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HTML Designer’s Guide to Email Templates
General Comments
Because the program puts so much unnecessary code in their HTML documents, DO NOT use Microsoft
Word to create HTML emails. Front Page is a little better, but not much. We strongly suggest either
coding by hand or using Dreamweaver. Open Source programs such as Nvu have not been tested yet.
The industry standard width for an email template is 600px wide. All images should be a resolution of
72dpi. Remember to keep a healthy text-to-image ratio.
Layout – DIV tags or Tables?
The best way to create your HTML email template is by using tables. Yes, this makes web designers
cringe but you will get the best results when doing so! We’ve found that using a lot of nested tables will
play nicer in the editor.
External Stylesheets
Do not link to external stylesheets. Most webmail clients will strip out your <body> and <head> code so
it does not interfere with their own design code. Since <body bg color> might be stripped out in webmail
clients, make the color inside the table. The best practice for styling fonts and images is to use inline
styling. This means putting styles in the <h1> <p> <img> (and so forth) tags.
Text –Sage E-marketing for Sage CRM Mail Merges
The Sage E-marketing for Sage CRM mail merge feature works with imported templates. Simply put in
your mail merge tags in the HTML document before you import. Of course your available mail merge
fields will depend on your own database, but here are the basic and most common:
[[First Name]]
[[Last Name]]
[[Company]]
[[Email Address]]
[[Phone]]