Everybody working in the email marketing business knows (or should know) that making email templates is hard. It is actually way worse than creating websites – not only do you need to use old technologies but you have to support 10+ email clients that all have different rules as far as CSS is concerned.
It’s enough to make any newcomer scream in desperation, but fortunately some tools have recently popped up to help you make better emails and some of them are even free.
Enter GetFractal.com
I discovered GetFractal not so long ago, and this tool is fantastic. You just paste your email content in the little textarea and submit it to the website. What you get back is astounding: GetFractal will analyze your email and tell you every problem you will see in more than 20 different email clients.
So now you will know from the get go if things like your background images are supported or not. Super! If you’re doing email templating I suggest you give it a try, you may never look back.
Guide to css Support
This useful grid is a nice, simple, “go to” tool to check if a particular css property is supported in major email clients. Want to know if a css3 property has been implemented? This table will tell you.
What about Cakemail?
We have a similar tool in CakeMail called Premailer that will generate a report during your campaign creation about your CSS utilization. There is another use for Premailer – you can actually code your css in your header, like you would for a website, and it will automatically place it inline for your elements when you save your campaign. This is especially useful if you create a template that’s going to be modified by one of your clients.
