Because I worked for company on a low budget for 3 years, with 90,000 members where our main business came from sending them HTML e-mail, I had to create quite a few techniques and use a few others that were obvious. It was nice having feedback from all those members to instantly let me know if anything was buggered.
Design for 600 - 640 px width.
Don't use CSS.
Do use tables.
Don't forget to link your images from the server with absolute paths.
Do track everything.
As with Web pages use text wherever you can rather than an image of text.
Avoid any scripting and don't use Flash - support for both varies too much.
Personalise whenever you can - if your list has names merge them into your mail.
Include unsubscribe info top and bottom - a simple:
Unsubscribe details at bottom of mail...
will do for the top but have full details at the bottom.
Hotmail:
If you want a background color/image set it for the table as well as the page.
Within your <body></body> tags surround everything within a comment, fixes some Hotmail problems. e.g. <body><!--this comment actually fixes stuff-->Loads of lovely content<!--nice fixing work there mr. comment--></body>
Text or HTML?
If you don't include the option in your sign-up process then there's no way of knowing if your end user is going to be using an e-mail reader that just displays HTML raw rather than formatting it. To overcome this I add a simple comment tag at the start of the e-mail that contains either the whole e-mail or a link to the mail if links are user specific e.g.
HTML Code:
<!-- You are receiving this e-mail due to your subsctiption to
%company%. Unsubscribe details at bottom of e-mail
Hi %Name%,
If you are reading this then your e-mail software is either incapable of,
or too old to, receive HTML e-mail. For your convenience a copy of this
e-mail is available at
[url]http://www.blah.blah/blah.blah?blah=blah[/url]
Everything below this line is HTML formatted and will most likely just look
like a bunch of gobbledygook to you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------->
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<!--hotmail fixer-->
Lovely HTML E-mail
<!-- end hotmail fixer-->
</body>
</html>
<!--------------------------------------------------------------------------
%name%, you received this e-mail at your e-mail address of %email% thanks to
your subscription to %company%. If you no longer wish to receive e-mail from us
please use the following link:
%unsub%
If you believe that you have received this e-mail in error please e-mail
[email]abuse@blah.blah[/email] and our abuse team will investigate the matter immediately.
Please do not reply directly to this e-mail as replies will not be read. -->
There are also e-mail readers that will attempt to display your lovely HTML e-mail as plain text. Because of these you need to ensure that links are shown as full URLs rather than 'click here's.
This should be enough of a guide for now?
Take a little while with your e-mails and send multiple tests to your self before sending to your list.
edit: Don't put anything important <head>in here</head> as it will probably be lost. Also don't include anything important in your <body> tag as again it will probably be lost. Define page elements in a table instead. /edit
You're going to need some software and for this I totally recommend WorldCast from
www.Fairlogic.com.
Finally,
NEVER SPAM.
I may follow this up with an article on how to write successful e-mails.
Although you may want to include the appropriate mail headers aswell that are needed for HTML e-mails (I assume they need to be right).
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