As an email marketing service provider, we at ClickMail Marketing are hyper aware that email marketing has many moving parts to it…often more than those in charge of email marketing are even aware.
I suspect that’s because at many companies, the email marketing department is either under-staffed or under-trained. Email marketing tends to be a job that people fall into rather than train for and seek out. Not to pick on email marketing! Trust me, in my career as a marketer, I’ve seen a serious lack of knowledge in every aspect of marketing, from direct mail to web analytics.
But part of our task as an email marketing service provider is to educate. Hence this blog, and our newly launched email newsletter. And our recent whitepaper.
Below is a snippet from the whitepaper, illustrating a critical and often overlooked aspect of email marketing and design: email html is not the same as the html you use for a Web site. If your email marketing design is built as if it’s a Web page, be careful.
For example, there are several tags you want to avoid in your email design because they don’t function in all email clients. Some will even get your email flagged as spam or kept out by an ISP. These tags can affect rendering, but really your first goal is to get your email delivered, so just don’t use them. The risky tags are:
- <Body> elements meaning background color on a page or setting page margins because it’s ripped out in Web clients: the open and close body tags are ripped out
- Page margins “0″
- Background images, whether for the page, a table, a cell; none of these are supported. You can use background colors for tables and cells but not images
- Layers are a fun way to control some functionality as well as layout, but they don’t work in email, so don’t use them
- Rollovers, at mouse state; these don’t work because they’re dictated with JavaScript, which you’re not using in your email, remember?
- Forms <form method=”get || post” action://…….>; if you have a post or even a get form method, it won’t work
For more email marketing and design information, download the whitepaper. For more email marketing edification, subscribe to this email marketing ROI blog!
This is really interesting information.
Do you have any idea how many html emails have these risky tags?
I’ll check out your newsletter.