I have a lot to learn about sending out email newsletters so I constantly keep an eye out for interesting articles on this subject. Well here is one from Lyris that really spoke to me and I expect it will for many of you who are in the same position I am (a newbie).
Essentially the article boils down to one conclusion… using CSS in a newsletter is foolhardy. Why? Well apparently a large portion of email clients and web-based email portals (Hotmail, GMail) ignore CSS. Personally this is bewildering to me since CSS has been so widely adopted but I have long since learned that some things just don’t make sense. As a result, any newsletter formatted with CSS may be entirely unreadable when viewed by an email client; which does not exactly bode well for the success of a CSS-driven newsletter.
Anyway, this is likely a very obvious fact to any of you with more than average experience with newsletters out there. But for those of you who are new to newsletter creation read this article and follow the advice: format the whole newsletter with inline HTML and you are off to the races. You can expect StepForth’s SEO newsletter to be significantly better as a result of this simple change – all CSS has been removed and reformatted in HTML. I am now looking forward to seeing the first readable edition of the Step Forth Weekly Newsletter in GMail next week 🙂
All the best this fine weekend – Ross Dunn