News & Press Releases

EmailLabs Introduces Comprehensive Guide to Creating HTML Emails

Innovative Best Practices Resource Helps Marketers Optimize Emails for Today's Shrinking Preview Panes - and Attention Spans

MENLO PARK, Calif. (Sep. 13, 2006) - Recognizing that, for marketers, it's a jungle out there, EmailLabs today announced the availability of a new free resource - EmailLabs' Complete Guide For Creating HTML Emails. The comprehensive guide contains the tools marketers need to create emails optimized for today's challenging online communications environment. A subsidiary of J.L. Halsey (OTCBB:LYRI.OB), EmailLabs is the leader in high-performance email marketing technology.

Available as a PDF here, the Guide provides in-depth discussions of topics essential to creating an email that is correctly coded and error-free, will pass through spam filters, and be displayed correctly in both preview panes and image filters. The Guide recommends text suggestions and formats that grab the reader's attention, given the cursory scan most inbox items receive.

"The biggest challenge facing online marketers today is to design for the preview pane and ever-shrinking real estate of the email inbox," said Stefan Pollard, Director of Consulting, EmailLabs. "Marketers need to remember that the purpose of email is communication. You cannot grab a PDF of your recent ad flyer, send it as one large image and expect it to render correctly - let alone grab the reader's attention.

"Email is its own medium with its own set of rules for optimization," Pollard said. "Our HTML Guide provides marketers with all the key elements required to produce an email that not only gets through the minefield of filters and other barriers, but communicates effectively and even memorably."

Focusing on the importance of fully rendered HTML - specifically, how text and images will appear in an email interface - EmailLabs' HTML Guide offers insights on rendering the email so it displays most effectively, writing HTML code that is error free, reducing spam signatures, and avoiding common pitfalls of HTML coding: embedded forms, improper use of style sheets, and non-ASCII characters.

Writing effective email subject lines tends to be especially vexing for marketers. Given that preview panes are getting smaller and images are often deleted, a short, snappy, to-the-point subject line is crucial. The HTML Guide also addresses the issues of preview panes by focusing on the importance of writing correctly formatted and coded HTML with regards to the initial two introductory sentences - the only thing visible in a preview pane.

Although marketers who publish online newsletters are often skilled at HTML optimization for email, retailers - accustomed to expansive and feature-rich Web design tools - often forget that email has its own stylistic best practices, Pollard noted. "EmailLabs' HTML Guide offers marketers who do not have the luxury of an email-creative team the next best thing," he said.

For more email marketing tips, articles and tools visit the industry's most exhaustive resource center and subscribe to EmailLabs' awarding-winning newsletter, the Intevation Report.

About EmailLabs
EmailLabs is a leading provider of high-performance email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an ASP (Web-based) service, and is easily integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface (API). For the fourth consecutive year, EmailLabs has been recognized by ASPnews.com as one of the Top 50 ASPs worldwide and as a Top 25 Service Provider for the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) and Business Service Provider category. The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is a subsidiary of Lyris, Inc. (OTCBB:JLHY). For more information, visit www.EmailLabs.com.