Jun 08
Here is the summary of the most common mistakes people make when designing HTML emails:
- Not coding “absolute paths” to the images. Remember, attaching graphics and using “relative paths” won’t work. You need to specify a full path to the image on the disk. Or, host the images on your server, then link to them in your code.
- Using JavaScript, or ActiveX, or embedding movies. That stuff doesn’t work in HTML email. You can’t have CSS-positioning, DIVs, DHTML, and complex embedded tables in the HTML message either.
- Using free image hosting services. They don’t like it when they get lots of outside hits (such as from email campaigns). So they’ll sometimes start blocking your images.
- Linking to an external CSS file. Insert your CSS below the <BODY> tag because web-based email applications (like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail) strip <HEAD> and <BODY> tags from HTML email.
- Using a WYSIWYG to “code” your HTML email. WYSIWYGs are known to generate absolutely horrible HTML. They insert so much junk code, it’s unbelievable. To code HTML email properly, you need to learn a little HTML.
- Not including an opt-out link. It’s rather roughly and unprofessional not to allow the recipients to unsubscribe from your list.
- Letting your permission “grow cold”. If you’ve been collecting the email addresses for years, and you’re only just now sending your first email to everyone, a little remind of how you got the recipient’s email address is nice. If you didn’t email your subscribers for a long time, people can forget what email lists they subscribed to. You can include a string like “You are receiving this email because you subscribed to our mailing list at www.yourwebsite.com” at the bottom or at the top (if appropriate) of your email.
- Sending to a list without permission. This is the worst offense. Like a good marketer you should have a subscription form on a web site to collect the recipients’ email addresses.
- Not removing people who unsubscribed. It’s an important thing if you don’t want to pass for a spammer.
- Forgetting to test. Make it a rule to test your HTML email in as many email applications you can. You should always send at least a few campaigns to yourself before sending it out to your entire list.
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:37 am
Nice Site!
http://google.com