Second Email Marketing Tip of 2007

Dog a Blog made a very good comment to my first email marketing tip of 2007. Rather than reply to the comment, I thought it deserved an all new post! (You can find the link to his very cool blog under my blogroll.) Dog’s asked if Dreamweaver wasn’t the answer to all of my inexperienced prayers. The answer – yes and no! (It can never be easy can it) Dreamweaver is in fact a wonderful tool that any novice web/email designer can use to very easily create and edit any type of html file. And if you learn all there is to know about Dreamweaver and it’s functionality, you can in fact create very professional looking emails and web pages. Unfortunately, like most things, there are potential limitations.

I myself took an existing email template, copied it into Dreamweaver and made all of my changes and adjustments. The problem is that I started with a template stocked full of email and html no-nos. As I did not have the experience to recognize these errors, I was not able to produce a clean and correct copy. Those who are novice designers like myself should either start from scratch and create a more basic email, or have a true designer create a basic template that can be easily altered.

The other problem with relying solely on Dreamweaver is that an email has certain restrictions and design requirements that a web page does not. These include but are not limited to size, image placement, the use of style sheets and the text vs. image ratio. You can create a wonderfully designed email within Dreamweaver very easily but if you are not aware of and working within these restrictions you could end up with an email that never gets to your customers in-box, or is never able to be viewed!