Quick tips for building your own html newsletter

In most circumstances, it’s going to be absolutely vital that you use a 3^rd party email marketing tool to actually send your newsletters. This ensures maximum deliverability, and, it stops your own IP address from being blacklisted by the email clients receiving your message.

There are a plethora of email marketing tools out there. Do your research, and find one that has a package & price point that suits you. We recommend checking out Mailchimp & dotmailer as a starting point, these services also offer standard templates that you can use as a start to building your own custom newsletter.

Structure

Whether you have decided to hand code your new newsletter from scratch, or are modifying a basic template provided by your mailing tool, it’s important to understand the restrictions that email marketing places upon the way you write your HTML.

Since most email clients do not render many CSS rules, we must forgo pretty much all of the beautiful CSS layouts we have lovingly handcrafted over the past decade & instead, pretend it’s 1999 and we’re building that first website on our brand new Pentium III.

This, of course, means a completely table-based layout, CSS can be used, but, I recommend that you keep it as inline CSS and use it only for style, and not structure. It is also recommended that you do not nest your tables too deeply, as this can cause some layout issues in some clients.

Widths, heights and all other position attributes should be managed with their HTML attributes and not the corresponding CSS rules.

Layout

You can do quite a lot with an HTML email, despite the restrictions placed upon you by the email clients themselves. However, it is very important to remember that you will not be able to easily achieve any layout that requires floats or relative / absolute positioning.  This really is something that needs to be considered at the design stage.

You are mocking your newsletter up in Photoshop before you start to code it right?

Testing

Using the email marketing tool you signed up for earlier, you now need to test your email in every single email client, and make sure it works correctly across the board. This of course means signing up to them all, but it is time well spent, as what may work correctly in Gmail, may not work at all in Hotmail, or vice versa.

The one big tip I can give you for the testing stage is to get a second pair of eyes on it. After you’ve spent several hours designing and coding your email, you will start to miss things that a fresh pair of eyes will pick up.

Thanks for reading! I hope these quick tips point you in the right direction, and if you get stuck, just get in touch with us here at SilverDisc and we’ll be more than happy to discuss how we might be able to help. Until next time!