12 Email Tips You Can Not Ignore

Krill Popov and Loren McDonald released a new article on clickz.com, "If Email Clients Mangle Your HTML...Fix It!". I think the article should be titled 12 Email Tips You Can Not Ignore. Anyways here are the tips that all email marketer should follow:

• Design the top three or four inches of your email with text and HTML that will tell readers what offer or content they will find below.
• Code email by hand. Unnecessary code bloat can increase your file size and could potential mangle your email.
• Avoid using nested tables. Some email clients have a hard time rendering them.
• Avoid 1X1 pixel spacer gifs. These are often found in spam and could get your email blocked.
• Background images for individual table cells are generally accepted, but may not appear in email clients such as Lotus Notes.
• Host your images instead of embedding them. Some ISP filter emails with embedded images.
• Use inline CSS. Some email clients strip out all the header information prior to rendering the email.
• Keep HTML email 500-650 pixels wide.
• Use image alt tags. The only email client that renders the alt tag is Gmail. (Not so sure if this is that effective.)
• Avoid forms. Many email clients will not render forms correctly or pass data from an email form to your Web site.
• Host rich-media (audio, video, Flash) on your Web site. Put a link in your email to these functions on your site.
• Avoid scripting (JavaScript, Visual Basics). Some ISP will block the email because they are mistaken for containing malicious code.

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