At the end of every work day, almost everyone working in email development wonders, “What happened to all the time I had at hand?” After all, churning out email templates in HTML day in and day out is no mean feat.
You may ask, why do we need so many HTML templates in email in the first place?
Well, businesses and sales rely on emails more than you think when it comes to their prospecting efforts. So inevitably, email marketing is everywhere. If you’ve bought an item online, you will see email developer skills put to the test in the form of sign-up emails in your inbox. If you do sign-up, you will notice newsletters, offers, and announcements as mail the moment you hit refresh.
If reports by Radicati Group are any indication, as of 2019, more than half of the world’s population makes use of emails and this number is only expected to rise up to more than 4.3 billion by 2023.
Given the steady demand for emails, the onus lies on email developers to design and deliver emails on time and creatively. You can try using an animated GIF in an email to spark the interest of your readers. So how do you make this possible? Well, the trick lies in saving time, developing HTML email best practices, being productive, and coming up with emails on time.
Think that’s easier said than done? Not really! Here are a few crucial email development tools that make developing emails productive and save a great deal of time in the bargain.
1. Email Layout Calculator
- Email layout calculator is a tool that helps you create custom container, columns with gutter spacing.
- You can add the required values for the container, column, and gutter and it will generate the HTML and CSS for you flawlessly.
- Give it a shot and see how you can unlock its potential in your next email campaign development!
2. Font Style Matcher
- Font style matcher is a tool that helps you choose a fallback font if you are using a custom web font.
- As we all know there is very little support for custom web fonts across all email clients, so this tool can help us find a fallback font that matches your custom web font for your HTML templates email.
3. The Ultimate Guide to CSS
- Another example email marketing tool that is very helpful for email developers is the ultimate guide to CSS which is a complete breakdown of the CSS support for the most popular mobile, web, and desktop email clients on the planet.
- You can take full advantage of this tool to check the compatibility of your CSS properties before you even think of implementing them in your code and later get stuck at testing.
- We at crafted.email use this tool regularly.
4. Can I email and Can I use email
- Both these examples email marketing tools, ‘Can I Email’ and ‘Can I Use Email’ are similar to campaignmonito’s “The Ultimate Guide to CSS” so you can pick your choice based on what suits you best as it is among the HTML email development best practices to be used.
- If you are a front-end developer, you must have used the caniuse.com tool to check the browser support tables for modern web technologies.
- Similarly, we now have caniemail.com which is launched and maintained by @HTeuMeuLeu and the team at Tilt Studio.
5. Better Placeholder
- When using email for marketing example, this is one aspect you need to pay attention to.
- we are all aware of the fact that when we have tight deadlines, we have to move faster and we can’t wait for the designers to provide the right size images nor do we have the liberty to find the right size images.
- We prefer using fake image placeholders so we can continue with our development and also test the emails and betterplaceholder.com is the easiest way to generate image placeholders in any size.
6. Bulletproof background images
- The Bulletproof background images is a very handy tool by campaign monitor when it comes to following HTML email development best practices.
- It allows us to generate the code for adding background images to our email.
- It generates code using VML which has wider support across most Outlook clients.
7. Bulletproof email buttons
- If you are wondering how to become an email developer, you have to know about Bulletproof background images.
- Another awesome tool from campaignmonitor, this tool allows you to generate CTA button code for your emails. It has a lot of customization options.
- For instance, you can add a background image, background color, width, height, border, and border radius among others.
- Again this tool also used VML which has wider support for most of the Outlook email clients.
8. Detergent
- Detergent is another one of the essential email development tools to know about.
- If you work with email which has a lot of copy-paste text content, you might wanna clean the extra styling tags which are copied along with the text you want.
- Make use of detergent to clean up the text and to remove the hidden HTML tags for eg, p, br, ul, and li among others.
9. Mailto generator
- Whether you use a free email template or already have a pre-designed one, Mailto generator is a simple tool to create mailto email link, it has options to add to, subject, and body copy.
- Add your text and it will give you a link to copy which you can add to your anchor tag.
10. Putsmail
- Whether you design an email newsletter or just a promotional/informational email, now that you have your email developed and ready it’s time for you to send a test mail to your email id and test the email.
- Putsmail is a service that allows you to put the code and send a test email to your desired email address.
- No doubt it’s the best and it’s free.
So there you go! Now that you are aware of the various email development tools that you can use to enhance and take your email development game to the next level, go ahead and try out these HTML email development best practices. You are sure to feel the difference. Do get in touch with our custom email developer agency to let us know what you think of these email development tools. We’d love to know what you think!