The latest release of our email marketing software, GroupMail (v5.2.0.082) contains over 20 new email templates. They range from holiday templates (to include a St. Patrick’s Day design, of course!) to practical business-themed templates with fashion, real estate, travel, music, arts and general theme designs.
Using professionally designed email templates to create your message is an easy way to make a good first impression on your recipients. Content is king; but in email marketing, design is crucial too. You only have a few seconds to capture the attention and interest of your recipients.
As important as helping to capture the attention of your recipients, the new GroupMail email templates are tested for compatibility with all major email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) This helps to ensure that your recipients will see the same thing you saw when you sent the message to them — and we all know how difficult that has become lately with variety of HTML rendering standards out there today which cause beautifully crafted email designs to lose formatting along the way.
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.
