/Opinion/ Better HTML emails
09/09/2008 | Filed under Discover > Opinion
What do you do if you can’t stamp out HTML emails? Make sure they’re done well and email clients implement existing standards, says Mathew Patterson
Talk to a lot of cricket fans and they’ll tell you that Twenty20 is a travesty, a game that’s ‘just not cricket’. Of course, the thousands of fans who turn up to watch don’t care; they just want to have a fun day out. HTML email is much the same, seen by many designers as a corruption of the ‘ideals’ of email, which should always and only be plain text.
Whether you agree or not, it’s clear that HTML email is here to stay, with recent reports showing that email marketing gives a return on investment of around £45 per pound spent. HTML emails have consistently outperformed plain text, garnering more opens, more clicks and better response rates. Email might not have been intended to carry HTML, but it’s taken to the job enthusiastically.
Every major email client supports the HTML format and most of them use it by default. As web designers, our clients, bosses and marketing teams will use HTML with or without us – we’ve all seen the results when they’re let loose with Publisher and ‘save as HTML’! But done well, HTML email can provide a much better reading experience. Real headings, line spacing, emphasis, inline diagrams and photos: these can be powerful, effective tools and aren’t available directly in plain text.
Setting the standard
Unfortunately, designing lightweight, accessible, modern HTML emails is not an easy task. Widely inconsistent rendering across the 12 or more email clients with a major market share makes it a frustrating job. Gmail strips out all CSS from the head of your email. Outlook doesn’t support background images. Hotmail doesn’t handle margins. Working it all out is a quick way to go bald. That’s why we launched the Email Standards Project late last year. Kicked off by the team from software company Freshview, in conjunction with some talented designers, it’s a group working with email client developers to move towards consistent support for a subset of HTML and CSS standards.
Much like the Web Standards Project before it, this is not about defining new standards, but about better implementing existing ones. Email clients already support HTML and CSS, but there’s lots of room for improvement. We created an email acid test and ran it through the major email programs to see exactly what the state of play is.
The aim of the Email Standards Project is to get in touch with the developers or product managers for each email client and provide them with as much helpful information and gentle prodding as we can. We want to ensure that future updates or new versions of their software move closer to the standards instead of diverging further.
It may seem like an impossible task, but since the launch we’ve heard from several big players, including Yahoo, which has agreed to make a fix to its webmail client. IBM is also in discussions about Lotus Notes. This won’t be a short-lived project, but the alternative is to just keep complaining about it and grinding our teeth to stubs.
The key to our success will be support from web designers like you. We’ve got a section on the project website labelled ‘what you can do’ and it’s a great place to visit if you’d like to see more improvement from email clients. If web designers keep ignoring HTML email, it won’t go away. It will just be sent by people who don’t know about accessible, attractive and readable design.
Email is a core part of the internet and will be around for a long time to come. When you’re next asked to design an email template and find yourself going through endless rounds of changes and testing, remember the Email Standards Project. When you read your .net Newsletter, remember us. Please visit www.email-standards.org, check out the blog and send us your thoughts. Even if you don’t agree with the idea, or with our approach, it’s important that we have the conversation. Web designers need to step up and take responsibility for HTML in email, as well as in the browser.
Mathew Patterson is the community manager for Freshview, the company behind Campaign Monitor, and is involved in the Email Standards Project.
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Comments
Stephanie / 09/09/2008 / 22:09 / http://www.stephaniecurran.com
I think this is a great article. I send out large html emails weekly for my company that I test cross browser and platform on the major email clients. It seems to be never ending cycle because the clients are updating what they allow or don't allow for that matter. Here's hoping for a better email client future!
Aaron W / 04/10/2008 / 09:58
Just a note - two helpful resources that greatly simplify HTML email testing on various clients (because doing them all yourself is a real pain!!!)
litmusapp.com
campaignmonitor.com
Both provide ways to instantly test and see results across email clients (and spam filters!). The pricing plans, and clients supported, vary between them.
Andy Parker / 06/10/2008 / 12:57 / http://www.emailmarketingmanual.com
We here at email marketing manual have been regular subscribers and readers of the email standards site and have been impressed on several occasions where it has seemed that they have been able to get good information out of the mail client developers and even push for developments in the past.
email in particular in advertising and marketing is a huge money spinner and is all too often abused and contorted, partly down to the lack of consistency between mail clients but also the mail exchanges themselves, all stripping different tag groups.
KeyCanada / 09/10/2008 / 21:56 / http://www.kingstonapartmentfinder.ca
Great article, but I am wondering how you came to the conclusion that advertisers get a return on their investment of roughly £45 per pound spent? This seems quite high and from my own personal experience when adding html i find it greatly increases the chances of emails going directly to spam.
Stream Media / 29/10/2008 / 17:21 / http://www.streammedia.org
Great article. I have been producing HTML newsletters for over 4 years and still find them a real headache especially if the client has an idea in their head that can't be completed due to coding restraints.
I have always said that less is more and that has been my way of working on them ever since. Few graphics that are all created in Photoshop (The header as one item) then build in a series of tables to layout content. Then maybe a graphic for the footer. Also I make them 600px wide just so they are easy to read.
Tom / 13/11/2008 / 11:08 / http://www.pricewatch.org.uk
Yeah I couldn't agree more. I know from personal experience the difficulties in producing an email which looks nice in all email clients. Unfortunately though it's not something which is widely understood so hard to justify spending the time working on it for clients. For example we were talking to a designer who said that he currently sends out HTML emails for his clients. However it eventually emerged that he's infact writing the email in Outlook, then inserting a picture in it! This means that email clients like Gmail just view this as an email with a picture attachment that most likely wouldn't get viewed by anyone!
It can be a terribly frustrating process explaining this to people. So the more understanding there is of the problems we technical people face in producing decent quality HTML emails the better.
Tip: By the way I've found that all styles must be inline, directly on the tags concerned. This is especially important on web based clients to ensure it overrides any other styles which might already be defined on the page.
