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Meet EMC: The group looking to create email standards
Find out about a new effort to address a lack of standards in the email industry. Meet the professionals seeking to solve the problem and find out how to join the effort.
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Have you ever noticed that the way your email campaign looks after you hit send doesn’t quite match what you expected to find? Did you ever see an email display one way in Gmail and another way in Apple Mail or Outlook?
Usually, you can blame those types of problems on a lack of email standards. Different mailbox providers have their own ways of rendering HTML and CSS. They also have different levels of support for things like web fonts, interactive elements, and dark mode emails.
Those inconsistencies account for some of the biggest email marketing headaches. If your campaign doesn’t render as expected, it could easily mean your subscribers won’t engage and take action.
A new group that includes some of the smartest email professionals around aims to fix all that by setting standards for email development.
We’re excited to tell you about this community-led initiative. It’s called the Email Markup Consortium. The EMC is “working to improve the user experience, accessibility, performance, consistency, and reliability of email markup.”
Led by Hussein Al Hammad, Mark Robbins, and Alice Li, the group aims to work with developers, email tools, and email clients to drive the EMC’s vision forward at every step of the email journey.
While there have been past attempts to accomplish this daunting task, Mark Robbins believes now is the perfect time to really make it happen.
“The email community is the strongest it’s ever been, we’re seeing huge levels of collaboration between individuals, between companies, between competitors. Now is the perfect time to work together on creating some standards for email markup. Although similar projects have come and gone before, we’ve set up the EMC with a focus on longevity and transparency, we’re inviting everyone to get involved and help make email better.”
Mark Robbins, Salesforce/EMC Admin
Sinch Mailjet introduced Email previews into our application to help our users catch and fix problems with the ways their campaigns are rendered on different clients and devices. But we’ve got to admit, a much better solution would be to have consistent rendering and defined standards in the first place. That’s why Mailjet is proud to be an official sponsor of this effort.
You can get involved too when you become an official member of the EMC. (Don’t worry, it’s free)
The group will keep you in the loop about what’s ahead and may call on members for ideas and advice. You’ll be supporting an effort to make the inbox a better place for subscribers and make the job of email development a lot less frustrating and a lot more effective. You can also join the conversation about email standards over at GitHub.
Meanwhile, keep doing your best to drive results with meaningful emails that are beautifully designed.
