The Whitelist

Would you like some free one-on-one time with an email marketing consultant? Talking specifically to you about your email marketing campaigns and goals? Then come to the Online Marketing Summit for a personalized consultation on your company’s email marketing reputation and deliverability with an expert from ClickMail.

The Online Marketing Summit 2010 (OMS) takes place next week in San Diego and email marketing vendor ClickMail will be there offering an Online Marketing Lab on email deliverability and reputation. Sign up for a one-on-one session with ClickMail, then submit an email example a few days before the show. Prior to OMS, we’ll analyze your reputation, deliverability, layout and email rendering, and produce several diagnostic reports. During the lab at OMS, we’ll go over the reports with you, and make recommendations to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
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In the email marketing world, “mobile” means much more than making sure your emails are rendering correctly on handheld devices.

Americans are on the go, especially during leisure time. How do you market to your customers when they’re not sitting at the computers? Some will have PDAs and BlackBerries and iPhones, but trust me, they’re not all that interested in your email marketing when out and about and scanning email on their phone: As great as your offer might be, chances are good that your email marketing campaign is a heck of a lot less effective on a tiny PDA screen than a full-size computer screen.
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A fascinating bit of information on email image blocking can be found on page six of MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide:

“In the version with blocked images, we see a higher percentage reading the entire headline instead of scanning and skipping down, which appears to be related to the pull of the image below. When that image is removed, people spend a bit more time reading. That underscores the power and danger of compelling images – they can engage and attract the user’s attention, but they may be stealing it from a key piece of content.”

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Half of users have their images turned off, meaning when that visually stimulating email you so meticulously designed with rich graphics arrives in their inbox, it fails miserably to impress.

Imagine all your pretty pictures replaced with empty boxes…empty except for the accusing little red x in the corner. Sadly this is an all too common scene in the email marketing industry.

Not worried? You should be. The newest retail email rendering study from the Email Experience Council and SubscriberMail is out, and it’s chockfull of numbers that should make email marketers sit up, take notice…and call their designers right away.

Go to http://blog.emailexperience.org/2008/06/retail_email_rendering_benchma.html for the executive summary. We won’t rehash it here, but note this stat:

“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.”

How do you get past this? By no longer thinking of your emails as direct mail or web pages. You don’t have to abandon graphics altogether and stick with text only. But you do have to be more thoughtful in your design. And test. Always test.

If nothing else prompts you to take action and rethink your approach to html email, consider the dollars. The summary states that email generates $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, but that ROI could jump to $52.69 if all emails were optimized for image blocking. That’s $4.40. Per dollar. Not a bad return. And you get much nicer looking emails too.