Email marketing is a tricky practice, but choosing the right email layout is even trickier. Every business that employs email as a primary method of communication with their customer base has to learn to toe the line between the optimization of technology and the need to connect on a human basis. Neither is self exclusive, however too much of one or the other—simplicity versus over the top state of the art—can be a bad thing.

For this reason, it’s crucial that you approach the use of email marketing templates with a cautious eye, and discerning sensibilities. One place where an awful lot of companies go wrong is through the use of style sheets in email—namely, by employing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to give their email messages the colorful, handsome appearance of a web page.

The issue that comes into play here is that a growing number of email programs such as Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft Outlook (incidentally, some of the most often used email platforms on the planet) are not style sheet friendly and have the potential of rendering your messages either unreadable, or at best difficult to read. Either case is undesirable, and could have a negative backfiring effect that may cause you a loss of subscribers.

Recommendation: If plain text format is simply not an option, utilize traditional HTML for your email layout, implementing <table> tags and <font> tags to ensure the optimum readability of your message.