In the world of email marketing, I think it’s fair to say, that far too many people fail to take into consideration the importance of good design and perfect cross-compatibility within email clients. I receive emails which ‘break’ in my chosen client, or have missing links much too frequently - a bad email has exactly the same impact as any other bad marketing; it lowers the values of that company in the eyes of the recipient.
A friend of mine started this blog recently titled Email Fail which perfectly illustrates the lack of attention-to-detail in this area.
In this post I’m not going to do a step-by-step guide to creating an email from scratch (it assumes you already have basic knowledge), instead I will give you a few pointers to overcome some of the most common and annoying problems that you face when designing and building for the most popular clients: Hotmail, Gmail, and Outlook 2007.
Before we get started I’ll quickly outline the problems that each one of these clients cause:
- Hotmail (or Windows Live as it’s now known) frequently ‘breaks’ the layout of image heavy emails, misaligning table cells and causing big gaps all over the place.
- Gmail insists on removing all CSS from the <head> and hence you cannot style a:hover or anything similar. (Now as far as I know there isn’t actually a way to stop this, you simply have to cater for it).
- Finally, Outlook 2007 ignores various styles such as line-height and uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine, rather than IE or any other option that might be considered logical.
So, what do we do to avoid these issues?
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