Because there are so many email clients, including web-based ones like Gmail and Yahoo!, it is essential that email marketers ensure their messages display properly in all the various email clients.

Look at these examples from Groupon.com.  This company (Think: Group + Coupon) specializes in emailing you a deeply discounted local deal of the day, and their business is HOT.  But viewing it from the preview pane, it doesn’t look so hot.

We see three major improvements (In order of importance) that could be made here:

1. Alignment. The alignment is all messed up. It’s obvious to us that someone created this email template without any regard to the various email clients in which it will be read. We’ve included two samples below – the first for the Mail client in Mac, and the second from Gmail through a Chrome browser. These were the first two options that tried it in, and they both look terrible. We’ve examined the code for the email and it’s cliear they need help in coding for email because it’s different than coding for the web. Just because it looks good in one browser, does NOT mean that it’s going to come through all the various email clients unscathed. You have to test it and tweak it to get it right.

2. Missing Alt-Tags. What are those question marks about?  I don’t know, and I’m too lazy to display the images, so I’m over it and deleting the message.  After all, if my attention span is the same as most people who open emails – it takes me 8 seconds to click something on average.* And unless your email message and preview pane kicks ass, it’s going to be the delete button. Adding alt-tags for each image will help insure that your message is coming across even if your user doesn’t download images.

3. Top Line Message Missing. As we mentioned, you have a very limited amount of time to get your readers attention. Why then would you not have the very first line of your email describe your offer? Notice how the very top line of this Groupon email says “Your Daily Seattle Groupon | View this message in a browser | Unsubscribe”. This is a completely missed opportunity. Some email clients, like Gmail, show the first line of your email in the “preview” pane, before the user opens the message. Is “Your Daily Seattle Groupon” the most important thing they could say? Uh, duh, since the From address says Groupon – I already know it’s a Groupon. Why would you use such valuable real estate to repeat yourself? And if you’re trying to “create intrigue” how about something like – “Get a Head to Toe Fix from Blix.” Sure, it’s a little more work to change your template every day, and to think up something creative – but don’t your clients deserve it Groupon?

Groupon viewed in Gmail through Chrome browser.

Groupon viewed through Mac Mail email client.

The daily discounts offered by Groupon are undoubtedly good bargains, but is business so good that they’re too cool to be concerned with aesthetic details? Do companies like Apple care about asthetics? Maybe for Groupon, it’s “good enough,” but that’s a dangerous marketing mentality. What about your company’s image?  Can you afford to overlook the details? Utilizing Groupon’s advertising is an investment for their clients. They pay for Groupon to create messages, so those messages had better look damn good down to the smallest detail in our opinion. If I was a Groupon client and my promotion looked all discombobulated, I’d be pretty upset–I don’t want to pay and settle for “good enough” because good enough never is.

Solution
Email Broadcast understands that an email campaign’s vitality rests on presentation of relevant content. Therefore, we hand-code each message in HTML to W3C standards and TEST IT against a battery of multiple email clients, so we know it’s going to look amazing no matter what web service or email client is used to view it. We also use ALT TAGS to make our messages “disabled-image friendly”, so just because our reader may not see the image, they still receive the central message of the content – which is key to getting them to the next step – downloading images. And of course, we always create great “Top Line Messages” and often personalize them.

True story:  CEO of Email Broadcast, Ken Mahar, loves a great deal – but when he got the email above from Groupon last month, he cringed.  So he emailed them back, a simple heads-up, pointing out how their preview pane looked with a suggestion that they take a look at it.  It’s been over a month now and he has yet to receive a reply.

So Groupon, here’s a little Email Broadcast “coupon” of our own, just for you:

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100% Off One Hand-Coded Template So You Can Get It Right

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* Lyris Webinar: *Turn your Email Marketing Up A Notch – 5 Ways to Improve Performance Now” 6/2010

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #5 Test, Test, Test

Ken Mahar, CEO of Email Broadcast has a problem. After consulting others for the obvious fix he finally calls over the “expert” who quickly solves the problem. Sometimes it makes sense to have an Expert like Email Broadcast help you with your email marketing. What may appear to be a simple endeavor can easily get complicated and having an expert on hand to assist can pay big dividends and avoid frustration. This spoof was hatched by the creative team at Email Broadcast and nailed in the first take!

No related posts.

So, here’s what you can learn from Salesforce.com:

1. The first mistake is that they send email from a “No-Reply” address. This is a fundamental mistake and email marketing 101. The whole idea of email marketing is to engage your customer. If you cant accept replies to your outbound messages then you shouldn’t be sending them. Some companies make this mistake because they get a raft of replies that have nothing to do with the email sent – and the company therefore considers it a waste of their time. But what’s really happening is that customers are reaching out hoping to find a human being to help solve their problem. I’m not sure anything is more important to a company’s future than helping their customers solve problems, yet it is deemed an annoyance and that customers “should go through the right channels.” In these cases little regard is given that the customers may have already tried that approach and failed. Bottom line is that if you can’t respond to your customer’s replies – you shouldn’t be using email regardless of how big you are.

2. They do not have an opt-out link on their “customer” emails. This is in violation of the CAN-SPAM act, and subjects them to an $11,000 fine per email that they send out. Apparently someone at Salesforce.com has made the decision that since these are “Customers” (or apparently FORMER customers in my case) that they should have no choice than to receive these emails. This is another mistake at creating a one-way communication channel with customers. Ultimately, your customers should have the choice whether or not they want to hear from you. That includes you Microsoft!

3. Since they can’t even take someone off their lists when asked – multiple times, it’s highly doubtful that Salesfore.com is segmenting their audience for targeted emails. The message I received today was to alert me to the upcoming changes that are taking place on their platform and how that will affect me. Well, if they did any kind of segmentation at all they would see that I have had ZERO activity with their platform in the last 9 months, so making me aware of their changes is a waste of both of our times. What they could have done (had I not already asked to unsubscribe!) is send me some kind of message that says “Hey Ken, we’ve noticed that you have not logged into the platform in over 9 months. We want you to know about some helpful videos that we created in helping customer like yourself get started.” That kind of message is targeted and might be relevant assuming I HADN’T ALREADY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT.

4. Another common problem with companies like Salesfore.com that integrate their CRM with an email platform is that any silo of your business (marketing, sales, customer support, etc) can easily broadcast an email to contacts in the database. This can lead to anything from mildly annoying your contacts with too many emails, to complete disaster like sending directly conflicting information or overlapping offers. Large companies need to have an email marketing individual leading a thoughtful campaign with highly relevant email messages instead of the free for all that can exist when everyone has access. I suspect that this is the case with me and Salesforce.com – they can’t figure out where else my information exists to keep people from emailing me and don’t have central control. Or they apparently can’t figure out how to completely delete my record permanently in their own heralded platform.

5. By the way, if you are curious on why we abandoned Salesforce.com it was because of the complexity of the application and it’s steep learning curve. After signing up, and watching my 4th video tutorial and completing my 4th skills test, it was still difficult to figure out the basics of entering a lead and setting a reminder task. And as a former corporate sales champion I have had my share of experience with CRMs. If you are considering Salesforce but don’t need a lot of the advanced tools check out Highrise at 37Signals.com For us it’s the right amount of information, takes about 15 minutes to master, and has all the tools that we need.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
2. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key