The Whitelist

A significant path to high email optimization is ensuring that you’ve adhered to your email marketing best practices. But a major stumbling block to email optimization, even after you’ve crossed every “t” and dotted every “i,” is how your email renders in preview panes. How does your email looks with images on vs. images off? Where is your email is getting cut off, horizontally and vertically? Is there enough imagery and/or text to compel someone to open it?

Even in today’s world, where preview panes are a factor in just about every email client and on every device, there are too many examples of email preview pane best practices being ignored. Too many email marketers seem to ignore the significance of image blocking, especially on the preview pane.  And that simple little factor can destroy an entire email campaign even if the message is relevant, highly engaging, well-crafted, and full of beautiful and interesting text and images. How? In one version with the images on versus one version with the images blocked, the following glitches resulted:

• The newsletter name disappeared.
• The headline disappeared.
• The navigation bar disappeared.
• The photo disappeared.

And after all of this content disappeared from the preview pane, what you’re left with is a frustratingly boring or blocked preview pane that does nothing to get the recipient to open and engage with the email. And to adhere to all the email best practices that get you into the inbox, but to ignore the next step to get that email opened and acted upon is a huge waste of effort.

The majority of readers are now using both the preview pane and the default blocked-images functions to decide whether to open emails and block unwanted downloads. In fact, more than half of email readers rarely or never download images within their preview pane, and an increasing number of email subscribers will simply delete the message due to insufficient information displayed in the preview pane, due to blocked images, advertisements or poor design.

So what does all of this mean to you? Think of the preview pane as a teaser area used to grab the readers’ attention and compel them to further action: the preview pane will determine whether the reader will open the email, scroll or click through to stories or just delete without further review. When designing your email marketing campaigns, ensure that your email messages are making the most of the valuable preview pane: just the top left 2-4 inches, the only area visible in both horizontal and vertical panes.

Lastly, blocked images affect the tracking of open rates, which affects your overall email performance rates . By placing more emphasis on how your emails render in preview panes, you will be able to up your click-through and conversion rates.

Twice in the last month I’ve received emails from entrepreneurial friends, one starting an online publication, the other starting an online store.

In both cases, the emails showed up in my inbox as almost completely blank. I had a tiny red x in the middle, and some standard footer information at the bottom.

Every single bit of information, every graphic, every design element, every word and call to action was invisible to me. All of it. The only reason I right-clicked on the red x to download the images was because I knew these guys and I wanted to see what they were up to.
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Thank you, thank you, to MarketingSherpa for calling to attention—once again—the issue of images being blocked in emails. Their article was prompted by an email that showed up in their inbox with only little red x’s. Surprised to get such an email, they reiterate how important it is to design for image blocking, something you’d think would be an email marketing best practice for all by now.
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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.