HTML eMail Troubleshooter

So, you want to send HTML email to your clients, prospects or newsletter subscribers. Marketing has descended from upon high and declared it, the small business client wants it, and an executive in management has read about it.

Well, why not? The clickthrough rates are noticeably higher on HTML email. Statistics show that customers are less likely to unsubscribe from HTML email than from its text counterpart. In my last TemplateKit email newsletter, I had 11 unsubscribes, 10 of which were text recipients. Customers simply respond with more click-through, more sales, and more inquiries for information, but only if your message is in a form that the recipient can easily view and display correctly.

The fact of the matter is that email HTML browsers are simply not equal to their Web browser equivalents. The situation's made more complex by the wide variety of settings, preferences, security updates, versions, and third-party applications which mean that the user experience is extremely hard to predict. Recently I've seen:

• Clients try to send Forms via email which terminated in a Web-based email reader
• Style sheets which conflict with Web-based email systems (sense a pattern here?)
• Redirects that get processed twice and break
• A Flash or Shockwave piece that begins streaming in an Outlook preview window, and then starts a second time when the email is opened
• JavaScripts blown apart when a viewer's security settings or a Web-based email client forbid them
• Links that mysteriously break under Hotmail's link accounting system

Common Email Clients

Outlook makes a decision to use the full version of IE (depending on the version you may have) or use a "lite" version, based on your current configuration. Two resources that can help you understand these differences are:

• Outlook E-mail Security Update Information
• How Outlook Renders HTML

1. As an attachment
   
2. As an embedded document
   
3. As raw HTML (consult your individual email program)
   
4. Through a third-party application like bCentral's Traffic Builder, or a robust system such as Xchange - eMessaging

• Cut and paste from Web pages
• Cut and paste from an MS Office product
• Use a previously-mailed document as the basis for your code

Cutting and Pasting from a Web Page

There are a number of ways you can get HTML code from an existing document without using an HTML editor. You can "view source" and copy the code to the clipboard, you can create a copy with the "save as" command, or you can try to select the code from the body of the document and paste it into another program. What you need to be conscious of is how the links inside that document are set up. If your document contains a number of relative links (i.e. /images/yourimage.gif), then you might not be able to find your images when it comes time to preview and test.

You may want to include a BASE tag in your HTML email so your recipient's browser knows how to interpret document-relative links. The BASE element allows global reference information to be set. Use of the HREF attribute provides a base address for the interpretation of all relative URL references in a document, when that document is read out of context. The TARGET attribute specifies a global frame destination name to be used for page activation changes (in links, forms and image maps).

For example:
<BASE HREF="http://www.florentinedesign.com" TARGET="_top"> This may help your mailings, however I'd recommend that you use an absolute URL for each of your links.

Cutting and Pasting from a Microsoft Office Product

If you cut and paste from Microsoft Word, there's always a chance that some formatting will not carry over into HTML very well. This is most often seen in the case of auto-formatting, when MS Word converts common keystrokes into symbols, -, "", © and a host of others. These are called Windows Characters, and they're not interpreted by your browser: Word represents these ASCI characters as numeric values, which a browser cannot understand.

This is why it's always best to work in text mode, or save your document as a DOS text document and lose all formatting before you transfer it to your HTML email. An excellent Text Editor worth your consideration is TextPad, which will allow you to specify which code set you should use and save your document as. Be aware that to merely paste your code into TextPad, or save your document in MS Word as a text document, is not good enough.