There are many things to consider when creating an email:

1. Establish a Goal
2. Determine the Message
3. Consider the Recipient
4. Find the right balance between imagery and text
5. Craft a subject line and call to action
- The most important element of an email is the subject line. Develop subject lines that speak to the content and are not misleading
- Subject lines should be no longer than six to seven words

Formatting

• Email clients strip the body tag; therefore we shouldn’t rely on any styling of the body tag
• Limit CSS; most email clients have very little support for absolute positioning, floats and clears are also very unreliable
• Inline styling is the safest formatting
• The only real way to succeed with multiple column designs in email is to rely on the old table based coding methods.

Image Blocking

• Make sure your email content is not one large image

- Images are very powerful and compelling, but many popular mail clients automatically block images as a default security setting
- If your call to action is a image, it is a good idea to have an alternate text link

Things to Avoid

• CSS Positioning
• Animated GIF’s
• CSS Floating
• Background Images (if you use background images, design it in a way that it will not look broken without the image)
• Forms
• External Style Sheets
• CSS Classes
• Body Tag
• Javascrpit
• Flash
• Alt Tags
• DIV Tags (can be used, but width and height are no longer supported, so be careful)
• Padding (adjacent TD cells must have same padding to render correctly)
• Using a 1×1 pixel spacer gifs (to force widths in your table data cells) as spammers use them and may flag your email as spam.

Bou Xiong
Web Designer
oneNetworkDirect

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