Email Rendering: Test Your Way to Success
ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Email Rendering is one of those deliverability areas that many marketers may overlook for compliance and best practice adoption. This month I am going to discuss four main issues pertaining to email rendering and suggest some tips and best practices for you to optimize your design value proposition.
There are a few things about email design that you need to know about right now, why they matter and what you can do about it.
• Emails DO NOT render the same across all email clients
Different mail clients treat HTML differently, which could cause your subscribers to have a very different experience with your email, based on how and where they access their emails.
For example, Outlook 2003 and Lotus Notes 7 render emails in very specific ways. There are particular differences between the two clients in the way they render text and images, which will defiantly distort the recipient’s experience and cause you to potentially lose the effectiveness of your communication.
Here are some quick tips for optimizing message rendering:
• Nine out of 10 HTML emails are coded incorrectly. Always ensure your emails are W3C compliant. It’s your best first line of defense against poor rendering.
• Designing web pages and designing emails are not the same discipline. CSS, for example, is problematic and, if used, should be of the inline variety.
• Avoid use of WYSWIG design tools and code by hand where possible.
• Test before you try them: Form Tags (functionality stripped but response may lift), Image Maps (delivery issues), Scripts & Executables (should almost always be avoided).
• Don’t forget about validating your links AND make sure your image tags work! Measure the user experience in terms of load times.
• Test your rendering experience with the Alterian email optimizer tools.
• A growing number if ISP are defaulting images and links to ‘Off’ in their respective email clients:
ISPs will use this technique to potentially block any images that cause their clients to have a less than desirable online experience. This in turn makes our job harder to render emails. Having your customer add your address to their address book will solve this problem, as ISPs will render all images and enable links if you are in the address book.
Other Quick Tips for Improving Performance in an Images-Off Environment
• Design your messages to retain integrity with and without images. Use ALT Tags.
• For those email domains with images-off by default, test Text vs. HTML and consider creating a separate version of your HTML if your standard HTML is overly reliant on images.
• Encourage your customers to add your from-address to the address book – in some email readers it turns images back on.
• Don’t forget your ads in third party emails. Provide ALT-TAG verbiage and consider a text-only or text-component in your advertisement instead of a pure image if distribution list weighted towards image-off readers (e.g. AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, businesses).
• Sign-up for the AOL whitelist (ask your delivery engine to coordinate this for you) and keep your spam complaints below 0.25%. This should qualify you for the Enhanced White List where images are placed back on by default.
• If you are marketing to a technically-oriented audience, pay attention to Mozilla Thunderbird and test a layout where images are not used to impose structure.
• Preview panes are becoming the norm for viewing:
More than nine of 10 email users have access to a preview pane, and seven of 10 say they frequently or always use it, according to Pivotal Veracity. So design and placement of content becomes increasingly important some would say the norm.
• Design, Reputation & Deliverability are all interconnected, affecting one another and driving your performance
Many factors come into play for design reputation if you are sending a sub-par designed email the following can become an issue:
Unsubscribe Rates: Over 53% of people unsubscribe if your offer and/or content isn’t compelling.
Spam Complaints: 26% of consumers unsubscribe from email by clicking on the “This is spam” button.
Customer Relationship: If the customer adds you to the address book, it improves your delivery AND turns images back on in AOL 9
ISP Whitelisting: If you are on the AOL Enhanced Whitelist images are turned on. If you are on the Yahoo Whitelist and get into the inbox, images are on. However to remain on whitelists your unknown user rates (bounces) and spam complaints must be kept very low (for AOL EWL spam complaints must remain below 0.25%).
ISP Blocking: If as little as 0.5% – 1% of your customers complain you are spamming them, the ISP may block ALL your mail.
You have to consider your total client experience and rendering plays a big part of that engagement.
Here are some final thoughts on Design Tips:
Recognize your customers read their emails in a variety of environments and your QA should reflect that. (Verify your message looks and functions right across email readers; a single view of your message in your local email reader – how most folks QA their design – is misleading and not representative)
Recognize the importance of images on and off, and what off means in the different email clients.
Optimize your brand and calls to action to display in the preview pane and above-the-fold view. This view may indeed be what differentiates a response vs. none.
Don’t forget about your ‘From and Subject.’ They may be the only thing that looks right and should identify who you are and, in most cases, the point of your message.
Don’t design in a vacuum. Your design affects your delivery and your delivery affects your design. Your design affects your credibility and your credibility affects your reputation. Your reputation affects whether you’ll have the privilege of continuing to communicate with your customers.
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