Preface

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for anyone who wants to better understand how to write effective HTML emails. No prior experience of creating emails is required, but you should have experience of HTML and CSS.

Conventions Used

Code Samples

Code in this book is displayed using a fixed-width font, like so:

A Perfect Summer's Day

It was a lovely day for a walk in the park.

The birds were singing and the kids were all back at school.

You’ll notice that we’ve used certain layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Tips, Notes, and Warnings

Hey, You!

Tips provide helpful little pointers.

Ahem, Excuse Me ...

Notes are useful asides that are related—but not critical—to the topic at hand. Think of them as extra tidbits of information.

Make Sure You Always ...

... pay attention to these important points.

Watch Out!

Warnings highlight any gotchas that are likely to trip you up along the way.

Supplementary Materials

https://www.sitepoint.com/community/ are SitePoint’s forums, for help on any tricky problems.

[email protected] is our email address, should you need to contact us to report a problem, or for any other reason.

Getting Started

HTML email is a part of pretty much every project, but even many of the most experienced web developers dread having to work with it. This book will explore the ins and outs of coding modern HTML emails, showing you how to love the craft rather than fear it.

Email Isn’t Dead

Email was born in 1971. And it died in 2007, according to FastCompany. Or in 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. Or maybe it was in 2011, according to Mark Zuckerberg. No one really seems to know.

What we do know, however, is that email is still highly effective:

Email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, according to email marketing platform Litmus.

Four billion people use email daily, according to data platform Statista.

In 2021, 41.5% of brands interrogated in the Litmus State of Email report consider email marketing to be critical to company success—an 8.7% increase from just three years earlier.

The following diagram shows the percentage of brands for whom email marketing is critical to success, rising from 32.8% in 2018 to 41.5% in 2021.

According to Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain (quoted by The Atlantic), one reason email is still so strong after all these years is that Email is the last great unowned technology. This arguably makes it more resilient and robust than any proprietary technology. So it certainly seems that email is here to stay!

HTML Emails Aren’t Stuck in the 1990s

Discussions surrounding the coding of HTML emails on social networks never fail: someone will always snarkily comment on how HTML emails are stuck in the 1990s. And there’s nothing that irritates me more—because it’s completely wrong!

A collection of snarky comments is pictured below, sourced from my 2019 "Think Like an Email Geek" presentation.

When I code an HTML email, I use plenty of modern styles: media queries (including ones for dark mode), CSS gradients and background images, Flexbox, and even CSS Grid. I also use semantic HTML: heading elements