HTML email best practices

It is with this in mind that we’ve begun to reshape our best practices regarding the development of opt-in marketing emails. As you may or may not know, crafting a rich-format email involves designing for an infinitely more variable, fluid environment than typical web development. There are a huge variety of email clients, all with an enormous variance in rendering capabilities and operating in a diaspora of environments, such that thorough compliance testing of any email can be exceedingly difficult, if not totally impossible. Browser-based clients may reduce your email to a collection of plain text and broken images; desktop clients such as Lotus Notes and Entourage might simply strip all design elements right out of your document; mobile devices can bury your message in a sea of poorly rendered stylesheets and microscopic text. As a result, email best practice documentation on the Internet is sparse at best, with recommendations often devolving into superstitious guesses based on long-outdated practices.

Basically, email development in the year 2006 is the equivalent of web development in the late 1990’s: scattered and essentially standard-less.

Here at opus:creative, we’ve been pooling our expertise and resources to forge best practices within the industry that will illustrate both how and why we craft emails that are conformant to standards-based web design. We’ve been meeting with industry experts and doing extensive research and testing in order to craft informed, real-world perspectives on email construction and delivery. We’re striving to work with our clients to build opt-in emails that deliver their specific branding and message while maintaining accessibility in the broadest possible range of environments. We’re focusing on designs that drive traffic and create conversions, not simply trying to make emails that look more like web pages.

What does this mean for our clients on a more technical level? It means developing markup that devolves nicely on mobile devices and web-based email clients into something reminiscent of rich text, instead of resorting to bloated, table-based markup from some kind of 1997-era, Geocities-esque nightmare. It means driving customer traffic with concise design and copy that focuses on code-to-content ratios, not simply transcribing the entirety of a web site into a single email. It means crafting documents that retain important branding elements without placing excessive demands on the reading environment. It means designing emails with both the client’s target audience and their delivery method in mind.

We want to help our partners consistently leverage a powerful communication tool in the most elegant way possible.

As we continue to refine these best practices, we’ll share more specific insights into how to build HTML emails. Because the sooner we can all educate ourselves on the benefits and pitfalls of email marketing, the happier all of our inboxes will be.