The holiday season is really on top of us again. Today is the 5th day of Chanukah and Christmas is 9 days away! Oy Vey!
If you have customers, it’s a good time to send them a note of thanks and warm wishes for a Happy New Year. The holidays also provide a great opportunity to send a generous gift or discount coupon to your customers. Have you ever considered taking a portion of your advertising budget and spending it directly on your existing, loyal customers rather than on potential business relationships? Think about it.
Here is a selection of holiday email templates available in GroupMail.
GroupMail also allows you to import your own HTML email holiday templates and save them in GroupMail’s template folder. Have you designed a holiday email template that you’re proud of? If so, provide a link in the comments of this post so that we can get inspired.
GroupMail customers have access to 45 email templates. Using these expert-designed and tested email templates will make your message appear more professional. They will also help to ensure that your message stays intact across the variety of email clients who treat HTML message display differently.
Our templates are great, but we’re always on the lookout for new email templates for our customers. Today, I found a link to 10 more (free) email templates from Lyris. Right on!
You can download these templates, import them into GroupMail and save them as user-defined templates in your GroupMail templates folder.
To import an HTML email template into GroupMail, open a new message and click File/Import/HTML Document. Once imported, you can click File/Save As/A Template to save it in your GroupMail Template folder to use over and over again.
If you know of any other free HTML email templates that have been professionally designed and tested, let us know!
This is the billion dollar question. As we’ve discussed here in the past, there are no standards for HTML email. So what looks good in one client (Yahoo) might look like [click] in another (Outlook 2007). Some email marketers, in true K.I.S.S. fashion, recommend keeping the design as basic as possible. Others hire designers to custom build a solid template to work from.
Of course, the whole thing gets even more difficult when there are email client developers, like Microsoft, actually reverting back to older HTML standards for newer email clients, like they did with Outlook 2007 which has less CSS support than the previous version of Outlook had.
But, it’s not a lost cause. There are definitely things that you can do to optimize your HTML so that it will render well in the majority of email clients.
- Test your HTML using the w3c Markup Validation Service and fix any major coding errors (like no end tags, etc.)
- Use an email testing service ($$) such as Litmus
- Do your own testing. Create a test group using as many different email addresses (i.e. Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, domain, etc.) and test your messages against them.
- Use pre-tested HTML email templates when possible.
- Implement the 9 Best Practices for Email Design
One day, thanks to the hard work of the Email Standards Project, we will all celebrate the day when all email is rendered equally. Perhaps we’ll make it an international holiday for email marketers.
Until then, good luck.
In email delivery, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to HTML formatting. So unless text-only messages are used, email marketers must either prepare multiple versions or spend time testing campaigns across different email clients and platforms. That’s life Joey – until the email standards lobby gathers enough steam to persuade email and mobile platform developers to subscribe to some HTML email rendering standards.
Mark Brownlow published an informative post with links to articles and discussions about image blocking, mobile email growth, iPhone email design considerations and even a post that includes an actual email template that Glen Lipka designed which seems to test well across most clients. Glen is a NY Jets fan. As a Giants supporter, I won’t hold that against him.
My tests with our own GroupMail email templates have proved successful with rendering across most email clients and even seem to circumvent image suppression in Outlook Express. I haven’t done any formal testing though. If anyone has performed formal testing with GroupMail templates and has records or screenshots of the results, I’d love to hear from you!
