The mobile phone continues to rise in popularity as a primary communications device making email rendering on mobile devices a serious issue. According to data from MarketingSherpa, approximately 64% of “key decision makers” are reading messages on a BlackBerry or other mobile device. Let’s find out why this issue is finding its way to the top of many a priority list.

What is the problem?

Right now, mobile devices only display text emails. Basically, they make a mess of a finely crafted HTML message. They are fussy about font size and the user is often scanning, not reading, the text. Email marketers will also have a challenging time separating their mobile users in email databases from traditional computer receivers. The segmentation will be necessary, however, to ensure proper rendering of messages to non-HTML-friendly email clients. Another snag is that mobile devices also make it more difficult for email marketers to determine the true open rate of their campaigns. Metrics, we know, are key to evaluating success and implementing positive change.

How do email marketers solve this problem?

There is no simple answer to this question, yet. But, there are questions to start discussing with your email design and marketing teams. The first step is to make sure you’ve considered your audience demographics. Are they using BlackBerrys? Why? Many mobile-device devotees are checking email for urgent issues and will pass over anything that looks disposable. Another consideration that will play a key role as email marketers update their strategies for this new medium is the nature of the campaign. For example, if the information is time-sensitive, can the campaign be targeted to mobile users (and not computer receivers) with only text and short, concise messages?

Naturally, we must also consider how we are gathering information in data collection methods such as surveys, landing pages and other tools. Do your sign-up forms include a mobile phone perference? Do recipients have a way to tell you that they use their mobile device as a primary communications tool? Start by addressing these issues and keep mobile devices on your radar screen as the challenges and opportunities unfold.

—Elie Ashery of Gold Lasso

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Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Listrak - Beyond Open and Read Rate
A guide to email marketing metrics that will help marketers understand how recipients are using their email campaigns.

Artegic: 2008 Mobile Email Marketing - German Language Whitepaper
Artegic's latest report. Please note: this whitepaper is in German.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

We asked the Voices of Email to look into their crystal balls and foretell what 2008 had in store for the email marketing industry. Here are their predictions:

Stephanie Miller of Return Path:
#1 - Email Marketers, if you want to keep your job, segment your file. I was hoping that last year would be the year that we’d see more targeted, tailored, relevant campaigns and less batch and blast. Not sure that happened, although I was half right in that we certainly saw MORE segmentation and targeting than in 2006.

Why will email marketers lose their job if they don’t do it now? Because the email channel is more expensive than ever, and there are too many risks to brand and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Unhappy email subscribers—all that dead wood on your file—is not just a missed opportunity, it’s a liability. Engaging with those folks is going to take more time and effort in creative and list hygiene and segmentation than ever before. To get those budgets, the email marketer has to prove the channel. To prove the channel, the email messages have to be a lot more relevant. To be relevant, they must be segmented. Thankfully, the technology and best practices are already in place and proven. We just need to set our minds to it.

#2 - The Data Capture form goes multichannel. We’ll see more and more email marketers open up their data capture form to include permission to contact via SMS and mobile marketing. Building up the database with these contact touch points will be increasingly important as more marketers start to test the efficacy of those channels.

#3 - Transactions will become touchpoints sometimes too hot to handle. More email marketers are going to push the envelope on turning transactional messages into marketing opportunities. The receivers and FTC will get stricter on standards, potentially causing trouble for some senders. With the need to dynamically create, message and track these messages, ESPs will aggressively go after the transactional email market to build their base and capture higher share of wallet.

Chip House of ExactTarget: Increasing focus on subscriber engagement. When emphasizing the importance of list hygiene, David Daniels of Jupiter Research often compares mailing the portion of your list that hasn’t opened or clicked on your emails in several months to “flying an advertisement over a ghost town.” Many marketers are realizing the benefits to their success potential via email by truly understanding which segments of their list are responding, and which aren’t. The non-responsive segments drag down your deliverability and ROI, and waste your time. This is something that I like to call the “ignore rate.” Marketers that ignore the needs of their subscribers, send irrelevant communications, or make other blunders leading to dissatisfied subscribers, drive a higher ignore rate.

Most sophisticated email marketers now closely track their open and click rates, and more are even tracking subscriber spam complaints by ISP. However, it is often what you don’t see that can be most harmful to your deliverability and campaign ROI. More marketers are beginning to see the benefits of closely analyzing the portion of their customer base that IS NOT paying attention. By doing so they can better reactivate them, opt them in again, or discard them—all to the benefit of their response rates and ROI.

2008 is about flying hundreds of planes, towing just the right message, over hundreds of small cities.

Amy Bills of Bulldog Solutions: I think we will see some shaking out in the use of social media for lead generation. Right now, a lot of companies are really struggling to understand what works and what can be integrated into their existing strategies. Is a blog, a podcast, RSS, an online community, a presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. going to be worth the effort and resources? How can you even measure their effect on your objectives? And of course, what works for one company is not going to be the same formula for another. Some have the impulse to try everything. Others want to bury their heads in the sand and deny the landscape is changing at all. A third group is experimenting and trying to be smart about making good choices, thinking about what their prospects will respond to and how to make social media enhance what they are already doing.

After Paul Dunay joined Bulldog in November for a webinar on making sense of social media for BtoB marketing, he made a comment that really stuck with me. “[The question isn’t] if social media is right for your company, but which social media is right for your company. And at this point in time and state of your company, you need to determine which social media is right for your company for next year. A year from now, the picture may look very different. And the answer to which social media is right for your company will be different for each company. My advice is look into next year with an eye toward experimenting with a few tactics to begin to get yourself and your team up to speed.”

So, I predict that more marketers will ease into that third group, and start to get smarter about social media. And by “smarter” I mean more creative and experienced about how to make tactics work and measure their results, and brave enough to admit when a particular tactic might not work.

Tricia Robinson of StrongMail Systems: The email space gets larger and faster daily. With this growth comes change, and I predict we’ll experience much change in 2008.

Automation Becomes The New Buzzword. We’ve lived through closing-the-loop, 1to1 digi-dialogues, and deliverability. Look for campaign automation to catch-on in 2008. We’re seeing more clients rapidly move in this direction. Those that already have are realizing the time/cost benefits of auto-generated programs.

The Final Sunset for the Old Homegrowns. The replacement of the original homegrown system has been a trend since 2006. However, this year we’ll see the last of the first homegrown systems built by Web 1.0 companies and those that thought “email is easy, we’ll make our own.” Some organizations will always custom-build, but most have done it on top of something more sophisticated than generic MTAs.

All Outbound Customer Email Includes Marketing. Even if it’s the inclusion of a logo, all outbound customer email (transactional, customer service, promotional, etc.) will include a touch of marketing. According to MarketingSherpa in mid-2007, 90% of email marketers planned to overhaul their transactional email in the next 12 months. Not sure if they will meet their own deadline by June, but look for an improvement in the look of all outbound email. I’m not crazy enough to predict the death of the text email, but maybe next year.

Still More Acquisitions. 2004-2006 were large vendor consolidation years in our space. I argue that 2007 was the year of the IPO. Now with more cash and CNBC viewers to consider, look for Constant Contact and ExactTarget to make purchases that round out their offerings or extend their reach into new markets.

Unlike many, I like change. It’s good to shake things up as long as the goal is always towards improvement. Happy New Year!

Chad White of the eec: 2008 will be the year that retailers and other B2C marketers increase the transparency of their email programs and relinquish more control to subscribers. In 2007 we saw more retailers allow potential subscribers to view a sample email before signing up. More also offered emails on different topics or allowed some level of content preference selection—which is key to elevating relevancy. Consumers are getting very used to having more control over how they’re marketed to, and email will be forced to fall in line over time. On the upside, giving consumers more control over content and frequency, and being more upfront about those aspects of their email programs, should generate more lifetime value from subscribers. Although eventually we’ll see this kind of control move to the front end, during 2008 we’ll start to see it more and more on the tail end of the relationship when subscribers are fed up and trying to opt out. Rather than lose subscribers, more marketers will give up control over frequency and other elements to boost retention.

During 2008 we’ll also see retailers pay more attention to content—product reviews, videos of product demonstrations and fashion shows, blogs, articles, podcasts, etc.—and do a better job of leveraging it in their email channels.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Chad White: E-gift Card Promotions Popular During Christmas Crunch Time
Retailers focused on e-gift cards in the days before Christmas, relying on email as a last-minute delivery mechanism.

Right Now: Busting Out of the Inbox
Five New Rules of 1to1 Email Marketing

Premiere Global Services: 8 Thursdays - Edition 1
Eight email marketing topics you can't afford to miss.

Microsoft: Protecting Your Brand, Customers and Employees from Online Threats
Creating A Competitive Advantage

MagNews: The Funnel
A Scientific Approach to Measuring Email Marketing Performance.

Listrak: Outlook for 2008
Essential Email Marketing Deliverability Guide

Innovyx: Understanding Dynamic Messaging
Knowing the challenges and learning how to face them.

Ezemail: The Rising Popularity of Handheld Email Devices
How Are Email Marketers Affected?

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Do we KNOW that emails with graphics get better response than text-based e-mails? Could it differ from industry to industry? —M.H. (from Lead Generation Roundtable webinar sponsored by Bulldog Solutions on Aug. 14)

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Jeanniey Mullen: This is a great question, and the answer is totally dependent on the type of email message sent.

From prior research, it appears that truly service-based emails—like welcome emails, confirmation emails and the like (ex. Your online payment has been posted)—do not perform any differently whether they are text or include graphics.

However, service-based emails that have soft sell elements—i.e.,. opt-in to our email program, or people interested in this are also interested in this—perform 2-10 times better with graphics to help focus attention.

As far as general marketing messages, I think this is a great question to re-study in the marketplace. Years ago, many tests were done and in most cases HTML outperformed text. However, in today's handheld world, text may begin to show additional benefits.

Chip House: R.J. Talyor from our strategy team weighed in with some great info we have related to mobile rendering:

—Across six different combinations of text and HTML emails, the highest click-through rates across three client email tests were achieved by maintaining an HTML version while improving the text design. This approach was achieved by maintaining the HTML version while altering the text version to include a brief (1-2 sentences) teaser followed by a “View as a Webpage” link after.

—With the increase of smartphones in the market (current penetration is 7%), sending an email with the most flexibility is imperative. Sending as HTML or text only can alienate or frustrate subscribers whose email client or device can only display in one or the other.

—Based on testing with three email marketers (one B2C marketer; two B2B marketers), we recommend sending in multi-part MIME with the text version optimize.

Amy Bills: The answer to the images vs. no images question isn’t the same for every communication. You need to consider the specific communication and call the action of the email. What are you trying to accomplish? What is the recipient expecting? I know it’s not the magic answer, but to a large extent it comes down to testing what works for your audience.

Let’s say your objective is to initiate a dialogue, engage prospects in a conversation, maybe introduce them to your company. For this purpose, in a B2B context, I do think that images can serve you well. They can be used to call attention to certain calls-to-action, present a polished face for your company. The example I’d use is Marketing Watchdog Journal, Bulldog’s monthly sales and marketing newsletter. This is a lot of people’s first real communication with Bulldog, so we’re very conscious of how it looks and how robust the content is. We’ve been testing a streamlined version that eliminates all images and some of the design elements. Click-throughs are lower than on our fully designed version.

On the other hand, one of our Web designers loves a simple, text-only email he gets from Motley Fool. As a subscriber, he’s already sold on their advice. He wants it succinctly presented so he can choose what he wants to learn more about.

Stephanie Miller: It does vary and in some industries like tech, text works better. This can be easily tested for your file. It’s always a good practice to offer a choice of format (text, HTML or mobile).

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

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Aside from testing, are there any minimal requirements that any email marketer can follow that will improve display on a Macs, PCs, and/or mobile devices? Or are there completely separate standards for each email client? —K.G.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Deirdre Baird: First, ensure the HTML is valid according to either W3C or WDG standards. This is the single best protection for universal rendering.

Second, try to ensure the integrity of the message (branding, calls-to-action, etc.) are communicated even if images do not display. While alt tags are useful, they do not display universally in all email clients, so do not rely exclusively on alt tags as an alternative to image display.

And third—and this is more of an FYI—some mobile readers display the HTML version as text instead of displaying the Text part of a multi-part message (as many assume). If a significant percentage of recipients are assumed to be using mobile devices to read emails, then consider not only the text part of your multi-part but also what the HTML part will look like when rendered as text. If possible, ask customers at sign-up if they’d like a “mobile version” of the email and/or create a mobile version that folks can subscribe to.

Chip House: The goal is properly recognizing the differing needs of your subscribers and customizing the content and format to best meet their stated or observed needs. The first way to do this is to ask their preferences (HTML or text) at the time you capture the opt-in. If you don’t get that information, then you have to try to optimize for how you want your subscribers to use and/or respond to your communication.

Let’s look at mobile first. The challenge appears bigger than it actually is. For example, when you look at the total possible number of rendering combinations for mobile devices, which vary by mobile phone manufacturer, top ISPs, mobile data providers and mobile operating systems, you get 3,780 unique rendering possibilities. However, what we’ve found via our research is that 56% of users are less likely to read commercial email and/or newsletters on their mobile phone as they are on their laptop or desktop. The message there is you need to optimize the email for both the mobile and laptop/desktop computer environment. In fact, our testing showed that commercial email sent using multi-part MIME (includes both text and HTML parts) was the most versatile format. By this I mean it is most likely to render as HTML only for those systems that can display HTML well, and render as text elsewhere—such as on many mobile devices. However, the advantage of multi-part MIME over text here is that when a user saves or flags your email to look at it on their desktop/laptop, they’ll get the graphic-rich HTML version you’d love them to see—which is also likely to deliver a higher click rate.

Testing the rendering of your email campaigns across a number of email clients and ISPs is the best way to overcome the difference in those systems. We use Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer heavily for this purpose, which allows for preview in a number of different mail clients (including Mac). Each has its own unique page break and image rendering rules, for example, which need to be optimized around. With a little testing, however, you’ll be able to get your HTML in tip-top shape for nearly all recipients.

Stephanie Miller: Let me focus on optimizing for mobile. What actually renders on a PDA or Smartphone is determined by four factors:
1. The operating system and software (e.g., Palm OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile)
2. The service provider (e.g., Sprint, Verizon, T-mobile, etc.)
3. The device itself (e.g.: Treo, Blackberry, HP IPaq, iPhone, etc.)
4. The user’s settings

Yes, it’s messy. And totally different than reading email on a PC. There is a temptation to just deliver text to mobile users, but I don’t recommend this. First, because it’s hard to know who is a mobile user (there is unfortunately no “sniffer” that tells the sender what device is being used (PC vs. mobile). Second, because mobile users are not just mobile users. They also read email in their PC-based email clients, where a nicely formatted HTML email still yields higher responses in most cases.

The best bet is to rely on Marketing 101—Know Thy Customer. Ask subscribers if they regularly read your newsletter or promotions on their PDA. Many mobile device users sync their device back to the PC and read newsletters there rather than on the road. If you believe that many of your subscribers read your email on their mobile device, then offer a mobile-friendly format (simple HTML with text) that can be selected at sign up or in your preference center. If you believe that many of your subscribers are sometimes mobile readers but often PC readers, then format your HTML (particularly the masthead and preview pane) to minimize the number of image links and other code that readers must scroll past to see the actual content.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

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