For email marketers that means that a number of significant HTML features are gone.

In Outlook 2007 you may have noticed that you can’t use:

• Background images. Not in HTML or Style Sheets (CSS).
• Rowspans to format a table.
• Forms to capture users input.

As Office 2007 gradually gets rolled out, you are going to have to change the way your emails are built and perhaps designed.

It may be of little consolation, but Microsoft has released a tool that checks to see if your email will work in Outlook 2007. The tool is for users of Microsoft Expression Web, Microsoft Visual Studio or Macromedia Dreamweaver (MX 2004 and Version 8). You can download it here.

It would be a good idea to check your next email marketing piece before you click send!

From the author: If you use email marketing to reach your customers and prospects, then there are simple things that you can do ensure that your message gets through and is acted on. The key is in your email marketing 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.

I believe that one of the major reasons that users treat everything as spam is that they have been educated to not use the unsubscribe link in marketing emails, even they may know and trust the sender. So in order to stop receiving emails they have no alternative but to put you on their spam block list.

Our experience with the eComMetrix® Email Marketing service that we run is that users are using the “spam” button in their email client to effectively unsubscribe from emails that they don’t want to receive any more.

With eComMetrix®, we participate in the Hotmail Junk Mail Reporting service which notifies us when a user has marked one of our clients emails as spam. In 99% of cases the messages that are reported in Hotmail as spam were signed up for. It shows that many users do not discriminate between real spam and emails that they just don’t want anymore.

We support the idea of developing an Email Service Provider Opt Out Standard that could be supported by the developers of email clients (i.e. Microsoft Outlook). Your email client could replace the “report spam” button with two new options that represent the following two separate concepts:

1. I didn’t ask for this (spam / hard response)
2. I don’t want it anymore (opt out / soft response)

Only genuine providers would be able to participate in such a program and such a program could be used to enhance the email system’s reputation with internet and anti-spam service providers. To really succeed a program like this would need to have the backing of Microsoft, who like it or not handle most of the worlds email in some way.

To combat email overload lately I’ve been unsubscribing from lots of email newsletters. I’ve noticed that every email provider seems to have a different way of handing an opt out request. Many of them make it particularly hard to get off the list. I can tell you from experience that a simple one click standardised opt out system is long overdue!

If it was implemented well such a system would be a real positive for email marketers and email users alike.

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.

So how do you protect your business from a looming downturn?

1. Ensure your supply of customers by investing in highly cost effective marketing

Web marketing is about finding people who are in the market now and ready to buy. Getting your website found in Google and driving 24 x 7 traffic to your website is one of the easiest ways to ensure that you have a steady stream of customers whatever the economic climate.

2. Improve your website’s conversion rates

You can boost the number of leads and sales that come from your website by analyzing and improving the performance of your website. There is enormous leverage in your boosting your website’s conversion rates. The payoff for boosting your conversion rates is far higher than the payoff from getting more traffic.

3. Start an email newsletter

An email newsletter that’s rich with content and informative is one of the easiest ways to keep your customers safe from the competition. If you’re not already producing an email newsletter, don’t wait until times are tough. Start now.

Act now

We’ve been warned that trouble is on the horizon. However, your business need not be hit hard by a retracting market. You need to be smarter than the competition and take a greater market and dollar share. And you need to act now…

I’ve been thinking about this topic since I saw Gerard Minack on Lateline last week, however US conversion rate guru Jeffrey Eisenberg at Future Now beat me to writing this article, so this was partly inspired by his post.

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.

Having said that, I’ve put together a gallery of email marketing messages that I have received since we wrote our article on the subject that pass the preview pane test.

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.

Unfortunately, the scales are stacked on the bad side. Below are a few examples.

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.

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.

It turns out that Missy Higgins has an email marketing savvy record label. Take a look at the example to the left of the Missy Higgins concert tour email that went out on the 22nd of November.

Missy’s record label Eleven appear to have held back from the urge to make their email an art piece, and have delivered an instantly digestible message that works. As you can see,

1. You don’t have to download pictures to get the message
2. The headline is clear and readable
3. The text is scannable
4. It’s instantly apparent what the email is about.

Good job Eleven (Like the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, they really do go past ten!). It’s good that a company that’s smart with email marketing like this is involved with so many awesome new Australian artists.

Here’s an example of an email that we produced seen in the preview pane.

With this email, a form was used and pre-populated with information from the database. The key here is to make it so easy for readers to respond to the offer that the response rates will go up.

Our tips to create an effective email marketing campaign in this age of blocked images and the preview pane are:

1. Use a strong text headline in the email as well as a strong subject line
2. Keep any header design elements like banners to a minimum
3. Make sure the body text is scanable by using short sentences, bold and bullet points
4. Make sure that the email can be read without downloading images (i.e. check that it’s not all skew without the images).

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.

I drew a blank when I saw this from Borders Australia in my email preview pane. It took me about 1/2 a second to delete the email, even though I love shopping at Borders.

As you can see from this capture of the email with images downloaded, it’s a classic case of form over function. Email marketing should be about content that is important to your customers, not just design and branding.

By our definition of content, “useful information“, a banner design is not content when it hasn’t downloaded yet.

So the question is, will this lack of content have an impact on email open, click through and conversion rates? You bet! What many email marketers forget is that:

Email is a time sensitive medium.

It’s likely that you will receive many emails like this everyday. Even if you see an email from a brand as strong as Borders, you’ll still look for a compelling, relevant reason to read on…

There are some questions that you should immediately ask about your email marketing:

• Where and when is the reader going to get the email?
• Is the content of the email relevant to the reader?
• Can the reader pick up the scent of relevance from the preview pane without downloading anything?

If the reader can’t pick up the scent in 1/2 a second, then it may be time to rethink your email marketing execution.

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 has made it very difficult for your Internet service provider to tell the difference between 400 messages turning up at once from a legitimate opt-in email marketer and a spammer.

The good news for email marketing is that things are changing, and a basic measure called ”Sender Policy Framework” or SPF is starting to increase the performance of opt-in email marketing. Read this article on the BizReport news website referencing a study by Lyris: SPF checks are changing email marketing

If you are engaged in email marketing and you don’t have an SPF record for your domain, feel free to contact us to find out more.

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too !
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.