How to develop suitable email structure for business communication

20 January 2016

When writing content for an email marketing campaign, a user rarely thinks of the underlying technology and they shouldn’t have to, which is just the way it should be.

The campaign build should be smooth and simple, but for developers this can be an incredibly difficult thing to pull off due to the complexities found in email client rendering engines compared to those that users are familiar with seeing in internet browsers.

At present, most email clients are hosted online, but there are a few that still sit on your desktop. The most common of these, and the most troublesome, is Microsoft’s Outlook which is now even more accessible through the Office 365 subscription platform.

Outlook currently uses the most up to date version of Word’s rendering engine at the time of release, but Word is not designed to render HTML structures beyond basic text and lists. This becomes increasingly apparent when trying to develop more complex layouts where it is a whole lot easier to focus on what you can provide than what you cannot.

The key to developing a successful, compatible email campaign is, therefore, to lay out parameters to work with from the build, design and content perspectives.

The build should define these parameters to a specification that promotes simplicity, while still maintaining enough features to not feel underwhelming. Providing just enough flexibility, without extending beyond the potential realm of possibility, makes the user’s experience a creative one, albeit quite brief too.

Finally, it would be wise to keep in mind the user’s end goal when developing, which is to reach out and collect feedback and data from their existing customer base. Speed and simplicity allows them to accomplish this goal; complexity or constant development merely delays the entire process and could result in a sub-par throughput in the long run.

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