A perfectly confident EMAIL TEMPLATE ready to land right into the INBOX is difficult to come by. Some marketers wish to go beyond that with the most relevant brand elements and properties and resort to designing and coding their own email templates. As much as these freshly made templates look amazing – they bring with themselves the unending troubles related to email client compatibility, inbox optimization and reader friendliness. We present to you in the following 10 points, what a confident email template has to say about designing INBOX optimized email templates:
1. “Fewer than 650 pixels would be a good width for me.”
A maximum fixed width between 600 and 650 pixels would work for the best cross-overs on email clients. Understand more about optimized email layouts, here. An email this size can never go wrong with Outlook’s vertical preview pane too.
2. “Umm…let’s just K.I.S.S?”
This rule has been around for a while now. A simple email template design that focuses on your message works best. A cluttered email with too many elements or colors is distracting and affects conversions. Better email rendering aided by fewer elements will only keep you safe from the SPAM filter.
3. One request – “Please code me on good coding software!”
The addition of bonus codes sometimes under WYSIWYG editing software can make your email appear differently across a few clients. Writing your email code on Dreamweaver or even Notepad for that matter can keep you away from such issues.
4. “I befriended tables since a very long time now!”
Tables give a structure to your email template which makes the sections easy to manage. Using tables in your email templates allows them to render better and same way across all the email clients.
5. “I don’t like HTML bullet points so much!”
Breaking your email message in to labyrinths or bullet points is important to be able to register better in the minds of the reader. However, avoid HTML bullets and use plain text alternatives such as dashes or asterisks to ensure an email without broken or missing bullet points.
6. “A video in me? I think I can handle it!”
Videos in emails have been known to increase engagement. Many email clients do not allow viewing rich media by default. To prevent the same, it is only safe to utilize a screenshot of the video as a fallback image and linking it to the video embedded web page. Our infographic on Video in emails may help you with additional information on the subject.
7. “I can never go wrong with inline CSS”
The most commonly used email clients being Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail, it is necessary to see your email template is compatible with them. The above stated are all browser-based email clients. The common thing with such email clients is that they do not allow the use of external .css referencing because of possible spam abuse. Inline CSS can never go wrong in such cases.
8. “Don’t put too many images on me, it gets suffocating in here!”
An image with too many images clutters and dissolves the message in the email. Include the image width and height to keep the structural identity of the email on an all-time high. Try utilizing absolute image paths with the images hosted on your website. Our post here can help you more with images in email.
9. “Try using link shorteners, they work well in my text-based view.”
When you make a plain text version of your emails as well, that’s when this tip helps. A long URL would appear very ugly in the email especially when your email has a lot of destination links. Utilize from the various link shortening services available in such cases.
10. “You better don’t send me without these things on me!”
The list could go pretty long! But a reply to address, a company name, contact us address and a link to unsubscribe are a MUST. After all you want your emails to comply by CASL for inbox delivery. Including the above in emails can be enough to show that you care and are considerate enough to address your recipients concerns if any.
That coming from an inbox optimized email template itself must surely help. Let us know what you do to optimize your emails for the giant inbox in the comments below 😉