Starting a project for my company and I am trying to figure out the minimum dimension that I have for an email HTML Newsletter. I have read through the forums and have found out about the 45,000 possible combination that people can receive this newsletter as, so I have a a chance that some of the subscribers seeing it but I just don’t want to have the people have to scroll to the right just up and down.
Thanks fir the hint and any other random thoughts you want to throw up on this thread.
Ok, a random thought comes because I don’t know what this newsletter is related to:
Why do you need to send a HTML based e-mail? Is there a good reason you need HTML for, cannot this same information be read or seen without using HTML?
And if not, you really need HTML, would it not be easier for you and better to recipients to put a short text to the newsletter and then: “if you want to read more, visit this website below.”
If you put a normal www.address.com text practically all email-clients convert it to a clickable link anyway.
This way you would not have to worry about anything and it’d still be very easy for people to read your news, no matter what kind of e-mail client they have.
Like I said, I don’t know anything about the content of your newsletter, just a thought(s)
-Z-
Edit: Now I noticed that you were talking about a new project of your company. Again, not knowing your business,these are just random thoughts which might help someone else if not you I’m writing them anyway because I read about this subject today.
Aight, if you are sending an e-mail to people who don’t know you and have not subscribed to your newsletter they won’t spend more than few secs reading it. Probably they read the subject field and who it’s from, and then the first topic + few lines. And that is if they don’t delete it as a spam right away. When sending traditional sales/info-letters 33% of the mail is always thrown away without ever opening the envelope. Always. And on e-mails I think the percentage is much higher, might be double. I don’t know that as a fact but that’s how I think it is, because the amount of e-mail spam is way bigger.
So, in that case you should only put few interesting topics few sentences to the newsletter. Keep it very short, very. If people get interested in your business they can then follow the links. If there are more than 10 rows of text no one reads it anyway.
*** HTML newletter maximum width 600 pxl by height 300 pxl with out scroll bars. Read on…
Some more info,
Yup it is going to be HTML based. My company found a service virtumundo that has subscribers so it is not a total spam.
But Zenith is probably right in saying that 33% will be thrown away. My one hope is that this service points this email so some semi interested clients, based on the content of the email.
As for the need for HTML we are gonna include images. So sending this newsletter/ad is like the difference between 4 color ad (HTML) vs. B/W (text) [yes that is a serve generalization, eh]
But I just got a Sitepoint newsletter and there maximum width is 600 pixels and the max high is a huge variable I would guess the best bet is keep the eye catching content in first 300 pixel of height and then if the client is interested they can scroll down.
I ran into this same problem about 2 years ago. So I started to do some analysis. I subscribed to a bunch of newsletters (using my hotmail account of course) and began going through the source of the HTML to see what standards people are using. I came up with 550px wide as a good compromise from what I saw. The problem is the “preview pane” can be different sizes based on how the user decides to view their mail.
BTW: I also did some analysis by sending the same message in both HTML and text. The HTML had a 225% higher click through rate!
I think the click rate depends very much of the content of that e-mail. Some things need to be said with more than just text - colours and images. With some issues plain text might work better. If HTML newsletter is the ‘way to go’, numbers between 500-600px sound good to me.
Use a percentage for the width contained in one table. Don’t use tons of images, make everything flow so that no matter what the size of the window of the newsreader (or web based email account) you newsletter looks good.
Expect all AOL 9.0 users to never see your emails, since 9.0 is blocking images and removing urls, so IMHO there isn’t even any reason to consider AOL’ers anymore as people that will be reading your message, so plan for Outlook, Eudora, Netscape etc. etc.
