MW
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Using View in Browser in Header
What do you think about still using the "View in a Browser link" in the header of an email? To me, if you're designing and testing the email correctly, there shouldn't be the rendering issues to make it neccessary to include the link. Design-wise having a cleaner header without it is preferable. Am I missing something and not following best practices but not including it?
Interested in email designers thoughts...
Hi Melissa, I'd always recommend including one. There are still a considerable number of clients who disable images by default. This can then make an email look poorly formatted and for those less savvy recipients they might not always know how to fix this by switching images back on. Having the "view in browser" mirror link can make it easier for those recipients to view emails the way they are intended to be viewed.
I often forward emails to people in my address book - often from odd email clients (Outlook, Gmail etc.) - not always does the forwarded email render correctly, even if the original message did. Guess the cocktail of email client rendering engines muddle up the display. So having a "view in browser" link at the top helps my forwarding recipient get the email as it was intended.
I would not recommend getting rid of the link. I wouldn't even remove it from the top and integrate it into the footer as some emails do.
Hi web web, I'm replying to a post comment from your 3 years ago, I hope you still receive it. My question, I'm making my first html-email-template, and I what to include a link 'view in browser'. How do you do that? Are you sending a email, click on the link in the emailclient, copy the url in the browser and paste url into the html? Or is there another way?
Hello everybody, I'm making my first html-email-template, and I want to include a link 'view in browser'. How do you do that? Are you sending a email, click on the link in the emailclient, copy the url in the browser and paste the url into the html of the template? Or is there another way?
You need to host the contents of the email as a webpage somewhere. If you are using a service like MailChimp to send emails, they often do that part for you - you just have to add the appropriate tag/link to where ever you might want it in your email.
If your sending service does not offer this, then you will need to put the contents of your email on a webpage and link to that webpage in your email.
Think it's less about rendering issues and more about whether the email client has images on by default. Not all email clients do. And some people do still have that preference set up to not download images by default. So there's that to consider.
Also, some people often prefer seeing their emails in a browser, especially if they're image heavy. Easier to view and navigate around.
A good thing to do would be to keep an eye on how many of your customers click on the "View in Browser" link - if you're still getting customers clicking through to the online version, it's always worth keeping.
A view in browser link is still useful for all of the reasons already listed here. Also, it gives people a link to work with if they want to do something like post it on social media (you might not want content like coupons to be posted, but social media engagement can be awesome).
My company has been playing around with placing the view in browser link in different places in the email, which can remove the need for preheader text (if the rest of the email is designed correctly as well). It's a little early to tell if it has helped/hurt reader engagement, but I suspect it will depend on the audience and how they tend to read your emails.
We've played with putting the "view in browser" link both at the top and bottom of the email, and with our customers we didn't see a major difference in click-through rate after we moved it to the bottom. It was interesting to test out and see the results. I think if customers really want to view the email in a browser, they're going to try to find that link.
Also, I think it's not just a norm to have the link in the emails from an email designer/developer/marketing point of view, but I think it's also become the norm for users to see the link too. Like they expect it to be there.
Thanks for the feedback. When I said your "designing" correctly, that includes using bullet-proof buttons and alt tags so that it doesn't matter if the person has images turned on or not.
We haven't utilized in the past so I don't have past activity to see if that's something that is clicked on very often. Guess it looks like a test might be in the future.