Email clients are a difficult bunch of customers to build a consistent design with, when you get into the nitty gritty of building the email. Here are some tips to keep you on the straight and narrow.

Here are our email design build tips:

1. Specify useful text alternatives for images
2. Mix images and text, don't just include one big image
3. Use tables for the layout and specify heights on cells
4. Slice horizontally to avoid line breaks between adjacent images
5. If slicing vertically, make sure cell widths add up correctly
6. Use style="display: block;" on images for maximum compatibility
7. Specify background images using background="image.jpg" on the table cell, combined with style="background-repeat: no-repeat;" (using background-image CSS won't work in Hotmail or Google Mail)