A well designed newsletter template will promote your brand, work and look good in all email clients (even outlook) and be easy to edit or populate with your new content in-house – so no need to keep going back to your web design agency each week, month or quarter.

Bright New Media are highly experienced in producing great HTML email templates. We test them in all the major email clients to ensure consistency across the board, so your email will always look and work as expected and never look broken or spammy.

If you’re thinking about starting a company newsletter contact us today for more details and a no obligation quote.

I’m quite often surprised to hear about web design companies that don’t provide HTML email design. Why not? Maybe they don’t want the hassle of managing the mail out, but with some great campaign management solutions out there, there really is no excuse.

If you can design a web page you can design a HTML email. Keep it simple, remember to host any images you’ve used. Test, tweak and test again, and with a bit of luck, it will appear in your clients’ inbox looking at least something like it should… Practice makes perfect.

Click here to view the ‘horizontal scroll game’.

An illustrated ‘teaser’ displays neatly in your inbox inviting you to scroll across, whereupon a series of ‘hints’ then direct you left and right, up and down, around a ‘map’. Ultimately you arrive at the call to action.

We’ve never seen an email quite like it either.

For larger or complex images however, the resulting code can be monstrous, so what are the practical applications? Well, a small graphic or logo displayed instantly may be enough to spark interest or to reassure the recipient as to the sender or the email’s value and go on to read or download the rest of the email.

Another possibility is to scale up the ‘pixel size’ so that a small graphic displays much larger using the same amount of code. The result is an obviously ‘pixelated’ image – but this could be used creatively to good effect in an email design – think pixel art, or Ceefax 2.0

Well, the short answer is (still) no, at least not in the same way that we can display video on a web page, but my digging unearthed some interesting stats, creative workarounds and a glimmer of hope, so read on…

Many of the services that talk about ‘video email‘ are in fact referring to a ‘click-to-view’ approach, linking out to video content on a web page as opposed to actually viewing it in the email application, and while this is nothing new, the interesting bit is that the click through rates are proven to be much higher, 50-65% compared to emails that offer no video content at 20-30%. (Source: Style Campaign)

But what about viewing video content in the email client? Well, creating movement in a HTML email is still by and large, limited to the animated gif format, and while this can be used to good effect, it can not contain sound, length and quality is restricted by file size, and it doesn’t work in Outlook, which displays only the first frame of the animation.

However things could be set to change (maybe, someday…) Specialist service provider Goodmail and Gmail have introduced support for video viewing within the email itself which should mean that in time, we’ll see others adopting it too. An exciting prospect for email marketers – video that plays on opening the email… But will it work in Outlook?