Adding content to your HTML email
The next step after you learn how to create boxes for your HTML emails, is to learn how to add content. You use Notepad ++ to code the tables which works great especially because it allows you to roll up tables. You have basic HTML paragraph tags on a line, the content on a second line and the paragraph tag close on the third line. This virtually allow even non-technical people to change content which cannot be possible if you add everything as a single string. The first content that you ad is at the top of the wrapper table for HTML email and it is typically two pieces of content. If you have a link to a web page version of your newsletter, it is a very good idea to put that at the very top in case people don't get the rest of your email. Additionally, it is a good practice to create a message that tells people how you got their email address and how can they unsubscribe from your email list. These messages prevent people from considering you a spammer.
In the HTML email section related to the content, you just have to add content in the boxes you have created. You can create a heading 1 tag(<h1>) on the first line, you add the content on the second and you put a closing tag(</h1>) on the third line. For bold text you should use the <b> and </b> tags. In fact you should use also the older HTML tags in order to deal with the fact that some HTML emails simply require the older tags. Furthermore, in the footer section, you have three main sections: one for the links, a middle table that gives you some space and one area for the wider links. The footer in code looks somehow like this:
<p>
<a href=”” target=”_blank “>
content
</a>
</p>
<p>
<a href=”” target=”_blank “>
content2
</a>
</p>
You simply repeat this process for each of the links on the left. When it comes to the middle table, or the black space, the piece of code should look like that:
</td>
<td align=”left” width”70” height=”90” valign=”top”>
</td>
<td align=”right” width=”190” height=”90” valign=”top”>
On the third and right hand table of the footer you follow the same pattern as in the first example. For instance:
<p>
<b>content1</b><br>
<a href=”” target=”_blank “>
content2
</a>
</p>
The last piece of content is in the close email table where you add individual lines of each piece of information such as copyrights and privacy policy. The final thing to note is that the email service you use will add the unsubscribe link at the bottom of all of your email automatically so you don't need to worry about this aspect.