Last month I started sending HTML emails to my mailing lists.  HTML emails are the emails you receive with lots of nice graphics, as opposed to emails containing plain text.  And I’ve received a number of questions on how to create attractive looking emails like these.

So here’s what you need to know.

First, an HTML email is basically an HTML web page.  That means you create an HTML email the same way you create a web page.  So if you can create web pages, you can create HTML emails.  But there are some differences.

First, when creating an HTML email, you can’t use CSS.  You have to use old-fashioned tables (technically you can use inline CSS, but it’s really best to avoid it).  And second, you have to consider the width of your email.  When creating a web page, that page might have a width of 900 pixels.  That’s going to be too wide for an email, where the width is usually in the 500 pixel range.

Follow those two things and you’re almost all of the way there.

I say almost because there is still one huge issue that you need to deal with.  And that’s email clients.  You see, web pages are viewed in browsers which adhere to HTML standards (meaning a web page looks the same in Firefox, IE, Chrome, etc.)…but HTML emails are viewed in email clients which do not follow HTML standards.

Every email client renders HTML differently (there are dozens of them too, by the way).  That means your HTML email might look fine to someone using Outlook, but looks like a mess to someone using Gmail.

To make sure your HTML emails look the same in all the major email clients, you can use a service like EmailOnAcid.  It’s not free, but it will display your HTML email in 15 different email clients.  If your email looks fine in some but breaks in others, you then need to go back to your email template and tweak things…then run an EmailOnAcid test again.

What if you don’t know the first thing about coding HTML?  In that case, there are plenty of HTML email templates available on the web.  For example, from ThemeForest.

Just be aware that rarely do the developers of these templates test them in different email clients, so you’ll still want to run any template you choose through EmailOnAcid.