183. Email Marketing › how it works › getting started Cluttered inboxes and busy subscribers mean an email that’s lengthy and difficult to get through probably won’t be read. Help your subscribers by structuring your email content into segments, making use of borders or colour blocks to accentuate and divide content. It’s important to balance image and text in your emails. You’ll want to make a point of placing images next to the relevant text. General design guidelines HTML and CSS design principles differ for web and email. Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing your email: • Don’t make use of external or embedded style sheets and avoid unnecessary embedded rows and columns. • Make use of table nesting as far as possible, as this is generally considered to render the best results with difficult email clients. Email designers tend to make use of tables to design their email layout, using inline styles within these tables. Keep your nesting as simple as possible, for the sake of recipients viewing it within Outlook 2007 or 2010. • Set a fixed width for your email by specifying the width and spacing of each cell rather than the entire table. When these specifics are not declared, email clients tend to render the email according to their own defaults and can break the design. • If you are using a block background colour, be sure to include a 100% width table to cover the entire email. • Keep fonts in your email design larger than 9px. Anything below that becomes difficult to view in some email clients. Also bear in mind that, whilst coloured text (or light-on-dark text) might look visually impressive, it can be difficult to read an entire email and strain your subscribers’ eyes. Rather limit such visual tricks to smaller sections of your email, or to emails that contain less written content. • Make use of inline CSS - some email clients strip the CSS from the head and body of the email. • Test your emails in a variety of email clients before you send. Designing for the preview pane Many email users run desktop clients with which they manage their email. Given the amount of emails people receive on a daily basis, many do not open emails but rather look at them in their preview panes. This has added another challenge for designers wanting to ensure that their emails display properly. Images and layout should consider the preview pane and be tested for rendering. Preview panes can be vertical or they can be horizontal.180