Email Marketing Tip #3 Don’t work hard. Rely on your inheritance.

Your style inheritance, that is. Place your styles in the table tag and each cell will inherit the properties. This is terribly useful for font properties that you can always override locally in your td or with a span tag. For example, define font-size, font-family, and color in the table style, but when you get to the cell featuring your headline, redefine the font-size property to override the inheritance. You also won’t have to add paragraph tags to your copy, reducing the HTML and there’s no risk that extra margin space will be applied to your copy.

I would like to reiterate the importance of this, especially when you are building templates for other people to use. Most of the time, designers build a template for someone who is a writer and usually has a limited understanding of HTML. Writers restart to the WYSIWYG, expecting it to behave like Microsoft Word, and alter text display. When they do this, it ads font tags, paragraph tags, header tags, spans, and superfluous divs, all that threaten the design and inbox display.

A proactive measure of prevention is to define styles in the table tags. All your Writer has to do is copy/paste plain text and the styles will automatically apply. They will also be relieved to have it be that simple.

KISS Your Design (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

Sometimes we need to remember to take our own advice. I really liked how some text lined up with an image, even though it complicated the table, and voila… it broke in the inbox. KISS Your Design.