Designing your own HTML emails? Check out our new design guidelines

Introducing a brand new help section for HTML designers

Sending an email is much like making a first impression. It’s an opportunity to show off your brand, familiarize your subscribers with what sets you apart and entice them to stick around to hear what you have to say. That’s why we want to help you create fetching and effective emails, no matter where you fall on the design chops continuum.

What might that continuum include, exactly? It includes the customer who’s juggling 45 other tasks during the day and wants to log into Emma to send a quick-and-easy campaign. (That customer is best suited for a custom stationery and custom layout, by the way, because that means he’s only responsible for typing in the content. No extra styling necessary.) It also includes the customer who’d like to spend a little extra time laying out copy and images, all within a custom stationery frame. (That customer might work with an Emma designer to get a Concierge Design, or even a Studio Design.) And it includes the customer who’s an HTML wizard and wants free rein to design her own HTML email from top to bottom.

That last customer type — Is it you? Hello, our HTML-savvy friend! — is the one we’re talking to today. (Not sure where you fall on the continuum? Take a look at all of the design options that Emma offers.)

 

If you’re a web designer who’s been tasked with creating code for your company’s HTML emails, we want to help you build rock-solid HTML that’s suitable for an email environment. You may have caught Taylor’s post about the differences between HTML for email and HTML for the web, and the distinction is only becoming more true.

I know what you’re thinking: Now I have to design HTML that not only works in all the browsers out there, but also works in all of the mail clients? This sucks.

But it doesn’t have to suck. It’s actually fairly simple — and even a bit fun — once you get the hang of it. Just ask Emma designer, Dean Shortland, a self-taught HTML expert and one of those guys who likes solving tricky problems. (Case in point: He recently sent around an email to our staff, inviting us to join a “Campaign Rendering Issues” collaboration group. Fun times.) Lucky for HTML designers building their own HTML emails in Emma, Dean’s developed a brand new section of our Help Guide: HTML for Email.

In this section, you’ll learn all about properly coding HTML for an email environment, including such topics as:

• Nesting your content in tables and working with <div> tags
• Using CSS style sheets and inline styles
• Image specifications and image placement in your campaign
• Mobile considerations
• Troubleshooting common HTML issues