczne
Settings:
Message Encoding: Printed Quotable
Character Set: iso-8859-2
In other way there’s a problem with text encoding in body.
kp
So background colors/images won’t be supported by a lot of email clients? Then why do I continue to get emails on these services with the above described colors/images? I often get emails with embedded images, colored fonts, and a colored border. But not when they’re my own creations (in groupmail)
I don’t write code, and use groupmail 5 for creating and sending mass emails. Color would be nice!!!
Any suggestions would be very helpful.
Thank you!
adobe images with text over worked, except the text was warped in some systems.
Hi Richard, GroupMail has a HTML WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor that allows you to change the Font, colours, embed images, include links etc. We don’t recommend the use of background images as a key part to your emails as some of the major email clients such as Outlook 2007 and Gmail won’t show them.
Background colours are fine and if you want to include a background image then you should have a similar background colour behind the image for cases where the background image is ignored.
Drop support@infacta.com an email with any questions you have on creating a HTML email with colour, images, and text formatting.
@richard Background images will not be displayed in some email clients, however embedded/linked images and font colors are perfectly OK in most, and GroupMail supports them, take a look at some of the latest HTML templates included with GroupMail to see what is possible.
If you need some help incorporating images/colors with your existing designs drop us an email to support@infacta.com
Thanks for the response. I’m trying the free version of Groupmail to see if it will meet my needs before investing in the newer version. Can I download the latest HTML templates for the Groupmail 5 version?
Perhaps someone can give me some clarification. Is the program that creates the email the ‘email client?’ Hostmonster says the problem is with the email client (in regards to colored fonts/background) and that I should check with groupmail to learn how to send emails in HTML. Groupmail is fairly simple, and I assume that if I designed a specific email, and send it with both HTML and plain text, and it doesn’t get received properly, the problem lies elsewhere.
But I regularly receive emails at these receiving addresses with colored fonts and backgrounds.
Does anyone know how I can isolate the problem?
Just a note:
It would be very confortable, if the html source editor hold the previous size of it. I must every time expand it, because window is too small, when opened.
Thanks, Jozsef
(I use Win Vista Biz)
@kp Yes there does seem to be a couple of issues with the encoding, I will email you on a download link when we have something that sorts out the problem so that you can verify it’s working
@richard sorry, didn’t see your queries, I’ll drop you an email
@Jozsef we are working on the HTML Source Editor at the moment, we’re aiming to implement source code highlighting, save/restore windows size, position as well as other settings, all going well these should be included in the next release
Hope You’ll solve this problem.
Thanks for taking care…
kp
Great work. I’ve just started my own blog on email marketing and I’m still learning
can someone tell me if it’s possible with groupmail 5 to have multiple ‘from’ addresses? i have different clients and will need to change the from address as per customer. thanks!
Hi Richard. Yes, you can create any number of sender identities in GroupMail. See my blog post below for details.
Optimizing the From Field for Your Email Campaigns
I hope this helps.
Hi
I’ve been a little frustrated over the weekend with GroupMails failure to include background images (why offer it as a feature?) so I’ve been doing a bit of googling – will the following solutions work?
http://newbitsontheblog.com/outlook-2007-css-background-image/
Hi Simon. What are you creating your HTML email in? Are you designing in GroupMail’s own WYSIWYG message editor or are you designing externally and importing into GroupMail?
I know email clients view text differently depending on the supported styles but how can I get the most consistent size and font? When I send an email to outlook the text size is small and when it goes to another it is larger and another the font isn’t supported. I use only common fonts and try to keep the size somewhere in the middle. Is there a general rule or a way to use percentages like you can do with images in websites to keep the email more consistent with all the email recipients?
Thanks
Hi Lori. There are a number of ways to define font size, from the old HTML 1-7 scale, to ems, percentages, and more. In order to ensure a consistent rendering (or as consistent as possible) use pixels to define your font sizes. You should add your font size definition as inline CSS to the HTML tag that contains your text. Pixel definitions are static so they should render the same size in web or desktop based email clients alike.
For more information you can drop me an email at support@infacta.com and I would be happy to provide more information about HTML email.