The ramifications of a poorly coded email can be long-lived and actually hurt your bottom line. If your email looks bad on 20% or 70% of the email clients/programs, your company looks bad too! You may lose customers and sales. It hurts trust. Subscribers might start getting paranoid and unsubscribe or mark your email as spam. And the thrust of the email is lost. A bad email does more harm than good!
When something goes wrong with an email, it’s tempting to immediately send out a replacement email with the error corrected. This kind of thinking works for websites, but emails are another matter. If you immediately re-send, Hotmail and other email systems may throw it right into spam (multiple similar messages are interpreted as spam). Gmail will receive both but stick them together in a way that confuses most subscribers, and they may not see the updated version. Subscribers who receive both emails will start to wonder, “What is wrong with this place?” and question whether your company is too disorganized to do business with.
Damage control: sending an apology email is even worse. When subscribers see that, they probably think, “Hey, you should have got it right the first time!” It hurts your trust and credibility.
It is best to not risk having an email marketing train wreck.
Developing, or coding as is called in the industry, HTML emails is more difficult than coding for a website, because there are more restrictions. For example:
- Styles must be in-line, not CSS.
- Tables are tricky to lay out and style perfectly.
- URLs must be absolute.
- Emails need a specific ratio of text-to-image area or they may get filtered as spam.
- Emails bloated with too many graphics at the wrong resolution take too long to download.
- Emails must make a good impression in the top 2 to 3 inches, and must be programmed accordingly.
- Opt-out options must fulfill Can Spam law requirements.
- Plus more!
If you didn’t understand what all that meant, you need to find a newsletter developing company who knows what they’re doing! Why would you pay an outside single HTML programmer to learn how to code your email using “trial and error” or hire somebody as permanent staff to do just that? Of course there are some exceptions there and you could find a great newsletter HTML developer who does a great job and is prompt. One of the problems that we have seen from talking to clients who used to work with a single person was reliability and promptness. Say for example, you are an average or big size company that sees that the sales for the week are not where they should be. Late Thursday night you decide to send three different promotional offers through three different email blasts by Friday at noon time. Will that single person be able to get the job done in a timely manner, in this case develop and test the three newsletters by 12 pm? I sort of doubt it. Next, having an in-house full time employee just for the development of newsletters it will be expensive overall. A specialist takes less time and turns your project around faster, gets it right the first ime, and is always there for you, even in the after hours when needed.
An HTML programmer who has learned how to code emails needs lots of ongoing experience to keep his or her skills sharp. If they only code one or two emails a month, they’ll start to forget the nuances of HTML email coding. You need a specialist who does it nearly every day.
An experienced company will be ready to test and ensure the email on looks the same as intended on all browsers and all popular email systems, including all combinations of:
- all major email systems (such as Outlook, MacMail, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, etc.)
- in all browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari).
Most general HTML programmers won’t have all those browsers and accounts ready for testing emails. You’d have to badger them — and pay them — to set it up.
Here are some real-life horror stories that we are Not Making Up:
- A website company in New York State sent an email in which the action step — clicking a “Sign Up Now” button — looked great on their Mac. On Outlook for Windows (the most popular email program at the time), the button showed up as black-on-black, and therefore illegible. A few subscribers wrote back, wondering what the action step was or how to sign up. And most just gave up.
- A non-profit sent out their emails as one large image — even the text was fancy script or plain text and all in the image. It looked great but not many people received it because ISPs flagged it as spam due to a low image-to-text ratio. People who received it became impatient with the long download so the message was lost. The organization soon learned to use an experienced web design company to code their newsletter in a prompt and effective way to get their messages out and opened.
- An amateur programmer tested his HTML emails on his own machine and they looked fine, so he sent out the emails. For the subscribers, the images were missing because he didn’t know to use absolute URLs
At Shero Designs, we have coded hundreds of HTML emails and we turn them around fast. Our turn around time is usually 3 hours from the time the graphics or the newsletter design is supplied to us. No matter how difficult the design is we guarantee that you email will look as intended on all the major email clients mentioned above. You will be able to send your message to your email list, confident that the HTML code is sound. Just contact us . .
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
