Design and html guidelines for custom templates

[Anonymous]

Marketo lacks clear guidelines for designing and coding custom templates for Marketo which are responsive across all email clients. This seems to be a very basic support document which would save Marketo users a lot of time.

We have recently spent 2 weeks trying to fix a template. If we had guidelines to follow from the beginning of the process we would not of wasted this time.

[Joe_Reitz]

If you lack someone on your team with web design expertise, templates.marketo.com is a great place to start. There are some very decent responsive templates that are easy to customize for your brand.

What was the nature of your problems?

[Anonymous]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your comment. We have our own template which is different to these templates which we have been trying to get to work. We may have to compromise on the design. It would of been nice to know about these barriers before we started creating the templates. We couldn't find any guidelines in support and Marketo support took 2 weeks of trouble shooting before telling us our template is not supported by Outlook on PC.

[Joe_Reitz]

Check this out... It gives you some guidelines on what various email clients can handle. CSS Support Guide for Email Clients | Campaign Monitor

Generally, a few no-nos:

• Animated GIFs (some versions of Outlook can't handle, and since Outlook is used most often...)
• Background images
• CSS3 shadows, rounded corners, etc (doesn't hurt to use them, just know that many users won't see your emails as intended)
• text overflow

To be fair, these aren't so much Marketo issues as they are email client limitations.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Joe,

We have about 12 custom designed templates across all our brands and have had issues getting them to work. I just think Marketo should offer some design guidelines so when these custom templates are made, the designer is aware of template limitations for Marketo.

[Joe_Reitz]

Agreed. When we started with Marketo, there was no internal email deliverability tool. Apparently there is now. I haven't used it yet, but you can check it out here Introducing Email Deliverability and here Email Deliverability Packages – Marketo.com Introducing Email Deliverability

Previously, our Marketo consultant also recommended Email On Acid to preview what our emails would look like in all email clients. You basically paste in your template, and they make tweaks for you. Pretty much an essential toolset!