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.

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!

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.

1. Test your HTML using the w3c Markup Validation Service and fix any major coding errors (like no end tags, etc.)
2. Use an email testing service ($$) such as Litmus
3. 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.
4. Use pre-tested HTML email templates when possible.
5. 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.

Below are some screenshots of the new HTML email templates.

* To see the templates in a larger view, just click on the thumbnail.

** Recently 3 HTML email templates were added to the GroupMail Personal Edition and 10 HTML email templates to the GroupMail Business Edition. With these additions, there are approximately 25 templates available in the Personal Edition and about 45 templates available in the Business Edition.