With the wide number of programmes and email clients that your subscribers may be using to view emails, there are some aspects of layout, common in web design, that can not normally be used in the laying out of email. These include the use of email background images, although simple to implement in html, not all email programmes handle them in the same way, so to get them to display consistently, you need to do a bit of clever coding. In the past this has required quite a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge to implement, but now, thanks to a nifty code generator I have found, all this is done for you. The generator assumes that you are using tables to control your layout (pretty much standard for emails) and allows you to generate the code to add a background image to either an entire table or a single table cell. You will find the code generator here. To use it, all you need to do is upload the image you would like to use as a background to the mail system or web server (In mailchimp for example, you go to Templates from your dashboard, and then click the file manager button in the top right), then copy the url of the image and past it into the first box in the code generator. Then simply fill in the rest of the boxes on the code generator, all of which are fairly self explanatory I think. Once you are ready, simply copy the generated code, and paste it into the relevent part of the email HTML. That’s it, you are good to go. One big benefit of using background images is that you can overlay real text onto images, where the alternative would be to embed that text as part of the image, but that’s another post! something we will cover in the next issue of Marketing Matters.
