The From Line

Recently, our blog discussed email deliverability, and how to ensure your email reaches the customers’ inbox. Today, we extend that discussion by examining three of the most important considerations for email rendering, or how an email displays when it is opened.

Email Clients
An html template can display differently across email clients like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Outlook. It's imperative that you review how the email will render in each client. In addition, each of these email clients uses a slightly different approach to display a snippet of the email's text, and some of them use a preview pane. Carefully designing your e-mail to ensure the strongest message from each of these avenues will help increase your email opens.

Mobile Customers
These days, there’s a good chance that your customers will be checking their email on a mobile device. To master a mobile message, remember that a mobile display is half that of a computer screen and that a single column orientation will display best. Other design considerations include the use of a finger for clicks vs. a mouse pointer, as well as font size and readability. Customers will likely interact more with a display that is easy to read and accommodates for finger size, eliminating the need for zooming in. Simple, elegant, straight-forward design continues to work best on mobile devices.

Images
Finally, remember that many email clients do not automatically display graphics. Image heavy messages may display as blank boxes. It is important to include alt text. This not only allows search engines to read images on your web site, but also maintains consistency if the images are blocked or not rendering correctly.
We would be happy to discuss email rendering with you in more detail, so that you can best optimize your email marketing campaign. For more information, contact us.
 

iPad passes Mac computer in sales. The tablet is the new frontier.

It’s official. Consumers are tablet crazy; so much so that they are choosing the mobile devices over computers. It’s that time again marketers, just when you’ve finally optimized for mobile…

A look into Apples record breaking year provides an impressive example of the tablets’ rapid rise in popularity. In 2011, the company sold over 156 million iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch), 55 million of which were iPads. To put this in perspective, in just one year combined sales of these mobile devices have exceeded the 122 million Mac computers ever sold. Since it was first available for pre-order in March of 2010, the sales trend of the iPad has blown all other Apple products out of the water (see figure below). CEO Tim Cook commented “This 55 is something no one would have guessed. Including us. To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones. And so, this thing is, as you said, it’s on a trajectory that’s off the charts.” There has been buzz for some time of the possible upcoming announcement of the iPad3, and today we have verification via Mashable that Apple has sent out invitations for an event on March 7th. The invitation states simply “We have something you really need to see. And touch” and according to Mashable is "superimposed on what is almost certainly an iPad". Knowing this, it is more crucial than ever for marketers to take to heart the magnitude of this trend. It has been rumored that the newest generation iPad will have a full operating system, providing the user with a full blown hand held computer, and conceivably further intensifying this trend. Yes, Apple is just one example, but I think it’s safe to say they are usually ahead of the trend. Assessing how we communicate via tablet will be paramount. 

Trend: With a mean score of 60% professional marketers still have more to learn

Download the quiz results and share with your co-workers

A few weeks ago Trends & Takeaways asked its subscribers to participate in a fun quiz to learn more about professional email marketing topics.  Since this was an advanced quiz, subscribers did better than expected however the mean score was 60%.   The reason why we chose to make this quiz advanced is because advanced email marketing tactics, or any advanced marketing tactics for that matter, are now needed for long-term success.  The pace at which the marketing discipline is evolving has rapidly changed from linear to parabolic requiring constant updating of not only skillsets (as mentioned last week) but also general knowledge.  The mean score indicates that professional marketers still have a way to go in mastering email marketing.  However, you can take comfort in Phil Kotler, distinguished professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management words of wisdom, “marketing takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master.”

Say goodbye to the days of needing a routing number or credit card to pay a store or vendor electronically. Say hello to a real game changer in electronic payments that combines mobile email, SMS and QR codes. Big banks are partnering to allow phone-to-phone, bank-to-bank payments.

Read more to learn what this means for merchants, e-tailers and marketers...

So you think you know a thing or two about email marketing? Here's your chance to prove it!  Take the email marketing quiz below and post your score on our Facebook Page.  Everyone who posts their score will be eligible to win a $100 Starbucks gift card.  Don't worry if you fail because most people do!