Reaching your Gmail subscriber’s inbox is critical. Even more important is that your message renders the way you want it to. All of it! If your HTML is more than 102 kilobytes, your email may be cut off by Gmail in mid-sentence. As an email marketer you may focus on the top half of your message, but at the bottom of your message are the tracking image used to record Opens/Renders and the unsubscribe link you need to be CAN-SPAM compliant.
Gmail will automatically clip a message if the total size exceeds 102 kilobytes. Users will see a [Message Clipped] View Entire Message link in order to download the rest of your message (see screenshot below). In Gmail’s smart phone and tablet apps, the same rules generally apply.
To fix this situation, keep your HTML code short by removing extra returns, comments and unnecessary attributes and styles. Applications like Outlook and Apple Mail will show you the size of your message if you’re looking for ways to test. You can also check your file size from an original HTML text file.
Aside from the HTML code, it is also recommended that you save your images in an optimized format. Recipients should not have to wait for the images to render on their desktop or smart phone.
Continue to test how your messages render. It is critical that your message renders properly in Gmail to avoid losing the unsubscribe link, tracking image for Opens/Renders , and any content that is displayed after 102 kilobytes.
If you have taken the step of including personalization in your email campaigns (even if this is limited to including the recipient’s first name, their sales rep, etc.), your goal was likely to make your emails take on a more personal tone. An additional step that may be the right fit for your email marketing strategy is personalizing the landing pages you link to within your emails.
These personalized pages could be limited to a handful of different versions of your landing page that include slightly different offers or a page that utilizes merge tokens to pull the recipient’s email address or other information into form fields.
When you go to incorporate these personalized URLs (PURLs) into your emails, you can achieve this goal using the same approach used to insert recipient first names and/or other data fields into your emails. With the personalization tokens provided within your SubscriberMail account for each data field you can personalize the URL for a hyperlink as well (inserting the token at the point within the URL where differentiation occurs to make the content of a particular data field related to the PURL pull into the link).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can incorporate PURLs in your email messages.
At the recent Email Insider’s Summit there were several topics that sparked quite a bit of discussion among attendees, and we thought this information could hold a great deal of value to readers of Digital Spin. Heading into 2012, here is a quick summary of what the email industry is talking about:
Engagement Outside of the Inbox
One point of emphasis was not to look at email engagement in a vacuum. When you send a promotional campaign via email, monitor all of your online channels – your website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to effectively gauge the results. A frequent anecdote told by marketers and ESPs focused on seeing same day/next day spikes in web site traffic following an email promotional campaign. Recipients who appear to be inactive due to lack of renders/clicks in email reports may, in fact, be engaging with brands outside of the inbox as a direct result of email campaigns. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that while suppressing inactive recipients may boost your message metrics, you could potentially be suppressing people who would have engaged with your brand outside of the inbox.
Mobile Experience
The use of mobile by consumers continues to grow. So, as an advertiser, what do you do first? Optimize your website for mobile or optimize your emails for mobile? There was spirited discussion around this question and one common theme embraced by the attendees was to first optimize your emails for mobile. Why? If your optimized emails are generating desirable performance metrics, then you’ll know that you need to optimize your website for mobile devices; however, if you aren’t seeing desirable opens and clicks from mobile-optimized emails, then hold off on assigning resources to optimizing your websites for mobile viewing.
Email and Social
Many email marketers are leveraging the inherent strengths of sites such as Facebook and applications such as Twitter to strengthen their email programs. They’re getting customers and prospects to sign up for email newsletters from Facebook and cross-promoting newsletter content on Twitter.
Getting Beyond “It Depends”
Email strategy is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, given the number of variables that make email programs so unique from one another. Too often, however, the conversation around strategy ends with “it depends.” For instance, marketers are often told “it depends” when they ask what day/time they should be sending their emails. Rather than ending the conversation there, take it a step further by testing and analyzing email and website metrics to see when your audience tends to engage with your brand.
Just a quick thought on managing recipients and their experience with your email marketing. I’ve been in the process of migrating subscriptions to various email newsletters from Yahoo to Gmail.
I have been amazed at how many email marketing pieces I regularly receive that don’t offer the option to change your email address. One after the other offered an unsubscribe link and in some cases, a link for someone to opt-in (if the email had been forwarded to me from a friend) to receive future emails.
In those cases, I would have to opt-out and back in with my other email address. I suppose in the end it’s not too many extra steps, but it seems so unnecessary. Why make it hard for someone to change addresses (which happens so often)? What if they get interrupted or irritated and don’t opt back in?
When setting up the footer area of emails (often called the “mousetype”), your marketing should include:
• A valid postal address (for CAN SPAM compliance)
• A functioning opt-out link which lets the subscriber opt out without having to give any more information than their email address (CAN SPAM again)
• Any pertinent legal wording, trademark/copyright references
• A link to your current privacy policy
• A link to subscribe if the email has been forwarded to you from a friend
• The email address it was sent to
• Any footnote references related to the body of the email (such as links to sweepstakes rules or further rebate program clarification)
Let your readers feel they are managing their subscription to whatever email address they prefer. Otherwise, you risk losing them completely.
Like many of you who read this blog, I’ve received plenty of unsolicited marketing emails from vendors promoting “qualified sales leads” that are available for purchase. Typically, my reply sounds like this one from the other day:
“No thanks – we’re an email service provider that preaches the benefits of opt-in email marketing. Looks to me like you’re giving people a way to send unsolicited Spam.”
Ultimately, I will mark such unsolicited messages as Spam, and therein lies the point. Sending unsolicited messages is a surefire way to receive Spam complaints, because by definition that’s exactly what you’re sending. I remember talking to a prospect who once said “…but once they realize how valuable the content is, they’ll be glad we sent it…” which sounds like it could be a soundbite from the old Saturday Night Live “Bad Idea Jeans” sketch:
Assuming that recipients will see the same value in your content that you do—especially those who don’t have an existing relationship with your brand—is a bad idea. Your reputation as an email sender is not unlike your reputation as a person. Sending to a list of purchased email addresses is a bit like being “that guy” at the office Christmas party — even if it’s an isolated incident, such a misstep can inflict long-lasting damage on your reputation.
