Period Three Blog » Email Marketing

Jun042008

Newsletters and Spam

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The Neilson/Normal Group released a report on email newsletters, they reviewed just about every aspect of email newsletters and how we use them as marketers and recipients alike. One thing they did have to say is that you should keep it brief (people scan not read in detail) and only send one when you have something to say. The big detractor is Spam in the wild. Here’s what they had to say:

There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being baffled about unexpected messages.

The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.

We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

So, before you just “blast” out that next newsletter, make sure it has relevant, timely content and make sure it works (test it)…

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May152008

5 commandments for email marketing

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

Here’s 5 top rules for email marketing for us all to follow:
1. Market unto others as you would have them market unto you.
2. Deliver content that you can’t get anywhere else.
3. There is a limit to the amount of email your audience can stomach.
4. Make sure your message is emotional or memorable (have a purpose).
5. Make the message personal.
Source: OMMA

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Nov282007

Email Standards Project

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The folks at campaignmonitor are up to something good, the Email Standards Project. This is something I support un-yeildingly. The state of email clients has been, for as long as they’ve existed, worse than the browser wars. Your HTML email designs look completely different on multiple email clients both desktop and web-based and as much as you try and as hard as you work at it, there’s not much you can do. Here’s the ESP’s mission:

The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.

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May242007

Email Marketing Lessons Learned Issue 1: CSS or table/Inline-styles for your email messages

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

We design and build a lot of HTML email message here at Period Three, A LOT… One thing we’ve learned over the course of time is that CSS support in web based email systems and desktop email applications is spotty at best. Not to mention now that Microsoft has said that it will be integrating Word’s HTML rendering engine into it’s newest iteration of Outlook instead of IE7’s. Ouch! Most of the time your emals will be viewed in Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/MSN and GMail, so make sure an test the design out in all of them. It’s safe to assume that you should avoid entirely a pure CSS layout for your message and if you use it at all make sure it uses inline-styles. Here’s a quick list of email apps/clients and what they use (for now):

Yahoo! Mail = Supports CSS
Hotmail = Supports CSS
(if you put the style element in the <body> not the <head> of your HTML document)
Gmail = Supports only Tables and inline CSS
Outlook and Outlook Express = Supports CSS
Lotus Notes = Supports only Tables and inline CSS
AOL 9 = Supports CSS
Thunderbird = Supports CSS
Mac Mail = Supports CSS
Entourage = Supports CSS
Eudora for the Mac = Supports only Tables and zero CSS

In many cases the <style> element gets removed completely from your message HTML, so inline-styles are the safe way out.

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Apr252007

Oh Microsoft what have you gone and done now?

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

I know there have been several articles and posts about this subject already across the web but I have to put in my two cents worth. I agree with David Greiner at Campaign Monitor when he says “Microsoft takes email design back 5 years” with their decision to use the Word HTML rendering engine in their new Office 2007 release of Outlook.

What are they thinking? While it appears they support inline-styles, this is still a long way from being at least a decent upgrade instead it is a major step backwards. A short list of what isn’t supported in the new Outlook/Word 2007 HTML rendering engine uncovers a very sad state of affairs:

no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
no support for multiple nested tables with background colors applied
no support for forms
no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for CSS floats
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning
no support for animated GIFs

I struggle to understand this decision and why Microsoft continues to steer away from supporting widely accepted W3C HTML standards (yes I know IE7 was a step in the right direction but I’m not 100% satisfied.)

“HTML has nearly universal adoption among consumers: A Jupiter Research consumer survey found just 3% receive only text email.” taken from emaillabs.com

I’ve read many posts that support the “text-only” approach which in my opinion is simply the easy way out, and I know simply complaining about this isn’t going to change Microsoft’s mind and at least have them use their own IE7 HTML engine *gasp*… I have always built the email messages for my clients using the tried-and-true tables with inline styles method and I’m sure things will be fine with that practice going forward but isn’t this a huge step backwards for web-standards and HTML email marketers worldwide?

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Newsletters and Spam

5 commandments for email marketing

Email Standards Project

Email Marketing Lessons Learned Issue 1: CSS or table/Inline-styles for your email messages

Oh Microsoft what have you gone and done now?

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