8 Email Hacks You Never Knew Existed
Email hacks are a way of life for email developers. Whether it’s hacking at code to ensure it renders perfectly on everything from Lotus Notes to Gmail or creating something new that’s not been done before in email.
At Litmus Live 2017, we asked the community to share their never-before-seen innovative email hacks—from coding tricks to use in email to tools that can help you improve your day-to-day workflows.
Today, we’re making these sessions available to everyone. Read on for tricks and techniques you never thought were possible in email.
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Build emails without tables
by Mark Robbins (@M_J_Robbins)
Ask any email developer how to code an email and the answer will be the same—use tables. However, the only email clients that truly require tables to structure HTML emails now are Outlook 2007-2016 and Windows 10 Mail, because they use Microsoft Word as their rendering engine. Watch and learn how Mark eschews tables in favor of divs to build an email.
Learn more about table-less email:
- The Email Design Podcast: Building Litmus’ Latest Newsletter Without HTML Tables
- Litmus Community: How and Why Litmus Didn’t Use Tables for its First Email Newsletter for 2018
- Read Mark’s write up on how to “Get Off the Table”
Add a Cool Duo-Tone Effect to Your Images
by Kimberly Connell (@r_kimberlyc)
Kimberly wanted to create a tool that would make it easy for customers to be able to edit images with a cool duo-toned effect without needing to use an image editor. Watch as she walks through the thought-process behind Duo-Toner and how the tool works.
Add to Calendar Links in Email
By Kevin Mandeville (@KevinMandeville)
Making it easy for a subscriber to add an event to their own calendar from an email is a handy technique for email marketers in the events industry. Kevin shares the technique he used for embedding “Save the Date” links in Litmus’ emails and explains how you can do the same.
An Alternative Technique for ALT Text
by Steven Collins (@theotherstevenc)
Correctly implementing the ALT attribute in your emails is one of the most impactful things you can do to make your emails more accessible. Screen readers read aloud the text in the ALT attribute so that people with a visual impairment can understand the context of the image in an email. Steven shows us an out-of-the-box technique that takes the ALT attribute out of the image and into the email.
Take Photos From Your Email
by Remi Parmentier (@HTeuMeuLeu)
Remi illustrated how far email development can be pushed by embedding an image in an email using the email to take the photo. You heard right: A camera feature embedded in an email. A truly unique idea!
Learn more:
- Read Remi’s write-up on the Email Camera
An Email Framework to Simplify Email Development
by Nicolas Garnier (@Nico_g)
Email code is complicated. Nicolas has developed a framework that makes it easier to create emails that are responsive and look great without complicated code. It’s called MJML.
Making Background Images Responsive
by Wilbert Heinen (@wilbertheinen)
Without question, every email needs to be responsive by design. However, scaling background images in email for responsive purposes can be problematic. Watch as Wilbert explains how using the viewport width can help with this issue.
Adding White Space to Your Preview Text
by Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry)
It’s frustrating when the text after your preview text sneaks into view in some inboxes. Email marketers have fought against this by simply ensuring the preview text is over a certain length. Well, there’s now another option. In this #EmailHacks session Jaina shares a technique to help you keep your preview text clean.
Learn more:
Every single one of these email hacks proves there’s more to email development than table>tr>td. What #EmailHacks can you come up with? Share them with the Litmus Community!
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Jaina Mistry
Jaina Mistry is the Director, Brand & Content Marketing at Litmus
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