Can you use css in html emails

Sorry we couldn't be more help. Can you tell us about your experience today? Coding an HTML email isn't much different from coding a website was back in the late '90s.

Learn about the limits of email and how to work around them. Get the job done with a pro From training to full-service marketing, our community of partners can help you make things happen. Note The information in this article applies to the classic builder only. Note Occasionally, a subscriber's email service will strip out lines of code that begins with periods, which can ruin your CSS. Technical Support Have a question? Paid users can log in to access email and chat support.

Log In. Was this article helpful? Since some email clients strip out embedded styles or linked, external stylesheets, most email campaigns use inline CSS to ensure that the email displays well in the widest range of email clients. In this report, we take a detailed look at how brands plan, build, approve, and send their email marketing campaigns.

There are actually a few benefits to not inlining your CSS, something we learned when we experimented with our own newsletter. The main benefit for most marketers is the reduction in code being written, which brings with it fewer points of failure and ultimately allows developers to speed up there email development process.

Clearly, there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. Like with most questions in the email world, the answer is: It depends. Your approach to CSS depends on your goals as a team, the resources you have to help achieve those goals, and—most importantly—your audience.

Understanding your audience makeup is vital in tailoring your email development approach. However, those analytics are not your analytics. Although the data above gives a good baseline overview of email client usage, that usage differs from list to list. And some international email clients have limited support for embedded CSS. A plain-text email is just that, plain text. This standard combines both plain text and HTML, leaving it up to the recipient to decide which to render.

When you send an email, whether transactional or bulk, include both the HTML and plain-text versions. Even if, in your mind, every one uses a client that renders HTML, still send plain text. Some will also create a plain-text version, based on your HTML. On the web, if you follow standards and best practices and use semantic markup and valid HTML syntax , you tend to get basic accessibility out of the box. Unfortunately, with email, due to our excessive hacks and the poor support for HTML, accessibility is often ignored.

He recommends the following:. In the email world, we can still make use of fluid design, grid-based layouts and media queries. The problem is that not all clients support these.

Therefore, we need some hacks along the way. Until recently, Gmail did not support media queries. Thankfully, as of September , most of its clients do. However, several mobile clients still do not, including Yahoo, Windows Phone 8 and Gmail for Android.

Several techniques are used in the email world to get around a lack of support for media queries. The easiest solution is to stick to a single column and make your emails fluid. This means that as the viewport shrinks, your content area shrinks. Using media queries and breakpoints, we can provide alternate styles for different-sized viewports.

We can also hide or show elements. This starts to get complicated once you introduce a grid and columns. You could have a two-column layout and then switch to a stacked one-column layout below a certain viewport width. This technique uses a bit of fluid, a bit of responsive and a couple of hacks for Outlook support. We also get to ensure that the columns stack without media queries. This technique is outlined by ActionRocket , and Nicole Merlin has written a great step-by-step tutorial on it.

You will also want to embed the following CSS:. The process of putting together a bulletproof email is complex. There are a lot of steps, and there is room for a lot of things to go wrong. Like any monotonous task with steps, I recommend automating what you can, so that you build the system once and make it easier for future work. Brian Graves has a good post on making your email modular. Just as you have a design system and pattern library for a website or application, you should do so for email, making components reusable and emails consistent across your product and company.

In his post, he outlines how to use snippets in modern editors such as Atom and Sublime , and he points to the community-contributed library of snippets hosted by Litmus. It runs various tasks, such as inlining CSS , compressing images, uploading images to a CDN, sending a preview, and testing with Litmus, all with one command.

Foundation for Email also has some great automation tools for developers, as does Mailjet with its responsive email framework MJML. So, the future is looking much brighter. Expect more instances of interactive and kinetic email emerge in Email design and development is a beast.

It is a lot like building a web page… 10 years ago. My introduction here is a high-level overview; you could dive deep into every one of these points. Just the things you can actually use.

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