Email marketing

HTML Email Survival Guide: Technical and Design Best Practices
Email marketing is one of the most powerful and effective forms of marketing today. It is quick to deploy, offers immediate and highly-measurable results, enables advanced segmentation and personalization, and delivers a high return on investment. However, achieving maximum results from your HTML email requires experience andexpertise. Simple mistakes in the implementation of HTML emails can seriously affect delivery or usability and cripple your ROI. To help marketers optimize results from their email marketing efforts, Lyris has created this complete guide to creating effective HTML email. These technical and design best practices give marketers the ability to improve their own email marketing campaigns. This guide is bestshared amongst email marketers and the HTML coding staff that supports your email development efforts.

In this guide we will cover: • HTML coding do’s and don’ts • Validate HTML content and avoid using scripts • Using forms in HTML emails • Font and font size • Color • Background colors • Font colors • Buttons, charts & other supporting images • Style sheets • Keep HTML emails to 500-650pixels in width • Windows Service Pack 2: Impact on email • Images • Image alt tags • Creating a Web version of your email newsletter • Preview panes and blocked images • Number of hyperlinks • Phishing and HTML Links • Length of email messages • Message file size • Navigation of email messages • Search capability in email • Email format/Versions • RSS feed functionality • “Push to talk” functionality• Forward-to-a-friend functionality • Rich Media/Flash • Essential content

Lyris, Inc. | 5858 Horton Street, Suite 270 | Emeryville CA 94608 USA | www.lyris.com Toll free 888.GO.LYRIS (465.9747) | International calls 510.844.1600 | Fax 510.844.1598 | Customer support 888.LYRIS.CS (597.4727) or 571.730.5259

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HTML Email Survival Guide

HTML Coding
HTML coding for emails is much trickierthan for Websites. With Websites, most designers/programmers code for a finite number of the most commonly-used browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla. Email, on the other hand, can be delivered and displayed on many more (dozens) of clients – making it harder to find commonality. In the office/work environment, Outlook (all versions) commands about 75% market share, with LotusNotes roughly between 5% and 10%. With consumers, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail/MSN comprise about two-thirds of most email lists. Good HTML creates branded, usable and attractive email messages that have better conversion rates than plain text emails. But when HTML goes bad, your messages will be unreadable, will not function correctly and can trigger email blocks or filters. With this in mind,the following are a few general HTML coding “do’s” and “don’ts” for email. HTML Coding Do’s

 Code HTML emails as a single Web page with the basic , , , and tags.  Make sure all tags have supporting closing tags. The most common HTML errors come from not having a closing

tag or having open or tags in the HTML. While your HTML might render properly in a browser, these errors can causeproblems with many email clients.

 Test your HTML code. Make sure your code conforms to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML standards  Code emails by hand where possible, as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors typically add extra code that
creates havoc with certain email clients. If you must use an editor, use Dreamweaver or Homesite, which do not add extra code to the designprocess.

 Use only the ASCII character set. More advanced word-processing software often inserts odd characters, such as the trailing

dot characters or smart quotes (curly instead of straight), which can hamper display or create delivery problems in some email software.

 HTML email code should be self-contained.  If you use CSS, include the element in your HTML file between the tags....