There’s a new article on Queness.com entitled “12 Killer Tips & Tricks for Building HTML Email.” I wish I had this link a few months ago. I had to learn a few of these tips the hard way. We talk so much about browser standards and we pull our hair out when IE won’t display something the way 10 other browsers will. However, if you call that a headache, then you’re certainly not going to like HTML email. There are probably literally thousands of email clients in use around the world today.

http://www.queness.com/post/8784/12-killer-tips-and-tricks-for-building-html-email

Web-based mail like GMail, Yahoo, and Hotmail have certainly established themselves in today’s market, but they certainly aren’t the only one’s being used. In fact, it takes very little effort to write your own email client…and so, many have and many of them are convenient, free, and work pretty well. Don’t even get me started on smartphones and their mail clients.

So, as you can see, if you are going to send an HTML email. The old adage of K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) should be firmly planted in your frontal cortex. You’re going to have to use a minimal amount of HTML because there is just a minimal amount that you can depend on to display the same across so many email clients.

Although it isn’t covered in the article above (and I understand why because this kinda’ defeats the purpose), the method that I prefer is to use large images as sections of an email body and let the user click on a section to take them to your website if they’re interested. So as you can see, it doesn’t get more minimal than that…so it’s not really in the spirit of the article. I’ve had clients balk at such a notion and insist that they want pure HTML emails. After so many experiences and also watching my own habits as a user (and looking at the marketing emails I get each day) those seem to be the easiest to read, understand, and respond to. So that’s my opinion.