I just stumbled upon this nice Halloween email campaign from Block Club, a graphic design firm in Buffalo NY.

MailChimp comes with all kinds of powerful, easy-to-use, and free email template tools that make email design easy.

But Block Club is a graphic and web design firm, and this is a “design tips & tricks” publication.

So their emails have got to look really nice and custom-made.

I noticed a few “power tricks” in their email template, and asked them if I could showcase them here…

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If you code a lot of HTML emails, sooner or later you run into nagging little Lotus Notes rendering issues (usually it’s a corporate user with a very old installation). They can be painful, but since so many companies use Notes, you have to design for it. Actually, I kind of like Notes, because it leads to more sales of our inbox inspection tool </ evil>

Well, we just learned from the ZDnet blog that IBM plans to put Lotus Notes in the cloud with LotusLive iNotes. According to the article, IBM appears to be positioning it against Google Apps as “web-based email for the enterprise.” Sounds like yet another email app you’ll have to learn how to design around, but this could be a good thing for email marketers.  Browser-based email programs generally render HTML emails nicely (um, because browsers are built for rendering HTML?) but they do have little idiosyncrasies, like spotty CSS support (we discuss this in point #6 in our How to Design HTML Email guide). We’ll post any special coding considerations we find for LotusLive iNotes here on our blog, so stay tuned.