E-mail marketing – beware broken e-mails!

E-mail marketing is a powerful tool which is set to grow over the next few years. So why is it that more than 40% of these do not work in all e-mail clients?

The answer is simple. Building HTML e-mails is an art where the normal rules of HTML go out the window! Unlike web browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Firefox) email clients don’t play by the same rules – each e-mail client has its own system for interpreting HTML code. In practice this means the same e-mail can look radically different depending on what software the recipient is using.

For example, Lotus Notes (used by many corporates) has a radically different way of interpreting HTML code (it ignores padding and therefore breaks when this is used). It requires the person building it to ‘think outside the box’ allowing for maximum compatibility. You wouldn’t build a website that didn’t work in Internet Explorer…so why build an e-mail that can’t be read by half of the recipients?

On investigation I found that “The E-mail Experience Council” have released a report which demonstrates how powerful a fully working e-mail is: “Working with a professional company to test your image rendering across multiple email clients often helps to increase response up to as much as 87%.” This shows the potential impact that insufficient testing can have on the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns.

The main offenders
The main problems we come across are:

• Background images are only partially supported. They can be used, but only where appropriate fall backs have been considered. If used incorrectly large white spaces will appear in place of what would have been the background image.

• Paragraph spacing is treated differently depending on the e-mail client. When spacing is not considered, blocks of text move to incorrect places on the page, often creating large white gaps.

• Padding and margins are poorly supported. If the e-mail isn’t built to allow for this drawback then the layout will be badly corrupted in some e-mail clients. This can result in cluttered looking e-mails where spacing instructions have been ignored by the e-mail client.

E-mail working in Outlook

The same e-mail breaking in Lotus Notes

These and many other “offenders” are the reason we test HTML e-mails in the following clients:

Lotus 7
Outlook 2007
Outlook Express
Pegasus
Eudora
Thunderbird
AOL
Yahoo
Hotmail
Gmail

Testing is powerful
You have just created a website worth thousands of pounds, reflecting your company’s professional image. Following this you send out an e-mail marketing campaign to promote the launch. Your prospective clients open the e-mail and your professional image is compromised because the e-mail falls apart in the display.
It is a common assumption that HTML e-mails automatically work the same for all recipients. With a small investment in e-mail testing, your professional image is secure and much more likely to result in click throughs to your site.