Designing Newsletters

As much as some might come to believe that newsletters will be extinct in the future, I’ve a feeling it won’t because it’s been proven so far to be one of the best e-marketing tools around. Of course, this isn’t comparing to marketing stategies like playing a game and the highest score wins.

Newsletter trends today are not the same anymore. If you don’t believe me, then take a gander of this upcoming screenshot and tell me what is wrong with it?

Go ahead and click the image for a larger version if you feel something is really wrong with that screenshot. :)

Have you found what is wrong with it? It isn’t that the image isn’t loading properly. What you’re seeing is an email provider blocking images from loading into your mailbox.

Why is this being done? To prevent any infection of virus, trojans, corruption of the mind and other logical reasons. The point is that email software nowadays are blocking images when they receive any emails.

That’s why as much as like our suped up styled newsletter designs, not everyone wishes to read them in that state. It’s not discouraging designers but advising them and the people providing newsletter to have a plain text version as well.

Though I could always click the ‘Always display image from..’ option, I’d be making my computer vulnerable if anything does happen and I don’t think the newsletter owners will say it’s their fault.

The other advantage of having a plain text newsletter is that it loads very quickly. The setback though is that not all email providers support CSS layouts yet. So we’d have to still use basic tables for the layout and then style the tables via CSS.

If you need a guide on how to use CSS to style your table or its data properly, read Bring on the tables | 456 Berea Street.

So the next time you’re thinking of using newsletters, remember that not everyone might want to see your colourful and designer-type emails or even worst, they can’t see them.