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Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

zurb.com

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Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#51

Post by duck »

fudged71 wrote: post #47
duck wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend MailChimp. I use them for my newsletter and the fact you can start using them for free with up to 2000 subscribers is very nice.

I'm curious more along the lines of personalized emails to users of a service. As far as I know, MailChimp is more about blasting one message to lots of people. Unless I'm mistaken :)

Oh, okay. In that case you want to look at transactional email services. MailChimp offers that as well with https://mandrill.com, but there are a ton of other offerings as well like http://sendgrid.com.

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#52

Post by snprbob86 »

kevinconroy wrote: post #38

If you're designing email HTML from scratch, Campaign Monitor's guide to CSS is incredibly helpful for knowing what to use and what to avoid. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ I've also found Litmus to be an incredible resource for cross-client test (Outlook vs Gmail vs Yahoo! vs ....). If you send a lot of emails as a part of your user retention strateg it's vital that you test this. You'll be amazed at how differ…

Also useful, automatic CSS inlining: http://premailer.dialect.ca/ & https://github.com/alexdunae/premailer/

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#53

Post by firefoxman1 »

Little ironic that the project's page isn't responsive, especially considering their Foundation framework is a fantastic tool for such tasks (I like it more than bootstrap). Anyway, it looks great, and thank you Zurb for making such great tools for all of us to use!

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#54

Post by netghost »

kevinconroy wrote: post #38

If you're designing email HTML from scratch, Campaign Monitor's guide to CSS is incredibly helpful for knowing what to use and what to avoid. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ I've also found Litmus to be an incredible resource for cross-client test (Outlook vs Gmail vs Yahoo! vs ....). If you send a lot of emails as a part of your user retention strateg it's vital that you test this. You'll be amazed at how differ…

I'll second Litmus. It's one of the few tools that I've really felt were worth paying for. It's just tons better than try to test emails ad-hoc.

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#55

Post by netghost »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #5

I am new to having HTML email sent. What do folks do with the large (large in this case anyway) stylesheet, that actually works with actual email clients? Link it with a tag? Plop it all into a tag? (where?) Something else? What are current best practices for sending html email that needs a non-trivial stylesheet like this? Googling around, i'm still left not sure; many pages I find make recommendations that would ma…

Linking it may work in some clients, the style tag works in more, but if you want your css to show up in most clients (like outlook), inline it.

So if you had `p { color: red; }` in your style sheet, then all your `p` tags should read: ``. It sounds horrid, and it is, but you can automate the process with a preprocessor.

When it comes to email, you unfortunately need to throw out the last 10 years of advances.

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#56

Post by tomwalsham »

fudged71 wrote: post #40

Is there anywhere else that I can send HTML emails from? It sounds very limited and difficult to do, based on your description on your site!

At PostageApp.com we focus on transactional emails, which these days are moving heavily towards HTML email as a standard now that deliverability is much more focused on IP reputation than content.

We provide a templating system which allows you to build and preview with separate HTML and CSS, and we compile to inline CSS at runtime to ensure compatibility with the majority of email clients.

The painful thing to remember is that html/css for email is a weird mix of HTML3 and HTML5 - meaning some major providers only allow for basic functionality, but other platforms support the bleeding edge while omitting some of the simpler aspects. In the end your demographics will strongly influence where you focus your efforts.

The templates from Zurb here are a great basis - as a start on a responsive email boilerplate this will be great value to the community - individuals using this for customization will hopefully push the development of these bases further.

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#57

Post by fudged71 »

duck wrote: post #51
fudged71 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious more along the lines of personalized emails to users of a service. As far as I know, MailChimp is more about blasting one message to lots of people. Unless I'm mistaken :)

Oh, okay. In that case you want to look at transactional email services. MailChimp offers that as well with https://mandrill.com , but there are a ton of other offerings as well like http://sendgrid.com .

That mandrill site is slick! Thanks for the links

Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates

#59

Post by nbashaw »

mbell wrote: post #46
maqr wrote: post #41

Am I the only one who is far less likely to read an HTML email? If I see that I need to click to allow external images for my email to load, I'm probably just going to delete it. It's amazing to me that HTML email can be effective for marketing. If you send me a paragraph of text, I'm going to read it on my mobile. If you send me an HTML email, I'm going to archive it right away on my mobile. If you send me too many…

Not all HTML emails are image heavy monstrosities. There is a lot you can do with HTML/CSS that makes the message easier to consume and more impactual without using a single image. I feel like HTML email design lags about 5-10 years behind website design. Some of that is the limited feature set, but I think more of it is the lack of design attention its given. It seems like most of it gets generated by a marketing de…

I disagree with your argument that email lags behind web design due to pack of effort. Have you ever tried to code a HTML email like you would code a website and looked at the result in email clients? Do this once and you'll see what I mean.

Email clients are definitely to blame.

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