Web Design & Marketing Blog

Lessons I Learned From Creating An Email Newsletter

Category: Blog

Written by Estevan Montoya

Well, the past few days have been a little stressful over one item....an email newsletter. We have a great relationship with a company as far as their website goes. The owner wanted to send an email blast to all the members of his website (over 100k!). We went to work and created a great looking newsletter. Well, the mail testing came, because we didn't want to send out an email without testing it. That's where we ran into problems. I am going to off of the record here, to the following statement does not exist: I DO NOT LIKE MICROSOFT! Our email newsletter looked great in every email client except for Outlook. We have ran into problems before when designing websites that work on IE, so it was not surprise to me that Outlook would have the problems as well.

To give you a better understanding of our experience, it's kind of like going to a fast food restaurant. You know, the kind where they emphasize fast over food. Just like me, you have probably had times where you looked at your burger and thought "this looks nothing like the picture!". The cheese is half way our. These mustard all over the place. Grease is dripping. You know what I'm talking about. See, the concern was to get the customer something, and not the best thing. Well, that's how I look at Microsoft and their web based programs like IE and Outlook. The client gets "something", but not the best thing. In fact, the email newsletter I created looked better in a FREE web based gmail account than a program people pay for. That's sad, because people are paying for junk.

So, What Did I Learn About Designing An Email Newsletter?
Beware, this will be a little techie...

I Had To Design Like It Was 1999

After making a clean looking design according to 2012 CSS standards, I found that the email looked great in every platform, except for Outlook. You might ask, what are you fixating on Outlook? Well...the person we were working used Outlook! We want the customer to he happy, so we had to work to make make it look good in his software. Well, after doing some research (I should have done that first!), I found that people were saying to design in tables instead of divs. I have got used to making table-less sites recently, so it was hard to go back to tables. Yet, that is what was called for by major email campaign websites. Well, to make a long story short, I had to design the way we used to design in 1999. Back to old style HTML. 

This can be a real test since most new designers are looking to creating cool looking website. Most of them don't even know how to use tables for an entire website. I do, I started designing in that style. Yet, it was hard because I had to change my thinking. I even had to go the our boss and get his advice several times. All because some email clients have not jumped on board with the rest of the web.

CSS Hardly Works

If you know anything about designing for a 10 year gap, then you know that CSS does not work to well. That was the case for this design as well. Again, the email looked great in a browser and other free email clients, but not in Outlook. I had to basically take out the CSS and do everything in old HTML format. The problem is that CSS and web standards are different from 10 years ago. Yes, you can get what you want, but working in tables is not that great. Plus, all the cool things you can do with CSS are not limited. Then, if you do work in CSS, you have to do everything INLINE. So, for every table, you must place in all the styles, that's if they work in Outlook. In fact, after the entire ordeal, I just rather skip CSS and design as if it didn't exist. I hope things change for that matter, but microsoft will determine that.

It's Better To Hack A Pre-made Template

After all the back and forth of getting the design to look decent, I finally came to the conclusion, use just hack the pre-made templates from the email newsletter company. They built their sites will all this in mind and somehow managed to make it look good. Why reinvent the wheel? After all, what matters is that the client is happy. Hacking a pre-made email newsletter template is a lot easier and saved time. That will really make the client happy if you charge by the hour. So, please learn from this one designers headache and horror, and try hacking an email template. And if you do design an email newsletter, then pull out your old HTML 3 book and take a trip back in time.