Although different platforms such as social media have managed to become the optimum method for letting people know about your product or service online, email-powered communication has its own importance! For example, we know a few people, who are not interested in involving themselves in these social media platforms like Facebook. In that sense, if you are a marketer, who would like to target different kinds of customers, you should make use of the mentioned way of marketing. However, unlike the old days, it might not be possible for you to send some text-only newsletters to your customers and forcing them to read all those plain text.
Instead, just like you prepare beautiful websites for different purposes using HTML, CSS, and other coding languages, you can insert HTML-based elements in email newsletters and hence make them look awesome. Rather than information-passing emails like alerts or notifications, HTML Emails would be quite useful in monthly or weekly newsletters regarding your products, website content, etc. Nevertheless, it is not that an easy job. Here, we would like to give you a brief overview on HTML Emails, and we hope that this would help newbie marketers to uplift their marketing efforts. We would start with an overview on HTML Emails.
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HTML Emails: It is not a Big Deal!
HTML Email means a kind of web page, which is built using HTML and CSS. When your customer opens your newsletter, they will show a multi-content-rich email page, consisting of images and other kinds of elements. It does mean that you can convey a lot of information through an HTML Email when compared to the text-only counterpart. Nevertheless, as we mentioned above, building a HTML Email is not that easy when compared to the publishing your site. Importance of these factors is because not all email clients shall display the HTML Email in the same manner. Hence, you should be careful enough during coding of those HTML Emails, as it helps you in letting all your customers know what you would like to convey through that Email. Major factor, which make HTML Email different, is as follows.
Delivery Matters
Even though the coding process of HTML Email and HTML Website would be having some common traits, what does make the former different from latter is the way, how you deliver the HTML Email to the customer. To deliver HTML Email to your customer, you cannot simply attach all files of the email message and hence show it as a fully-fledged webpage. In addition, as different persons use different email clients for receiving and displaying your email message, the delivery would not be easy as expected. Due to this fact, you should be quite careful during the building of the HTML Email.
Things to Care While Building
Because of the difference between HTML Email and HTML Web pages, you should keep a few things in mind, before starting the coding as well as designing of the Email. Important ones among the tips are like the following.
CSS Style
You would be integrating a stylesheet (sometimes, more than one) in your webpage in order to make it beautiful. In the case of HTML Emails, however, you cannot use CSS stylesheet as an external file. Instead, you should follow the inline CSS method, in which you have to insert all kinds of CSS codes along with the HTML Code. For instance, if you want to display a specific background colour for a division, you should insert the corresponding CSS code along with the HTML code for displaying a division rather than putting all your CSS codes in the head section of code.
Make Images Public
You might be using protected or forbidden directories for storing images for your website. However, in mentioned case, you have to store all the attached images in a public web server so that each email client can access all these images. Also, you should be careful to access those images in a relatively quick web server so that your customer will not have to wait long in front of the PC.
Careful While Designing
You should give optimum importance to the designing part of HTML Email with the same amount of precision when you design one webpage. You may use the designing tools, which you are familiar with. Your first consideration has to be the use of minimal graphics and the visual treatment for content. This means that, instead of inserting a lot of images and graphical elements in the email, you should make sure that the content is quite readable and each customer would be able to understand, what you would like to convey through the newsletter. Sometimes, it would be wise enough to insert just a few lines of text accompanied by single image rather than stuffing many CSS&HTML elements in the email.
Use Popular Mail Clients
As you know, there are different kinds of email clients available in the market. And, you should be very careful to use the same mail client throughout your marketing efforts, as the way of representing content might be different for various clients. In addition, it is also preferable to go behind popular mailing clients. While you are using popular mail clients, you have options for analyzing the statistics of your email marketing campaigns as well.
Alt Tags Are Inevitable
Even though you are inserting different kinds of images in the email newsletter, you should not forget to insert alt tags in it. Through this method, you can let the user understand the actual message even if something goes wrong and the email client is not able to display the contents in a correct manner. For instance, when you are inserting one image, regarding the discount offer, you should insert an alt tag, which has similarity with the topic.
Summary
HTML Email is something great in use! However, you should be very careful while designing and coding the HTML-based email, as it has a lot of difference from the actual method of coding HTML-based Web pages using associated languages. Even after using all these tips in the building process, you should test whether the email message does its job in all (at least, most) kinds of email clients. Do you have any other tips for designing and coding HTML Emails? Do let us know through your comments.