Allchorn Design

Mr/Mrs Client:

“Whip me together a quick newsletter to send to my subscribers. Oh, and make it look like this design”…

I am then handed a design created by a print designer. Background images, fancy fonts, overlaying text etc.

“It needs to look exactly like that and must work in all mail clients.”

Wow, thanks… I’ll get right on it. Should only take me a few minutes… right? wrong!

Designing and coding newsletters… where do I start? Do you think us web professionals have problems getting our work to render correctly in browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari? Not nearly as much as we suffer with the exceptionally poor rendering of the mail clients. Gmail, AOL, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook… they all have their wierd quirks and rules.

Don’t get me wrong, some of these quirks are security related, and I won’t begrudge them the fact that some of them are sterling products and services. But creating email newsletters that look the same, or at least similar in all of them is almost an impossible task. One fraught with immense amounts of testing time and to-and-fro bug fixes.

The Newsletter Designer’s Saving Grace

Thankfully, the people that send your newsletters are aware of the problems and have even gone to the lengths of creating an email standards organisation.

Side Note: First, let me say that if you’re not using something like Campaign Monitor or Aweber, you’re not really sending newsletters. Sorry to be blunt, but you’re doing the equivilant of a flyer drop from a helicopter. Marketing is useless if you can’t measure it.

Campaign Monitor are especially on the ball and actually keep a very informative blog up to date and full of useful information. The most recent of which being an article on 2008 Email Design Guidelines. Read it, either being a client or a designer/coder. It’s worth the extra general knowledge at least.

Aweber are also keeping with the game, and this is actually the service I use to send email newsletters to my subscribers at Circuitchaser.com. They’ve recently introduced some advanced analytical features to better analyse the effect of your email broadcasts.

But now I’m going off topic again…

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

I probably heard this at school first. It rings true now, more than 20yrs later. Simpler is better with email newsletters. Treat them as a calling card. An enticement tool that allows recipients to visit your website for further information/action.

Keep the images minimal. Don’t plague your visitors with images that make up important parts of your email. A lot of mail clients block images at first and this can break your email if there is important images in them.

Test thoroughly, test it some more, and then when you’re done testing, test it again! There is information out there for this, and believe it or not, it comes from Campaign Monitor no less (helpful guys these aren’t they?).

Summing Up

So Mr/Mrs One Click, quick quick, design me a newsletter; hopefully you now know and understand more or less what goes into creating a newsletter, and when your designer sighs when you give him an hour’s notice to send something important, you’ll know why.

Oh, and if your designer disputes this post’s facts and maintains that he/she can design and code and send a custom newsletter in a couple of minutes… ask them to prove it and show you how they render in (your client’s) mail clients! I bet they either won’t know what you’re talking about or will catch a very quick wake up when they realise what they’re doing wrong. They will probably then go back to their normal secretarial/admin/plumbing/invoicing work that the boss asked them to do an hour ago.