Let’s be honest, email templates are a real pain!
It’s super easy to build one quickly, but it’s not that easy to make it look perfectly the same in all mail services and versions of them. The tricky one is always old version of outlook.
But if you consider a few things from the beginning you can run that without much troubles.
What can I use with emails
Emails are still very basic html page, don’t use background images, only inline style, create spacing with transparent images in your table, etc.
Have a look on this guide from campagne monitor to check which property you can use or for emails
Start from a template
There are lots online, (zurb, sendwithus, campaignmonitor, emailframe.work, etc). I don’t trust them all but it can save you a bit of time at first. And if you are sending and build from a platform, you can always pick a basic template from their template library to start with. Mailchimp, Litmus and campaign monitor are the “leaders” for those business mass emails campaigns.
Some documentation
- HTML Email Boilerplate – Well-documented boilerplate template
- Mailchimp Email Blueprints – Lots of template for various layouts, including responsive template
- Mailchimp Email Design Reference – Great reference guide for designing HTML emails
- Email Client Market Share – List of the most popular email clients
How and where to test your email
It works well in your browser, cool, that doesn’t mean it will in Outlook 2007 or 2010.
The 2 services I use are Mailchimp and Litmus
They are not free but you can get a trial with Litmus.
Keep it basic. Avoid borders when possible, use images for rounded corner, tables and tables in tables. Think responsive and not fixed dimensions. The text length will change from the first copy someone provided to you, always ;)