Email coding

Tips from a Junior Email Developer

Posted by Gareth McCabe

As a fresh media graduate looking to make a start in my career, I did not expect to join the email development industry. I was familiar with web development, but had little knowledge of how the email world worked. Joining this new and unfamiliar industry was a challenge, there was a lot of information to learn quickly since email development is a fast paced and busy industry. From my own experience, here are some tips that I can share from my brief time as a junior email developer. Ask for help Chances are, you are going to get stuck or confused. It’s always better to ask a quick question to someone with more experience instead of struggling for hours on…

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Email Coding 101

Posted by Josh Green

It can be daunting writing HTML from scratch especially if you haven’t written any HTML email code before. As someone who has coded email for over 15 years I promise you it is not as hard as it looks and everyone had a day one someday. Being able to read, write and understand HTML is a fantastic first step into understanding the internet and is a valuable life skill even outside of the email marketing environment. In this post I will guide you through the first simple steps of hand-coding your first email. Before we even get started it is worth pointing out that email code is quite different from ‘modern’ HTML you might find on the web, and without…

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Three interactive email problems (and how to solve them)

Posted by Adrian Young

Electronic mail has come a long way since its humble, text-only roots. The modern medium is one rich in imagery, animation and – if you fancy it – interactivity. Until recently, interactive email could only be achieved by means of some CSS wizardy. While CSS was never actually intended for this purpose, it’s capable of powering surprisingly complex interactive content. In the JavaScript-free world of email, this was a revelation. Of course, technology doesn’t stand still for long. The advent of Google’s AMP for Email has introduced a standardised system of interactive email. Is that the death knell for CSS-based interactivity? Not yet and potentially not at all. It’s early days and remains to be seen whether AMP becomes widely-adopted…

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Dynamic coding for smarter and more efficient templates

Posted by Mel Jewell

Dynamic code in templates can save a lot of time for a lot of different scenarios. Not only will you not have to go through your data with a fine toothcomb to fix things to fit your template requirements, you may also only have to make one template rather than multiple ones, saving significantly on development time and resources. Here are just some of the solutions our platform can offer to really help save time and effort when it comes to perfecting your templates: Personalisation using titles, first names and last names One very common issue you may find, is you want to use personalisation in your email, be it a salutation or in the subject line, but you have…

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Animated GIFs vs CSS Animation – The Showdown

Posted by Josh Green

Ding ding. We’re in for a fight night treat today as two big powers are squaring off. In the blue corner, we have animated GIFs and in the red corner, we have CSS animations. It’s time to find out who the heavy-weight champ is. Animated GIFs In the blue corner, weighing in at anywhere between 50kb to 3mb we have the stalwart of email marketing, the animated GIF. Long have animated GIFs (pronounced gif, not jif!) been used in email marketing. They are an excellent way to draw attention to a specific area of an email or add a bit of life to an email. Just take a look at this example by Boden: I love animated GIFs, but they’re…

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How to create hi-res retina images for email

Posted by Josh Green

While the world of email might be a a few years off from implementing something like SVG images there are a few tricks you can do to ensure you have high or at least higher quality images in your emails. The technique described here works best for small images, icons, or single colour images. During the testing process I noticed that serving images even slightly larger in size did have quite a noticeable image quality improvement on the retina screen. What we can learn from this is it’s not always necessary to supply exactly the right amount of pixels for the retina screens just try and get as close as possible. For this example I’m going to make a logo…

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Sublime text for email coding

Posted by Josh Green

Email coding is getting a better and more professional reputation and we are now starting to see tools made specifically for email coding, such as the new Litmus email builder. While this is an impressive and rapidly evolving tool the fact that is an online editor and not desktop app is still a deal breaker for me. While most email coders out there probably use Adobe Dreamweaver I know our peers in the Web Design industry often sneer and jeer at us email coders. Not only do we code in “gross” table mark-up but even our editor of choice (Dreamweaver) is super uncool. Well quite a while ago now I caved to peer pressure and made the switch to Sublime…

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