General Guidelines

- It is highly recommended that a plain text version be included with every HTML campaign to insure compatibility with all email clients.

Plain Text Emails

It is important to the success of your campaign that your message be short, to the point, and include a special offer or time-sensitive promotion. Allow your website to further emphasize your messages and promotions.

- Text must be ASCII text (12 pt. Arial Font). No colors, no bold, no italics, and all one size.

- If you want the lines to look the same on each different computer they are viewed on, you should use a hard return (press the enter key on your keyboard) at the end of each line.

HTML Emails

- Research shows that response rates to emails decrease dramatically with email of more than 12k in size.

- Use a program created specifically to manage html (i.e., Dreamweaver or FrontPage). Do not use Microsoft Word or other word processor to build or modify creatives because they will build HTML code that is not compatible with many email clients.

- Use simple HTML. Do not use, Java, Javascript, DHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Active X, meta-tags or any similar extension, plug-in or language. If you want to add movement you might want to consider using .gif files. The reason is that many email clients can only interpret simple HTML and some ISPs even block messages that have scripts.

- Use colored tables to simulate backgrounds. Do not use the background property of the body tag. Do not use graphics as backgrounds for tables. The reason is that most web-based email services already have a background set in their pages that will override the information set in the body tag of the creative.

- Do not embed forms in the creative. Reason: Web-based email services use forms on their pages. It could create conflicts.

- Do not use many images. Keep the weight of the creative in bytes as small as you can. Use text instead of graphics whenever is possible. The reason is that a standard dial-up connection, which is how most people still connect from home, takes one second to download each 3kb. Most of the email should be loaded during the first four (4) seconds to catch the attention of the user.

- Design creatives that can be seen in screens with low resolutions. Creatives 480 pixels wide or narrower are a good choice. That's the width of a standard banner ad. The reason for using this width is that most computers have resolutions of 640x480 or 800x600. Most email programs and web-services use a section of the screen to display menus, thus leaving only a small section of the screen to see the message.

- Use error-free HTML. Check the creative with the free W3C Validator Service (http://validator.w3.org/). Test the creative with Internet Explorer and Netscape. The reason is that the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) develops interoperable technologies for the web, including HTML specifications. Most developers use their standards to create HTML interpreters.

Spam Filters

Be sure that your email vendor works closely with all of the major consumer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to help ensure that their emails are whitelisted and not blocked at the ISP level as being suspected spam. We do. We also are 100 percent opt-in and CAN-SPAM compliant, but some anti-spam software filter programs don't know that. So it is important for you to build creative that does not look spammy to the filters. Avoid the use of words such as "free," "offer," and "opportunity" that are frequently used by spammers. Avoid using only one image for your creative, as those types of creatives are frequently used by spammers. Before sending your creatives to your seed list, run the creative through a software program such as Spam Assassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ ) that will provide you with feedback as to whether the creative will look spammy to the filters and why.