Email marketing design has grown considerably from the early days of text based messages sent en masse to your recipients. With HTML email design, you can craft messages that not only look like web pages, but offer interactive functionality as well. Better still, using HTML in your emails allows for increased email analysis.

While HTML email design uses the same coding language used to craft a web page, web page design differs. Email marketing design relies on an email client to deliver its content instead of being shown through a web browser. As a result, the creative approach is different as well.

The following tips should help you design HTML based emails:

• Use tables. This is a big no-no when it comes to modern day web design. But when it comes to email marketing it is almost a requirement since Gmail and Outlook 2007 aren’t very compatible with float, margin and padding attributes.
• Use inline CSS. Gmail strips all CSS from the head and body tags therefore you have no other choice if you wish to use this.
• Put background colors in a container table. Many email clients will ignore background colors regardless of defining it through CSS or as an attribute in your body tag. Again, creating a table will alleviate this problem.