why does the email formatting look different then what i see in marketo

[Anonymous]

I am testing an invite email. When I send out the sample, why does the sample's format appear to look different when what I have in Marketo? Is there a way to fix that in Marketo? I've attached a few images for a visual explanation of the formatting issue.

[Robb_Barrett]

Kind of hard to see the differences without them being side-by-side, so can you explain?  One thing to note is that Outlook renders images at 96dpi instead of 72dpi so they always look wonky.  From there, different emails browsers render differently.  Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail all have different rules and respect CSS differently. It's VERY hard to get an email to always look correct.

EDIT: This isn't the same email. One says "Register Now" at the bottom, the other doesn't. Please provide updated screenshots and highlight the differences you're trying to overcome.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

There isn't a simple answer to this question. Consistency in email deliverability can be a complicated issue to fully solve. However, to answer your question directly, it is because each email client renders emails slightly differently, thus creating variations in a real send versus a preview when designing.

The most common practice for consistency in emails is building everything in a table based layout. For people with web development knowledge, this is sort of like designing a webpage 10 years ago, but its the most tried and true methods for clean emails. There is a number of other things that don't work in emails as easily as they would when building other things, and if you are new to it it can be frustrating.

Here is a decent guide to the fundamentals of designing and developing emails I recommend. To troubleshoot your specific issues on this email, you'd need to post your code for it.

[Anonymous]

Emails definitely render differently across browsers, platforms, email clients, etc.

We use Litmus to test before sending out an email.

[Anonymous]

Hi Kara,

You can check the solutions provided by Marketo partners onLaunchpoint for creating responsive emails that are tested across all devices.