There are many articles about designing websites as a marketing tool to actually generate business leads or sales rather than simply looking nice. And many business owners do now consider how well their website works at marketing rather than just how attractive it looks as an artistic piece of work.
But when it comes to emailer design, the same thought to designing for conversion is rarely done. The majority of email newsletters which arrive in our inboxes have not been visually designed with the purpose of getting a response. They have been designed primarily as an artistic exercise in looking good. This makes them far less effective.
Another issue is the number of email newsletter which look very poor in many email clients. This is because they have only been written to work in one or two email clients. It is not widely appreciated just how different every email client is when it comes to showing an email, and this is much greater than the difference between say Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer and Firefox and Safari and other common browsers.
In fact two of the main business email clients, Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 render emails very differently, and the other common webmail clients just as Googlemail, Hotmail, Yahoo and many others all show the emails in a different way again. The most problematic is probably Outlook 2007 (and the most common for B2B email addresses). There was a major change between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 in the way the browser generated the email to view; Outlook 2003 was based more on web browsers whilst Outlook 2007 was based more on Word. This then creates major inconsistencies in how an email newsletter looks between different email clients.
Let’s consider the basic styling of an email. A few years ago it seemed sensible to try implementing styles in the header of an email or at least by defining them with a style element. But this will not work even now in Googlemail and Lotus notes, two key email clients.
For those dealing with multiple languages, the support for right to left languages such as Arabic as available in many webmail applications such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Apple mail and was available in Outlook 2003, but is not supported in Outlook 2007 or Google mail. Recent (but not the most recent) versions of Lotus notes did not support many of the font tags so styling the text was very restricted in this popular corporate business product.
The basic layout of the email newsletter is even more confusing with inconsistencies in how widths, margins and padding are treated with the two main business email client, Outlook 2007 and Lotus Notes creating the most inconsistent issues.
So if you want an email newsletter that looks good for everybody, and not just in the email client you tested it for, make sure whoever creates the email code is aware of the differences between these email clients.