Conversion Rate Web Marketing Blog 

I’m really trying hard to look for email marketers who care about what their email looks like in the preview pane. It’s too easy to find bad examples, and I’m caved into the urge to expose them! So here are the three bad examples that I received today.

If it wasn’t for my recent posts on the subject, these emails would not have lasted in my inbox for more than five seconds (With the exception of Paul Kelly’s email, because he is an Australian Music Legend).

Example 1 - Paul Kelly

There are 2 main problems with this email.

1. It’s obvious that without seeing images, there is absolutely nothing to see. No content (as we define it, “useful information“) whatsoever.
2. The descriptions of the images that would usually give us some idea of what we’re missing out on can’t be seen because they are black text on a black background. The reason for this problem is that the HTML Code of the email references an external style sheet. This is blocked along with the images in the preview pane.

Now web programmers often like to be different from the mainstream. So it’s quite likely that they don’t use Outlook for their own email. However if you want to succeed in email marketing you simply can’t ignore the massive market share that Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express hold.

Technical Note: In Outlook 2007 Microsoft has switched to the the Word rendering engine for HTML messages. This has wiped out many of the HTML and CSS techniques that we commonly rely on to produce a good readable email. You’ll be shocked at how poorly it treats HTML emails. It will rank as one of the Microsoft Outlook team’s dumbest moments, but we’ll have to live with it.

Make sure your technical people test your email in Outlook (whether they like it or not!).

Example 2 - Chaos.com

More of the same with the Chaos.com newsletter. Apart from the lame “click here to view this newsletter online” there is nothing at all to see in the preview pane.

Have email marketers given up on high open rates? So much effort has gone into creating a catchy subject line for this email, but it could all have been wasted by not picking up on the subject in the body of the email.

Just like in web marketing, if there’s no scent of the subject line in the content of the email, readers will quickly lose interest.

Example 3 - POW WOW Events

This email presents quite a confronting array of images to the user. Again, there is absolutely no useful information in the preview pane.

There’s no reason that the headline seen in the complete email (left) could not have been text. That would have at least given the reader a cue that they should to download the images to see more.

The first and most simple way that you can boost your email marketing open rate is to check how your email looks in the preview pane in Microsoft Outlook.

If you are marketing consumers, you should also check to see how it looks in Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

Remember that email is one of the most time sensitive mediums of all marketing. With the barrage of communication that busy people receive every day, you need to make sure that your message is sharp to get through the noise.

From the author: How effective is your email marketing? The answer lies in your conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your email marketing you need a combination of the best email marketing tools and a team that includes experienced web marketers, email designers, web programmers, copywriters and editors. That’s why we created Bitemark.

Contact us on 03 9012 6600 for a free conversion rate review of your email marketing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 12:24 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.