SocketLabs New HTML Email Editor

SocketLabs has been expanding its offerings for content creation, and one of the newest features is the ability to create, edit, and send raw HTML emails directly from the control panel. (Check out the Email Marketing menu –> Create a Newsletter or Autoresponder –> Select the “Raw HTML” option.)

Our HTML email services can really streamline your newsletter and autoresponder sending workflow, but it’s good to keep in mind that HTML email is a very different beast from contemporary mainstream web design for browsers. A quick look at the sample code below hints at this with its <table> tags used for layout purposes and inline CSS throughout! The culprit here is email clients and their varied HTML rendering engines – many of which are not standards compliant or keeping up with current web design practices. Thus, to create a consistently-rendered two-column layout template like the one shown above, <table> tags need to be used heavily:*

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600">
  <tr>
    <td align="center" valign="top" width="50%">
      <table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
        <tr>
          <td class="columnContent" style="height: 150px; color: #ffffff; background-color: #1683CA;">
            Some content for your left column.
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
    <td align="center" valign="top" width="50%">
      <table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
        <tr>
          <td class="columnContent" style="height: 150px; color: #ffffff; background-color: #0A6FB1;">
            Some content for your right column.
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

This is just one of the surprising gotchas of HTML email construction – and extensive testing across your target email clients is always recommended. However once you’ve mastered these coding intricacies, SocketLabs’ raw HTML editor provides a perfect way to instantly construct and send out custom HTML emails to your audience. Editing the bare HTML allows to you construct more sophisticated layouts like the one below – and that’s only the beginning.

Stay tuned for forthcoming tools that will graphically aid in the construction of well-formed HTML email for your campaigns…

* There are several good sources for HTML email best practices, but a good one to start with is modernhtmlemail.com.

If you do not yet have a SocketLabs account to try our new Newsletter and Autoresponder applications, sign-up now and see how easy it is to send great looking HTML email messages.