Preview Pain: Redesigned Web-based e-mail challenges marketers
With the newest releases of Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Windows Live offering users preview panes by default—at least while they’re in beta—business-to-consumer e-mail marketers must discipline themselves to get their point across in the first few inches of space, says Stefan Pollard, director of consulting services for e-mail software provider EmailLabs.
The reason: Recipients often use the little windows to read their messages and determine what they want to do with them.
Also, though business-to-business marketers have faced this design challenge for years as a result of the widespread corporate use of Microsoft Outlook, default preview panes at Yahoo! and Microsoft are a new hurdle for those on the B-to-C side.
Yahoo! and Microsoft addresses can make up as much as a quarter of a B-to-C marketer’s e-mail file. Plus, couple Yahoo! and Microsoft’s preview panes with AOL placing banner ads in its e-mail viewing area and the so-called fold line—above which marketers strive to place their most pertinent information—is moving up across the board. “Marketers need to understand that there’s a new fold line,” Pollard says.
In any case, most marketers have no idea how their e-mail appears to recipients. They’ll send a campaign, see how the creative renders on their own desktop machine and be done with it.
“Where do you do your proofing? You do it at your desk,” says Pollard. “And the person who does the proofing? It’s a small percentage of their day.”
Pollard adds that when a typical e-mailer’s clickthrough and open rates drop, it will look at deliverability issues and blame the e-mail service provider for the drop.
“But nine times out of 10, when I show them how their templates look when they get there, they’re shocked,” he says. “The images are turned off and all the calls to action are in the image. No one knows where to click on the e-mail so they’re just opening it and deleting it.”
However, like all challenges, the increasing use of preview panes is presenting new opportunities as well. “It used to be that the whole weight of your performance was dependent on your subject line,” Pollard says. “Now what’s happening is you actually have more real estate because you’ve got two or three inches to support that subject line. When they click on the subject line, your message is popping into that window.”
As a result, B-to-C marketers should design so the pertinent parts of their messages will appear in the preview pane. According to Pollard, this means putting the most important call to action—or table of contents, in the case of publishing—in the upper left corner so it can be viewed in either horizontal or vertical preview panes.
He adds that key portions of the offer and call to action should be spelled out in text so recipients can view them even if the e-mail’s images fail to render.
Pollard recommends reducing the size of masthead images and logos—or changing their placement, at least—so that more of the upper left corner of marketing e-mails are devoted to driving the desired actions.
“If they look in that preview pane and all they see is your broken masthead and some administrative copy that says, ‘If you can’t see this e-mail, click on this link,’ then you’ve delivered no value in that message, and that two to three seconds in which you wanted them to do something turns into them clicking ‘delete,’ or ‘report as spam,'” Pollard says.
“Most people look at it and say, ‘Your survey is much too long,’ but it works for us,” Angelo says.
