Email Marketing series: Preview Pane Design (from Lyris)

One of the best ways to learn about effective design is by actually seeing the design in action. In this article, we'll show you seven real-world examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to preview pane design, highlighting both preview pane pitfalls and successes. Consider these samples as you work to improve your recipients' own preview pane experience, as well as your open and click-through rates.

The preview pane, also known as the ‘reading pane’, is the part of the email client typically on the right hand side or at the bottom. It gives recipients a sneak peek at what the email is about. And the way an email displays in the preview pane can make the difference between the recipient opening and interacting with the email, or quickly hitting the 'delete' button.

Especially Important for Welcome, Reactivation Campaigns

Certainly, mature email lists are less likely to encounter ongoing preview pane issues--after all, long-term customers have ostensibly added your email address to their whitelist and are seeing your emails as you intended. But the preview pane is especially important when you're reaching out to first-time customers or attempting to re-engage customers who may not have responded in some time. The first impression (or re-impression) you make will help recipients decide whether to pay attention to your brand or search for the unsubscribe link.

Preview Pane Pitfalls to Avoid

Understanding how your email appears in the preview pane is one of the keys to email design success. Realizing that many email clients block images by default, ignoring how your email looks with images turned off can end up turning off recipients. It is vital that you test your emails in a variety of different email clients, and that you use a separate account that doesn't have your sender address added to its whitelist. By doing this, you'll have the most accurate view of how a first-time or reactivated recipient may experience your email. (Note: Click on images to view full size)

Single-Image Emails Leave Recipients Uninformed

Many emails that appear in the preview pane look very similar to the example above: a large blank square with a red x in the upper left-hand corner, indicating that the image has not been downloaded. Outlook will also populate the 'Right-click here to download pictures' message by default--not exactly the most welcoming, customized message your brand could deliver.

Emails like these rely solely on the subject line and the hopes that the recipient recognizes the 'from' address as the incentive for the email to be opened and fully viewed. When an email looks like this in the preview pane, it's easy to see why a recipient may make the decision to hit delete.

Centered Images Miss the Mark, and Negative Text Sets the Wrong Tone

We see a similar situation with this email. But instead of one red x showing up in the left-hand corner, all that is being displayed is the black background color of the message. The images are actually centered and therefore the 'can't download image' message simply falls off the right-hand side of the screen. When you fully open the email, it displays just fine, but in the preview pane recipients don't get the full effect--and may reach for the delete key as a result.

Notice too the 'Having trouble viewing this email?' message at the top of the email. This is the only text that recipients can read, and the tone of it is negative. Consider a more neutral statement like 'View this email in your browser' as a way to help set the proper tone for your interaction.

More Images, More Potential Issues

Whether you're using one large image or a series of small images, one thing remains the same: if there is no HTML code that is supporting the email, then you simply don't have a lot that you can do to make a good impression in the preview pane. In the email above, you see a handful of red x's--not exactly an invitation to explore further.

This very common design practice also has another potential downside: if your email has an unusually heavy ratio of images to text, many spam filters interpret it as potential spam and score it lower, which may have a negative impact on your inbox deliverability.

Personalization and Relevant Text Provide Incentive to Open

My personal inbox sees between 200-300 emails per day, so I have a vested interest in quickly browsing through emails to see what needs my attention and what can be deleted. The email above was one that was opened rather than tossed, because it did a good job of giving me an incentive to open. How?

First, they've addressed me by name--'Dear Andrew' shows me that there's a good chance that I've interacted with them at some point. Secondly, with a quick glance at the text below I can see that this email has to do with cricket, a sport that I love. Yes, this is definitely an email I intended to receive and want to open and read. With a design that considers the preview pane, this sender is quickly showing me what this email is about, even though no images are displayed.

The Power of HTML to Add Brand Triggers

The example above looks different than other emails we've seen thus far, but how did they get their logo to display in the upper-left hand corner? They didn't. The headline at the top may look like an image, with the attractive colors and the bold font, but it isn't. It's actually a hard-coded HTML that reiterates the site's brand name and mirrors the color scheme used in the company's Web site design. Using HTML code to add brand triggers to your email designs is an excellent way to ensure your emails make it past the preview pane.

Navigation Elements Invite, Capitalized Text Informs, Coupons Inspire Action

The email above does an excellent job of giving recipients an incentive to open and further explore. Notice that the email has navigation elements that are similar to those that may appear on a Web site, and that the navigation elements are repeated as inline links within the body copy. This provides recipients with a very subtle but compelling invitation to browse the site even if they are not responding to a particular offer.

Another technique that this retailer has used is simple, but very effective. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft adds alternative text to the images reminding users that images are not automatically downloaded. But the designer's alternative text also appears. The designer of this email very cleverly decided to capitalize his alternative image text (GREAT CHRISTMAS OFFERS) as a way to help it stand out from the text that the software automatically generates.

Finally, pay attention to the special offer and coupon code in the red box. The bold color helps draw the eye to this very important call-to-action, and showing the coupon code within the preview pane shows the recipient that this is a legitimate offer.

Text-Only Email Can Offer an Effective Alternative, Especially in the Follow Up

After seeing a slew of red x's, one can see how effective a text-only email is when it is displayed in the preview pane. Not only are they effective, but text-only emails are also relatively easy to produce--just put together some compelling copy and go.

One smart way to use text-only emails is as a follow up to HTML emails to capture additional opens and click-throughs that you may have missed. Use your email marketing software to segment your mailing list, sending a text-based version of the HTML email to recipients who did not open. This is something that we've done in our own campaigns: sent an HTML-based email on a Thursday, and then on Friday sent a text-only follow-up message to those who didn't open Thursday's email. Our results have been impressive--our follow up text emails achieved open and click-through rates of between 3-6%.

Preview Pane Design Gives a Competitive Edge

For marketers wanting to fully optimize every possible aspect of your email campaigns, the preview pane offers the potential to maximize often overlooked territory. Through testing, designers and marketers can work to create a preview pane display that meets both marketing and design goals, and gives recipients a good reason to double-click.

###

About the Author

Andrew Robinson is the director of international professional services at Lyris, located in the UK office.

Email Marketing: Why we use Silverpop (inspired by an iMedia article)

At Leo Burnett, we use Silverpop for our email marketing needs. We're fortunate to be able to take advantage of ridiculously low cost-per-email rate because of our global contract with Silverpop. But that's not the primary reason why we use Silverpop. It's because its one of the best email service providers (ESPs) that make deliverability a primary concern.

Deliverability refers to whether or not email arrives at its destination, what limits its delivery and what we can positively impact in this process. E-Marketer reported in 2006 that 20.5% of permission-based email do not get delivered. That's an alarming rate if you consider that these recipients have already signified their intention to receive email from you. List hygiene is the primary cause of this thus the onus for email marketeers to keep their lists clean.

Since Jupiter began covering ESPs in 2003, Silverpop has been ranked consistently within the Top 3 ESPs, higher than any ESP ever covered, garnering two #2 rankings and two #1 rankings in the past 4 years. And they boast of a 96% client retention rate, in an industry where the standard is less than 70%.

•

I believe that Silverpop's strengths lie within how their Marketer tool and processes are designed for deliverability, and how they evangelize to their clients all the best practices to achieve optimal deliverability.

We've had great experiences with Silverpop, and our clients are impressed.

P.S. I got inspired to write this post because of a Mashable article I found more than a month ago, which I'm re-posting below. Happy reading!

-------------------------------

Email deliverability: The real way to measure it

By Spencer Kollas

April 27, 2009

• PRINT
• SHARE
• COMMENT

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Many marketers' email deliverability measurements are incomplete
• True delivery measurement requires both your failure logs and your seed list results
• Tracking your "potential rate" will determine the real value of your campaigns

Next in Email

Lately, I have heard a number of people talking about email delivery rates and what they really mean. While the topic of deliverability is not new to the email space, it is an important one that deserves discussion. Most of the time, when marketers are talking about numbers and various metrics, they invariably focus on opens and clicks, not delivery rates. With that being the case, I wanted to take a look at what delivery rates really are and, more importantly, how you should be looking at them.

One of the things that always makes me laugh is when clients or prospects tell me that some other email service provider promised them 99 percent delivery. Here is the problem with that: It's impossible to make such a promise without knowing anything about your list, your previous practices, or other important factors affecting deliverability. When it comes down to it, the sending platform is only half of the deliverability equation; a sender's practices make up the other half.

There is also confusion around how people look at deliverability. Some folks in the email space think that delivery rates are simply the number of messages sent minus the messages failed, while others look at it strictly from an inbox percentage perspective. I would argue that neither view by itself is correct. Instead, I see it as a combination of the two. While this viewpoint may be a little more complicated and harder to track, it is the most effective way to look at deliverability over the long term. Both of these statistics should be monitored, followed, trended, and acted upon, but they don't tell the whole story. What we really need is a new metric: "productive rates." But, I'll get into that a little later. First, let's discuss these two approaches in more detail.

Tracking your delivery rate based on the number of messages sent minus the number of messages bounced will tell if you are keeping your list clean and not having any issues with ISPs from a blocking standpoint; however, it won't tell you where your messages are landing. Did your messages get to the inbox, the bulk folder, or did the ISP just accept the messages and then never actually deliver them to its users? This practice of "dropping messages on the floor" is not as uncommon as you might think; ISPs do it to help protect their networks and monitor mailings from suspicious senders. This makes it all the more important to know what ultimately happens with your messages.

I'm sure you'll agree that if your message isn't in the inbox, you will get very little response. Fewer and fewer people are checking their spam folders, and that's not surprising since 99 percent are typically messages that they don't want. The increasing number of messages landing in the spam folder makes it less likely that people will take the time to search for a marketing message.

That being said, you might think it's better to use a seed list to determine your inbox delivery and use that as the actual delivery rate. Unfortunately, there's a problem with this approach as well. Seed lists can only offer you a representative sample to show you what likely happened with your mailing, which can't account for users who have changed their default email settings. For example, customers could change their settings to junk any message received from an address not already in their address book. On the other hand, the seed list could show your message arriving as spam, but if the recipient has added your email to the safe sender list, it will arrive in the inbox. In short, there are several different scenarios that could affect these numbers, which is why I am continually stressing the importance of testing.

So, what's the best approach? Should you be looking at your failure logs or your seed list results? The answer is "both." Think of email delivery as a puzzle, where you need to use all the pieces to get the complete picture. If you are missing any piece, the puzzle is incomplete.

Measuring email delivery comes down to using both your failure logs and your seed list results to determine what I call your "campaign potential rate" (i.e., the potential your campaign has to reach customers and get them to act on your email).

In order to figure your campaign potential rate, you must first gather failure data from your email system and then compare it to your seed list results. For example, let's say your delivery rate is 95 percent, but your seed list shows that your mail was sent to the spam folder at MSN/Hotmail, which makes up 30 percent of your overall list. In that case, your actual campaign potential rate would be 65 percent.

While it's possible that more than 65 percent of the people will have received the message in the inbox, this is still a good way to look at your mailings. Not only will this approach allow you to do trending, when you fix the spam problem, you will also be able to measure the actual effect it had on the overall ROI on your campaigns. So, say you earned $10,000 from the campaign with the 65 percent campaign potential rate, but the next campaign got to the inbox at MSN/Hotmail and you earned $15,000. You can now see the direct impact of getting junked at MSN/Hotmail. This is very valuable information that can be used to push for the best practices that will help ensure inbox delivery.

The bottom line is that you should use all the tools available to you to better understand your delivery rates and the overall potential of your campaigns. No one metric should be used to evaluate your email marketing programs because they are all interconnected.

Good luck and good sending.

Spencer Kollas is director of delivery services for StrongMail Systems.