What is html email

It is important to know the difference between HTML and plain-text emails, and how they affect the delivery and engagement of your campaign. Plain Text is regular text, with no formatting options such as bold, italics, underlines, or special layout options.

Depending on the email client or particular settings your recipients are using, an HTML campaign may or may not be able to be displayed. Get the most of your email communications. If HTML is recognized, your recipient will see the campaign with images, text, and designs you may have chosen when you created your campaign. Check out the code and client tests on Litmus.

This is just one way to implement buttons in email. However, as long as Outlook , and are around, you will see it being used, typically for background images. In general, sticking with standard system fonts is easiest.

This includes Helvetica, Arial and so on. However, we can use web fonts , such as Google Fonts. We can apply specific CSS styles and show or hide elements and content for different versions of Outlook. Some clients will show images by default. Keep this in mind when including images in your email content. This also affects tracking metrics, because images will typically be used to track opens. Remember to include good alt text for all of your images. You can get creative with alt text for clients that turn off images, as Email Monks does:.

Animated GIFs are supported in most clients. Outlook versions to do not support animated GIFs, instead falling back to the first frame. Remember to compress your media assets and upload them to a content delivery network CDN , such as Amazon Web Services, Cloudinary or imgix.

Most marketing ESPs will handle this for you. Scalable vector graphics SVGs have a lot of advantages on the web. As you would expect, email support varies, and SVG requires a couple of fallback hacks or conditionals. For Retina-ready images, supply a larger image 1. Keep in mind that, for Outlook, you need to declare how wide an image should be with the width attribute. Otherwise, Outlook might render the actual width of the image and break your email.

You can use media queries to show or hide a video based on the client. Email on Acid has more on email video support. Support for form elements varies. Try to steer clear, and link to an external form if you need one.

Campaign Monitor offers some advice on forms. Obviously, it depends on your objectives. Staying away from forms is safer, but Rebelmail and Mixmax have done interesting things with forms for surveys and e-commerce, with good fallback support. Google makes handy actions available for Gmail. Adding the code is straightforward. You have two options :. Getting whitelisted involves a few more steps.

You can test Gmail actions with an gmail. Something important but often forgotten is preheader text. Some clients show preview text next to or under the subject line. This text should provide an extra incentive for the user to open your email. Hide the text like so:. How do you send HTML emails to yourself? Good question. A plain-text email is just that, plain text.

This standard combines both plain text and HTML, leaving it up to the recipient to decide which to render. When you send an email, whether transactional or bulk, include both the HTML and plain-text versions.

Even if, in your mind, every one uses a client that renders HTML, still send plain text. Some will also create a plain-text version, based on your HTML. Some of the available elements include graphics, formatted text and background colors. Used properly, HTML email has the potential to communicate more information, which can lead to higher response rates. As with Web pages, however, load time is still an issue.