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

2008 Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study
Message Integrity & Email Design Issues in an Images-Off Environment

Women's Bean Project Case Study
The Results of the eec's 2007 Nonprofit Project

FreshAddress: Build or Buy?
Real-Time Email Address Validation

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

Image blocking has become pervasive, with approximately half of all email users suppressing images by default. However, email marketers have not fully adjusted to this reality and reflected it in their email design.

The two strongest weapons in their arsenal in the fight against image blocking, HTML text and alt tags, aren’t used nearly enough. 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.

Consequently, emails from 23% of the retailers reviewed in this study were completely unintelligible in an inbox environment—and there were some significant shades of gray among the 77% that were intelligible, because of lackluster HTML text and alt tag usage.

In addition to our observational study of retailers, the Email Experience Council and SubscriberMail, the sponsor of this study, surveyed 472 marketing executives in March. When it comes to designing for images off, only 47% of the survey respondents said that their company had taken action. Those actions ranged from adding alt tags or a “click to view” link to minimizing images above the fold.

Of the 38% that had tested to see whether the changes they made produced results, 32% have seen more opens, 32% have seen more clickthroughs, and 17% have seen more conversions—with 47% seeing at least a 10% improvement.

“Email marketing currently generates an estimated return on investment of $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, according to the Direct Marketing Association,” says Jeanniey Mullen, the founder and executive chairwoman of the Email Experience Council and chief marketing officer of Zinio. “We conservatively estimate that if all marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, email’s ROI would jump to $52.69. Not paying attention to rendering impacts revenue directly.”

“The results of this study underscore the importance of proactively designing email to compensate for image suppression,” says Jordan Ayan, the CEO of SubscriberMail. “Specifically, email marketers must design emails to work with and without images present and test to ensure optimal image rendering. Marketers whose design accounted for image suppression reported impressive lifts in key performance areas—the results speak for themselves. Still, a significant percent of email marketers realize this issue, yet fail to take action to address it.”

Other key findings from the study include:

• 14% of retailers compose their navigation bars with HTML text rather than images.

• 3% of retailers used HTML call-to-action buttons rather than images.

• 88% of retailers include a “click to view” link in their preheader text.

• 63% of retailers include whitelisting instructions in their preheader text.

• The emails from only 21% of retailers displayed meaningful snippet text.

*Please note that this report does not cover rendering on mobile devices, a subject that is worthy of its own separate report.

Get the Full Report
Visit the Whitepaper Room to download the full 41-page report, which is free for eec platinum members, available at a discount to eec gold and silver members, and available for $219 for non-members. Not a member? Learn more about becoming a member of the Email Experience Council.

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

Synchronicity Marketing: The Four Essential R’s of Email Marketing
These terms serve as guideposts to ensure your campaign s not only optimized for delivery, but also maximum response.

Silverpop: Unlocking the Secret World of White Listing
Insight for Enterprise Email Marketers

Premiere Global Services: 8 Thursdays 5.0
Cutting edge tips and tricks to help you and your email program reach its maximum potential.

LSoft: Stop Guessing and Start Knowing
Using A/B-Split Testing to Increase Your Email Campaign Effectiveness

ExactTarget: Email Marketing Design and Rendering
The New Essentials

Listrak: Email Frequency
How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules

Constant Contact: The What, Why, and How of Email Authentication
What it is, why it’s important, and what you need to do to authenticate your email.

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

While at the Email Evolution Conference this week, I had the pleasure of being DJ Waldow’s guest on BrontoFire, Bronto Software’s lively, unscripted, one-take email marketing debate show. During the webisode, DJ and I discussed the good, the bad, and the ugly of four email designs from Bluefly, All Recipes, PajamaGram, and American Airlines.

>>Watch the debate on BrontoFire

—Chad White

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

BlueHornet: HTML Rendering in Outlook 2007 - Top 10 Questions & Answers
How to code and design HTML email templates that render effectively in Outlook 2007.

Chad White: Retailers Gravitating toward Single Sender Addresses
Managing multiple sender addresses and getting them all whitelisted is proving tough.

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

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.

-->Read other Reply to All posts

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

Email Labs: Strategies for Addressing the Challenges of Preview Panes & Disabled Images
Two advances in email clients are combining to deliver a double whammy to email marketers.

Chad White: Reportlet - Buttons Vs. Links: Which is the Call-to-Action Hero?
Usage of button and link calls to action among the top online retailers.

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

Recently one of our customers encountered an issue with rendering when sending to the “full version” of Microsoft Live Mail. A few of the fields in their email showed up as blank white space! Our testing of similar emails via Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer showed perfect rendering in all other top ISP email clients, even Hotmail and Microsoft Live Mail “Classic.” The Live Mail “full version” is one that appears to have this unique issue.

What’s the issue? In the initial code from our client’s newsletter (recently redesigned), the designers did not specify a font color within the text boxes that showed as blank white boxes. Live Mail defaulted the text to white (all other email clients played nice and used the standard HTML default of black text).

In Live Mail full-version, the text is there, you just couldn’t see it unless you highlighted it (because of the white background). Here’s the added bonus: We tested other emails using undefined font colors, and it did not show the same issue. Live Mail did what we’d expect and displayed black text.

What drove the issue for the client at hand seemed to be a “perfect storm” of sorts. The template uses an outside table and inner tables. The outer table defines a font color of white over a green background. So, it appears the interaction of the outer table having font color defined as white and the inner table with no font specified led Live Mail to display the text as white. I’m not positive what the W3C‘s say about this, but other email clients (even Hotmail) dealt with it differently than Live Mail. This, by the way, isn’t the first display issue found in Live Mail (read this post from Campaign Monitor).

At the end of the day, this is a fairly complex issue and one other email marketers should be aware of. The “full version” of Live Mail acts differently in the treatment of text than other email clients in the marketplace. Pre-testing content with a rendering tool like eDesign Optimizer is even more critical these days as the major players are rolling out regular changes to their email software.

—Chip House

We just sent the follow message to all our clients and I wanted to share the news with the EEC community as well.

—Deirdre Baird

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ALERT: AOL disables images in AOL.com & AIM.com starting today!
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Dear Pivotal Veracity Clients,

Today, May 22, AOL officially introduced and rolled-out a new interface for customers who access their email using AOL.com & AIM.com. In addition to a number of other changes to the interface, AOL has decided to disable images in both of these web-based email clients.

As a reminder, images have always been OFF by default for AOL 9.0 (AOL’s desktop email software) but, prior to today, images were ON by default in AOL.com and AIM.com. The new interfaces for AOL.com and AIM.com now turn images OFF by default exactly like AOL 9.

Turning Images back On
Just like AOL 9.0, images will be turned back ON in AOL.com and AIM.com by any of the following:

the recipient enables the images by clicking the SHOW IMAGES link for THIS MESSAGE or THIS SENDER that appears for each email, OR

the recipient adds the mailer’s from-address to their address book, OR
the mailer’s IP is on AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

Be proactive in getting images back on! Encourage your recipients to add your from-address to their address book; if your from-address is in the address book, your images will automatically display. In addition to an explicit add-to-address book campaign, strive to keep your spam complaints and unknown user rates low so you qualify for AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

eDesign Optimizer already enhanced to show the new AOL.com and AIM.com rendering
Yup! We have already enhanced eDesign Optimizer to incorporate the new image settings for AOL and AIM and have updated screenshot intelligence accordingly for the new interface.

Sincerely,
Your Pivotal Veracity support team