Coding and designing HTML emails can be a daunting task. There is such a wide variety of mail clients on the market and every one of them seems to follow its own unique set of standards. So how do you get around this? How do you launch an HTML email marketing campaign that garners positive results regardless of your readers’ mail client? While there is no universal standard to fall back on, the following three tips in this article will help to ensure that HTML formatting does not hinder the effectiveness of your marketing message.

1. Keep it Simple

If you are planning to use HTML for email marketing endeavors, try to avoid all the bells and whistles and keep it simple. You may be tempted to lay it on heavy, but more color, images or layout blocks does not necessarily translate to a better design. Many businesses find that simple is the way to go when it comes to HTML design. Determine the single most important element of the email and design everything else around it, ensuring that your message stands out and hits home. It would not be a bad idea to have someone give your email a quick look over and let you know just which part of the message captures their attention first. Their insight can help you determine whether your campaign is ready to launch, or if you need to go back to the drawing board.

2. Consider Your Mobile Audience

Email and mobile devices have become a common marriage. Therefore, you have to consider that even the recipient who regularly reads email on their desktop, may also do so occasionally on a mobile phone or PDA. The disadvantage this poses to you is not being able to know when it occurs. For this reason, you should test your HTML mail by seeing how it looks on an iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, and other popular mobile devices that support email.

3. Test Early and Often

Although it is widely embraced and adopted, HTML is still not a universal format. The good thing is that you can easily check your emails before you send them by opening up a couple of free accounts for testing. This is something you should really consider if your messages contain embedded forms or other advanced HTML techniques. And because trends are always changing, you should test your emails on a regular basis. Research shows that an alarming number of messages received did not display correctly because of broken code and other errors that could have been avoided.