Why Emails Look Different Across Email Clients

Tip: Are you looking for information about Constant Contact’s Email and Digital Marketing product? This article is for Constant Contact’s Lead Gen & CRM product. Head on over to the Email and Digital Marketing articles by clicking here. Not sure what the difference is? Read this article.

Email Clients Differ

Consider the following: You are about to perform a large email send, so you decide to send a few test emails to yourself and your co-workers. Seconds later, you open the email to find it does not look quite the same as it did in the Lead Gen & CRM email designer. Images are distorted, text is not the right size, and the formatting is askew. The email is unfit to send.

This typically happens as a result of how Outlook renders their emails, but there may be several other reasons why your emails may look different. For the most part, emails are sent as multi-part messages.

This means that the HTML that holds images, clickable links, and formatting is separated from the actual text. Upon delivery, an email client renders the most appropriate version for its capabilities. As a result, emails sometimes look strange

Important: Microsoft no longer supports Outlook 2007. As such, Lead Gen & CRM does not guarantee that email templates and emails created in the email designer will render correctly in that email client.

Lead Gen & CRM has no control over how email clients render their emails. Refer to that email client's specific help documentation for more information on how different email clients render emails:  

• Apple Mail
• Gmail
• Outlook

Regarding Consistent Rendering

Keep these best practices in mind as you design emails in Lead Gen & CRM:

• Use a Lead Gen & CRM template. All of Lead Gen & CRM's email templates have been designed to look great in the majority of common email clients.
   
• Use "web-safe" fonts in your email. Some of the standard fonts safe to use for webpages and emails are Helvetica, Arial, and Courier New.
   
• Test thoroughly. Open your email in various email clients to make sure it looks like how you want it to, or consider using a tool like Litmus to test the email in all of the major clients.
   
• Do not rely on images to convey your message. Many of today's email clients do not render images by default. If you are counting on leads to click an image link to access your website, you might be out of luck. 

Did this article answer your question?