Forget your list when designing emails

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on August 14, 2007

The F word might be killing two traditional ways of coping with the problem that each webmail service has its own way of interpreting and displaying HTML emails. (That's F for forwarding.)

The first way was to look at your email list and check the domain names (the bit after the @.) If you had a mere handful of names with @gmail.com addresses, you wouldn't lose sleep trying to get your email template to display perfectly at the Gmail webmail service.

Or those with more resources might split their list by domain and send different designs to each. So @gmail.com addresses would get an email specifically designed to display beautifully when viewed in the Gmail interface.

Unfortunately, it's no longer that simple. The domain name is no guarantee that this is where the email is going to be read. Increasingly, the domain names in your email list are irrelevant to your design.

Instead, you have to assume that your emails might be read anywhere, at any webmail service or on any desktop software, and design accordingly. (Not to mention the growth of mobile email.)

A message to johndoe@gmail.com might end up read on Outlook 2007. Or one to johndoe@mypersonaldomain.com might be read at Windows Live Hotmail.

Here's why...

1. Among the top webmail services, the following all allow you to automatically have your email forwarded to another address or to check email using a suitable desktop client like Outlook:

Gmail
Windows Live Hotmail (just announced for premium accounts)
The premium version of Yahoo! Mail

(AOL/AIM Mail also lets you use desktop clients like Outlook to read your email.)

2. Then there is the problem that all four big webmail services allow users to have custom domains and/or provide business email hosting services for organizations.

In other words, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL might be behind any innocuous email address on your list.

In summary...forwarding, remote account access and hosted custom email services mean you can no longer assume that an address's domain name tells you how and where email to that address will be seen.

More on design | Tags: email marketing, email design, hotmail, gmail, aol mail, yahoo mail, webmail

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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