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Content Related
Issues relating to Email Content specifically around email marketing/campaigning.
Outlook 2007 changes how email marketers should design their templates.
May 26th
Posted by EmailManual in All Items
Designing your templates for Outlook is important, especially if you are doing B2B mailings as Outlook is the most common email client used (over 50% of business users) in the workplace and an increasing amount of organisations are switching from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007.
The biggest change between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 is that 2007 no longer uses Internet Explorer is its rendering engine, instead it uses Microsoft Word to render emails which it receives.
The problem with this is that Word is much less flexible, has less support for commonly used html code and CSS style sheets.
For a full list of things that Outlook no longer supports please see the Microsoft article on Outlook 2007 which was published.
The highlights are:
- No support for animated GIFs (moving image files) – Despite Microsofts quote here saying that “GIF is a widely supported Internet standard.”
- Macromedia Flash
- background images
- Forms
- alt tags in images
This has not been popular amongst the Email Marketing community of designers.
However as Outlook 2007 has such a big market share it is not practical for Email Marketers to do nothing. Unfortunately therefore, marketers need to review their campaigns and email templates to ensure they still display reasonably well within Outlook 2007.
Here are some ideas and tips from Email Manual on how you might choose to address these changes.
- Send a copy of your email templates and campaigns to a copy of Outlook 2007 to test them before you send your live campaigns.
- Use a service such as litmus to test your templates in all common browsers/email clients.
- Ask your ESP to review your templates, make suggestions for increased compatibility with email clients including Outlook 2007.
- Ask your ESP to review and fix your templates for Outlook 2007 (This is likely to be chargeable, check pricing with them.)
- Use this as an oportunity to review your emails against your marketing objectives, have they become to complex, cluttered? Perhaps this is just what you needed to take your emails back to basics and realign your templates with your marketing objectives, perhaps even a complete redesign?
Massive percentage of consumers are suppressing your images.
May 13th
Posted by EmailManual in All Items
At EmailManual we don’t normally post about content or html related issues but instead focus on the more technical elements of email, this time we are making an exception.
Approximately half of all consumers have images turned off by default according to a study by the email experience council.
This statistic shows that marketers need to ensure they are using text effectively within their email marketing content in addition to images. Having text with a call to action or targeted offer will encourage the reader to allow images to be displayed within their email which will also register as an email open if you use email open tracking and failing to do this may result in your email being simply deleted or worse, the “this is spam” button being clicked.
One of the easy wins, if you do not want to redesign your content is to use alt tags. These are html snippets within your email which will show a word or sentence when an image can not be displayed. By doing this you give your subscribers who block images by default a chance to decide whether the content is relevant to them and allow the images to display. Without text surrounding your images or alt tags your subscribers will only see empty boxes where your images were supposed to be and this will result in your email not being read and just deleted.
Seems simple enough? We thought so too but surprisingly in a separate study titled ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ from the email experience council showed that :-
“Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.”
Email Manual recommendations:
- Use a good mix of text and images, don’t include your text within the images.
- Use alt tags for your images where appropriate.
- Trial sending your emails with embedded images rather than linked *
* N.B the figure you should look at here will be your clickthrough or conversation rates and not your open rate, if the images are embedded within the content and the only image that is linked is the open tracking image then users will not see the need to allow the image through and therefore you can reasonably expect a slightly reduced open rate but you may also see a higher clickthrough and conversion rate.
If you want to see more results from the ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ you can read the executive summary here.
