I often get asked about email best practices. What is the best day (“here’s a PDF on that one”:http://email.exacttarget.com/pdf/Best-Day.pdf) and time to send marketing email? What are typical open and click-through rates? How do I optimize my email marketing?
The answer is almost always “it depends”. One thing that I commonly tell people is that these things are all relative. It all depends on your industry, the type of email you are sending, the depth of your relationship with the recipient, your objectives, etc.
Something I _seldom_ get asked about, but consider a big pet peeve, is how email looks in various email clients, especially how they render within preview panes and on different devices.
This stuff really impacts the overall success, and optimization, of your email programs.
Did you know that a lot of people will just delete an email if it doesn’t look right?
I have personally used multiple email clients (e.g. Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Eudora) and webmail providers (e.g. Yahoo, Hotmail) to do testing and research plus I have experience with both the “Research in Motion”:http://www.rim.net “Blackberry”:http://www.blackberry.com/products/new_handhelds/index.shtml and “Palm”:http://www.palm.com “Treo”:http://www.palm.com/ca/products/smartphones/treo650 devices. Each of these may, and will, render an email very differently. And people use these devices to filter email and decide what they will read later on.
What are the problems you might be facing when it comes to how email looks to various recipients, and how do you address these issues? We are not talking about creative and design. My focus with this series of posts is more about testing and the technical aspects of how marketing email looks when viewed by recipients.
Tomorrow, watch for part two of *5 Days To Optimize Your E-mail Messages* here at One Degree when we look at Optimizing For Different E-mail Clients.