P.S Whilst I have your attention - is there any way to produce rounded corner text boxes using the Email stacks?
Was looking to emulate an Apple email I saw a while ago…
You could achieve this look with my Wallpaper stack. While I discourage the use of most normal stacks inside of Email, Wallpaper does work. However, it will not work in all email clients. This is why so many email use images instead of text.
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Thanks Joe. I’d been tending to consider images, yes.
Wallpaper’s tempting - do you know which email clients it won’t work with - any majors?
You can add border radius to blocks of content using a couple of lines of custom CSS, no need to buy an entire stack to do it! (Joe: Always the salesman!)
As Joe says though, not all email clients will honour it, but they will just drop back to regular corners, so not a big deal.
Very quick demo project: Transfer - Dropbox
Note the settings in the two following images.
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Ahh - that’s interesting. Thankyou. Will take a close look at that later!
Email clients are essentially like browsers from the 90’s, they will still “understand” a lot of basic CSS, so using custom CSS is fine. You just need to understand what will and won’t render correctly.
If you are sending out a lot of emails, or really if you want what you send out to look “right”, do yourself a favour and get access to a Windows machine for testing Outlook. Outlook is the worse at handling HTML emails, even if you only use CSS it understands it still regularly throws quirks, like inserting <hr>'s here and there, cropping some buttons and not honouring some padding.
Joe’s Email is really good. Even though it’s seen little in the way of updates over the last few years it still remains one of the most reliable ways to produce email HTML code, not just within the RW world but in general. You just need to get used to its quirks and find workarounds.
Oh, and final tip: Gmail clips content at about 104kbs. So make sure to keep your code well below 95kbs, so that viewers get to see everything. This is especially important if you need to include an unsubscribe button: These typically go at the bottom, and if the code is heavy it can be one of the things that get clipped.
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Thanks. Yes, I remember the joys of Outlook. These days I’m focused on relatively low volumes of emails. I think I would be OK with any solution that looks good in a lot of clients and degrades gracefully in the rest. That’s what drew me to the JW Email + Sendy combo. It’s kind of interesting how email has stayed locked into older technology given we spend so much of our time using it.
Outlook has remained in the dark ages due to the fact that MS switched to using the Word rendering engine after the anti-trust issues with its requirement to have IE installed. or summit like that.
Most of the others are far better at handling modern CSS. Obviously not to the level of a browser, but that’s because they don’t.won’t use javascript etc.
If I’m producing newsletters for B2C I tend to ignore the issues with Outlook, as few private users use it. If making newsletters for B2B I keep them ultra simple so as not to upset Outlook, as most business users still (shockingly) use it.
I’m an email marketing fan, not because it makes up a good chunk of my marketing output but because it’s still the single most cost-effective form of digital marketing for almost all businesses. When done right.
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Yes. I’ve neglected email a little this year and have had good results in the past. Hence my current efforts to revive my workflow. I’ve been looking at the segmenting potential with Sendy so hope to develop that a bit. Good wisdom with the approach to Outlook; thanks.
I found this out the hard way. Outlook is terrible and so is Gmail in a browser, and of course those are probably the most used email clients on the planet.
My life would be so much easier if everyone used Apple Mail. It seems to always render emails perfect, even those with CSS. But that same email looks like garbage in Outlook or Gmail. Gmail doesn’t even render background colors consistently. It’s a nightmare.
After I switched to Joe’s system it just works. I keep it simple so with zero CSS so I don’t have any issues at all.
I did notice one thing with Sendy: sometimes it doesn’t render the pasted html from Email Stacks correctly. But if you refresh it or save it and go to the next page, it looks fine, so I believe it’s just an annoying cosmetic issue with Sendy that is probably harmless but it gives me a heart attack every time I see it!
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Yes. There are so many potential pitfalls with email design. It’s a dark art…
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