Re: Issues with Custom Designed Templates

Anonymous · ‎08-05-2014

I had an outside designer create some awesome email templates for us. But unfortuntaely they are so awesome that Marketo is confused by the code. They are rendering different in Outlook and Gmail and Marketo support said this "This is most likely occurring because Outlook interprets <style> tags in the <head> while Gmail does not. For this reason, I consider it a best practice to only use inline CSS for emails. Outlook can be a nightmare because it uses Microsoft Word's HTML rendering engine, and IE has similarities with this as well. "

I dont know HTML which is why I paid someone to create these. Anyone know a workaround or how I can get these looking good across all email clients?

Anonymous · ‎08-05-2014

The designer should do that for you. They haven't tested the templates in both Outlook and Gmail, and that (IMO) is part of their job. It may be too late for this time, but you need to tell them up front that these are HTML templates for email, and one of the requirements is that it work in Outlook.

Designers hate Outlook for this reason, but sadly, that's just how it is. We just have to live with it until Microsoft move into the 20th (never mind the 21st) century.

Anonymous · ‎08-05-2014

Marketo should give us a way to test ourselves too. My designer is testing in Outlook and discovered the new version of IE that I am running is not the same as Outlook so the email actually does not look the same in Outlook as it does in IE. We are going to start building emails in Drupal to avoid this and have more flexiblity in making things look nice.

Anonymous · ‎08-05-2014

Hi Christina,
We've had the similar issues -- which only got partially resolved by having a second vendor recode the templates. The issue we're still having is our headers won't properly display on an Android. For us mobile display is the number one priority.

We tried using a text based solution with a color background header but that did not display properly in all the other devices. So we stopped that and are living with the fact that the template displays properly when an Android device is displayed horizontally.

Litmus is a good tool to use for testing -- have you tried that?

When we resolve our issues I'll certainley let you know.
Wendy

Anonymous · ‎08-05-2014

+1 for Litmus and adding IBM’s Email Deliverability

Anonymous · ‎08-05-2014

We originally had designed these templates to be responsive but they failed in Marketo. Come to find out, Marketo does not support responsive code (confirmed by their support team and our account manager). if you find a way to make this work on Android/mobile, please post it here! I had to remove all the responsive code to get our templates working.