Image-heavy HTML emails, although looking great, often cause a number of problems across different email clients. Outlook 2007, Hotmail, legacy releases of Outlook, Gmail, AOL, YahooMail, Apple Mail and… whisper it… Lotus Notes all deal with HTML email differently and, unless you’re coding specifically to handle them all, they’re likely to display your email in a number of weird and not-so-wonderful ways. Considering the size of most commercial mailing lists it is inevitable that the recipients will be using a variety of email clients, so it’s essential that you factor safeguards into your mailout procedures if you’re going to avoid the headaches they can cause.

We’ve found the best way around this issue is to simply settle on a happy medium between text and images, something that looks great, will display correctly and consistently, and of course conveys the necessary message in the most effective way.

With this in mind, our recent email marketing for Jaguar adopted a subtle blend of imagery and text.

The copy - including the tagline - was presented in text format and we used a single image of the new Jaguar XK, along with the requisite branding. The large image was powerful enough to support the design and present a suitably glossy style, while the use of text rather than image-based wording meant that the flyer was displayed consistently across every email client.

Who uses which email client?

A recent report from Fingerprint shows that Outlook (all variations) and Hotmail are used by the majority of business recipients. Interestingly, Apple’s iPhone already has a 1.3% share of the business usership, underlining the fact that new platforms don’t necessarily take long to become significant. The notoriously problematic AOL Mail on the other hand commands just a fraction of a percentage. Either way, your customer list will contain users on these email clients - so you have to accommodate them in your coding.

What else is there to consider?

As well as presentation, the variation in email clients can cause a number of other unwelcome issues for HTML email marketing. Form handling, whitelists, click-thrus, downloads and forwards are all tackled in different client to client - and if you’re not considering this then there’s a major chance that the email marketing that you’ve carefully created is unrecognisably bad for some recipients.

Greenmedia’s experience in email marketing, coupled with the fact that we’ve created our own system in-house, means that we’ve got it covered. Take a look at our portfolio for a selection of email marketing that looks great across all email clients.

Tags: greenmedia html email marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.