How to Design an HTML Email

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Luis Estrada and I am a software developer. In this video I'll show you how to design an HTML e-mail. Now that you have created your own magazine or store on line and added on line payments to it it is time that you keep in touch with your clients. You could write them an HTML e-mail as verification of the purchased order as a welcome message to your on line magazine or as a news letter to keep users informed of new products, services, or content added to your website. An HTML e-mail could also be used to try to get your customers back after they have bought products on your website or after their membership account for your website has expired. You could use HTML to create a message that looks interesting including images and links and make your e-mail exciting. You could even set up templates to send your e-mail in a special format depending upon what you want to write. Here are some tips that will help you create a great HTML e-mail. You should think of the e-mail message as an extension of your website. Upload the images on your website and then link to them in your e-mail using absolute url's. Be sure to use absolute paths for both images and links. You need to use absolute paths in an HTML e-mail to insure that the images display and the links work. An e-mail is not a web page. When your users arrive to your website you have the whole browser window in which to display your message. E-mail is different. An e-mail inbox is a very noisy place with tons of messages, folders, calendars and other distractions. Your subscribers may only read the subject line or perhaps see your e-mail through a small preview panel. You need to decide your e-mail accordingly and make the best use of the screen space and time the readers give you. Get to the point quickly. Start with the most valuable information. Your reader should be able to glance at the top of the e-mail and know immediately what it is about. Consider starting with the table of contents or a short summary that will entice them to read the full e-mail. This is especially useful if you send monthly newsletters. Another very important activity before sending your e-mail is testing. Your clients could use different e-mail providers. Some could use e-mail client applications to download their e-mails to their computers like outlook or thunderbird and others might prefer to check their e-mail on line using a service like hotmail, Gmail, or yahoo. You should always test sending your HTML e-mails to at least one account to each of these e-mail readers. That way you can verify that the e-mail looks good on each one. Another option that you can take is to test the e-mails on different browsers. There are at least four or five major web browsers that you should do testing on. There are cases when a user sees the same HTML e-mail on different browsers and the page looks quite different. For example if you see a HTML e-mail using your Gmail account in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 the result could be quite different. I realize that we are talking about a lot of testing but I believe that it is better to invest time on this than losing potential customers that cannot read your e-mail correctly. I am Luis Estrada and I have just showed you how to make money with your websites."