We all have received, at one point, an email that supposedly includes one giant image, maybe a promotional banner for an upcoming event. Yet all we see in that email is one giant, empty box, like this one:
This may be because of poor Internet connection.
Most of the time, it’s because most email services (like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Microsoft Outlook) do not automatically open images in an email. You’ll be asked to click the Display images below link, or view the email from a web browser.
This is troublesome for many recipients, especially for those who check their emails on a smart phone.
One way to make things easier is to “convert” your poster/banner into HTML text and grahpics. We’ll show you how we turned this promotional poster into this email:
This way, your recipients won’t have to wait or click anything else to see your entire email. It takes some effort, but your email recipients will be grateful that you emailed it like this.
STEP 1. Create a new email.
STEP 2. Create a Table. (We recommend you also center-align your text.)
STEP 3. Adjust Table Properties. We use just one column, and no borders. But you can always edit this part anytime later on.
STEP 4. Insert the logo images in the first row. This part can also serve as your “header” — your organization’s logo, the main sponsors’ logos, etc. (Tip: It’s best if you keep PNG files of your logos — or logos with transparent backgrounds. You won’t have to worry about clashing different background colors.)
STEP 5. Adjust your image sizes and alignments by right-clicking on the image > Image Properties. Provide an alternative text for each image as well.
So here, if the image is the Tapulanga Foundation logo, the alternative text is Tapulanga Logo.
This is helpful during cases when even a small image as this fails to load properly. Because of the alternative text, the recipient wouldn’t have to wonder what the empty box is.
STEP 6. Compose your text in the next row. This is the fun part — the trick is to simply play around with the text colors, font styles, text background colors, boldness and italics, underscores or dashes as lines, etc.
Here, we followed the text on the original poster.
The font used in our poster is not included in the list of typefaces, so we make do by using another font instead, like Trebuchet MS. Since the original poster has BASIC COURSE in a yellow backdrop, we simply selected BASIC COURSE and set its text background color to yellow.
Add new rows by right-clicking on the Table > Table Properties.
Play around with the text by making them italic, or changing their text sizes, or adding more spaces, or using dashes ( —– ) to create lines.
STEP 7. Simply repeat steps 5-6. Add more rows as you add more text if you want.
Tip: Stick to only 2-3 font styles and colors. This gives a sense of uniformity and avoids distraction or confusion. In this case, we used three colors: black, grey, and warm yellow; three fonts: Trebuchet MS, Arial, and Georgia italic.
PREVIEW YOUR EMAIL. Make adjustments if necessary.