3 Top Tips for HTML Emails in IBM’s Lotus notes
If you have ever had to do an email marketing campaign you will know that the majority of businesses and clients will use Outlook or some variation of. However small percentages use IBM’s Lotus Notes. And if you have had any experience with this email client you will know that this client is the worst thing to ever exist in terms of HTML emails.
This article will give you all the tips and tricks you need to make your HTML email look right in lotus Notes and Microsoft outlook.
Tip 1. Lotus does and merged cells. Now tables are a bit dates now but if you do use tables to build your HTML emails then you will want to avoided merging cells. Lotus notes will not read the merged cells correctly. What the result will be is that the <table>, <tr> ad <td> high and widths will read uneven and you cell sizes will display wrong. To double check you have no merged cells look through your code for any ‘colspan’ or ‘rowspan’ tags, these are the tags that make up merged cells in a HTML email
The way to work around this problem is to create tables within tables so if you need a to create a template with a long header and two columns underneath what you will need is on table with 1 column and two rows and another table inside the bottom row with 1 row and two columns. Ne sure to remove any nbsp; and make sure you set the heights and widths on your <td> and <table> elements.
Tip 2. Avoid Background Images. Background images will not work with most versions of Lotus notes. Not with CSS or imbedded HTML. Your best bet it to use background colour. The only work around i have found for this problem is to only use small sections with image backgrounds and save the whole thing as an image.
Tip 3. Centring you email. For me this problem is intermittent depending of the way you lay out your email. The problem is that sometimes Lotus will not centre your email just by using the <table align=”centre”> tag. This problem is caused by the fact that lotus will not centre the table based on the <body> tag. The way to work around this is to create a table or DIV encasing the email with height and width set to 100% then in the <td> tag use align=”centre”.