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Email Marketing Best Practices: HTML Newsletter Best Practices for Rendering Images

Using a marketing firm instead of doing the work in-house provides an advantage to marketers that do not have programming skills. Even though most ESPs, like Listrak, contain a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and pre-designed HTML templates to make designing the email easy, it is still a good idea to code the emails yourself if possible. And a marketing firm should have a team in place that can do this for you. However, your firm must understand the difference between coding HTML for a website and coding for email.

Do not use CSS: Although cascading style sheets are commonly used in web design, your marketing firm should avoid using CSS in your email campaigns as it can render incorrectly in some email clients or simply get stripped out or overwritten. If CSS is used, the styles must be embedded within the body tags and not within the header.

Follow other best practices for coding HTML messages: To make sure that your HTML email looks its best in all possible email clients, here are some additional specifications your marketing firm should follow:

• Do not use image maps
• Do not include Meta Tags
• Use <p></ p> tags instead of <div></ div> tags for alignment purposes
• Do not use java, JavaScript, frames, ActiveX, cache busters, or Dynamic HTML
• Do not use body background colors or images. Instead use background colors within your table to simulate the background color