Millions of emails hit inboxes every day and while many companies are harnessing the power of email marketing, a large majority, however, are not using the advice freely given to them and are missing out on the additional rewards to be seen from just a little bit of fine tuning.

This ranges from skilled designers struggling to build consistently rendering emails to people who are perhaps new to email and aren’t aware of the Do’s and Do nots.

Here are my top 10 things to change. If you don’t do anything else, take note of these. They will strengthen your campaign deliverability and help your campaigns to achieve more.

1: Personalisation

Nobody enjoys being addressed by “Hi There” or Dear Customer. When I get an email that says Hi Tom I am more likely to engage with it. By addressing the recipients you are likely to see a higher open and click through rate. To do this simply use the ‘insert action’ feature in dotMailer’s Campaign Editor. Select the field (FIRSTNAME). It will appear in your campaign as @FIRSTNAME@.

2: Data

The quickest way to reduce your deliverability and get blacklisted is by buying and selling data. Your emails will quickly get flagged as spam and as your emails pile up in the junk/spam folder or lost in hyper-space, no-one will open your emails. The most effective campaigns are sent to your existing customers and organically grown, opted in lists.

3: Back to basics

Emails do not need to be complicated. A simple structure and a main header for your logo works well for most clients. This should be followed by the main content with the a single key message with obvious calls to action, followed by a footer with company details and the required legal information.  Remember the simpler the design the easier it is to code. This also means less chance of something going wrong in different web browsers or email clients.

4: Construct using tables

When building an email we are going back to basics, we have to construct the layout by using tables

5: Hotmail & Gmail image padding  fix

As mentioned in a previous blog post Hotmail applies padding around images in a different way to anybody else, causing issues for many email designers, luckily we have a nice easy fix

By applying the style to all the image tags it removes the padding which is applied by hotmail and Gmail.

6: Images

The biggest thing to remember (and do!) is to avoid background images. Most email clients do not render them and display a greyblock.  Also never rely on visual artwork to be the main way to communicate your message in an email campaign. If you send a email with a big image, it will be turned off and appear as a blank email, causing your contact to think you’ve sent them a blank email and hit delete or the spam button.

7: Phishing links

Phishing links cause distrust in your email campaigns and are mainly caused when the whole url is present in an email. Place your links behind actions and images, encouraging your contacts to click through.

8: Spacer images

Now some email clients don’t like empty <td>’s even if you set a width. To fix this issue we suggest you use a transparent GIF and then use that to set the width of height of any empty <td>’s.

9: Alt Tags

With images being disabled in the majority of email clients when an email arrives in the inbox, taking advantage of adding an alt tag is your best chance to get your message across to your contact and persuade your contact enable links and engage with your email.

10: Test, test and test again

This is probably the most important step to constructing an email. Testing allows you to view your campaign in the email clients but also the web version in a browser. This allows you to check consistency across ISP and email clients and fix any rendering issues that will occur before the email is dispatched to your database.

For more advanced testing we offer Inbox Preview here at dotMailer.

By Clifff Guy

As many as 19% of email recipients will not open an email that hasn’t rendered properly, as they assume it is spam. So it’s critical for email marketers to design and code their templates to ensure they render correctly in all relevant email clients.

In our newly published 2009 Hitting the Mark benchmark survey, we used the Inbox Preview tool within dotMailer to test how consistently the email campaign templates of 43 major name retailers rendered in over 20 different email clients (for full list of email clients included in the Inbox Preview report, download the full report).

We found the results were mixed across the retailers when it came to deliverability, with an average score of 7.2 out of 12. Whilst 12% of those surveyed achieved top marks for their emails rendering correctly in all email clients tested, 10% of the retailers scored just 3 marks out of the 12 available.

Best practice leads to best results

Not adhering to the coding best practice rules laid out below meant that many of the templates we studied did not render correctly in certain email clients, even with images switched on.

Remember that as a default, emails are delivered with images turned off by many email clients. So it’s important for marketers to include a balance of web text with any imagery used so the template is still legible and meaningful when viewed with the images turned off.

Here are dotMailer’s best practice guidelines for ensuring your emails render correctly and consistently across the key email clients:

1. Ensure images are imported into your template at the correct size you want them to render – do not rely on the HTML height and width settings as some email clients may not support these
2. Make sure your HTML height and width settings match the actual dimensions of the image
3. Ensure an equal balance between web text and images – image heavy emails may attract high spam scores and are less effective when images are switched off
4. Design your template with preview panes in mind – ensure your brand, key message and/or call to action are visible and above the fold
5. Include a link to a web version of the email to help solve rendering issues for the recipient
6. Test how your emails look when viewed using mobile broadband connections. We found different ‘dongles’ lead to some emails being rendered differently for different members of our panel
7. Use an ‘Inbox Preview’ tool (provided by many leading email marketing providers) to test quickly and easily how your email template renders with and without images switched on in all relevant email clients and through different preview panes
8. Focus on the relevant email clients for inbox preview testing, depending on whether the email is B2B or B2C
9. Make sure your designers are experienced and qualified in email design and are aware of the issues of designing for the inbox

Best practice guidelines for coding to ensure renderability

1. Avoid using cascading style sheets (CSS) in your code – not all email clients support them, and your email may not render correctly
2. Use background colours as an alternative to background images behind text – not all email clients support background images, and your email may not render correctly

And our top tip is:

Segmenting your database into regular openers and non-openers means you can send less image-heavy emails to non-openers, and increase the chance of these recipients reading the email with images turned off.

Return Path, the global email services and delivery monitoring organisation (and a dotMailer partner) are surveying European email marketers to benchmark your perceptions about delivery and to develop new products and training to help email marketers improve responses and revenues.

Take the survey

Your answers are appreciated and everyone who enters will be sent a copy of the results.

Take the survey and tell everyone else: http://bit.ly/AJBmL