When creating any form of advertising it's vital to get the right balance between text and imagery.
Too much text and the viewer will lose interest, too little and they'll be left bewildered as to what it is they are looking at.

Applying this to email design adds a few extra considerations: spam rating, legibility, cross platform bugs and more. In this best practice guide we are going to look a little more in depth into these areas and their implication for HTML email design. By the end you should be confident in how to correctly render images in emails along with keeping the right balance between text and graphics. As you'll see, when it comes to email, design matters.

I'm no fan of buzz speak but right now there's one phrase floating around the internet ether that I'd recommend paying attention to - 'multi-channel marketing'. Or in other words, taking an integrated approach to all your online promotional activities.

It's easy to think of email campaigns as being quite self-contained. But developing an awareness of the way all your different online activities feed off and complement each other is essential.

Even if you're already combining your email promotion with a wider internet marketing strategy, the chances are you could be missing a trick or two.

SEO copywriting simply means including the words (keywords) people use to find you and the service or product you’re offering through search engines. It can help improve your website rankings big time.

What does SEO copywriting have to do with email marketing?

In my experience as an SEO copywriter, it makes sense to include important keywords in all brochures, press releases, articles, blogs and even email newsletters so you can add them to your site and help boost your rankings. If you’re not optimising all your content, you could be missing a trick.

One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in email creation for a designer is its regressive nature. Whilst the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and browser developers improve and enhance at an almost inhuman rate html mail delivery has kept its front foot firmly in the past.

The restrictiveness of its HTML4.01 foundations can cause many a headache, unavoidable use of tables for structure, forced ‘web-safe' colour schemes and so many essential present day CSS attributes unavailable. A beautifully crafted design in Photoshop can soon become a blocky unyielding behemoth, far from the designer's original concept.

So what preparation tasks can be taken onboard before working on that all important eshot or newsletter?

What are semantics? Simply put, semantics are about putting everything in its place; a series of design principles that have been around since Gutenberg looked at his Granny’s washing mangle and thought ‘I can print a newsletter with that’.

Semantics within web design has been a hotly debated subject in recent years, since the structuring of web documents has become more linear. Regardless, there are many valid reasons for ensuring your site pages and emails use well-formed semantic markup.

In the infancy of the World Wide Web certain terms of reference were used to guide those that had ventured into the purchase of a 56k modem.

Direct instructions such as “click on thumbnail to view larger image” and the most commonly used “click here” statement were implemented to show this first generation of web surfers how the browser took you from one page to the next.

Maybe I'm getting grumpier as I get older but I am increasingly fed up with the emails most companies send me. I would like to think that email is a tool for engaging, relevant, personalised communications.

It would even be nice to believe that people follow Drayton Bird's maxim of only sending direct communications that will make people say 'how nice of them to think of me'.

The slow reaction by some email marketers to changes in legislation earlier this year highlighted a lack of awareness within the industry regarding the law.

There are a number of regulations surrounding email marketing which differ according to whether you are targeting an individual or an organisaton so it's important to keep up-to-date with the latest legislation and best practice.