Timberline Interactive

Recently there have been some code changes in Gmail and Hotmail that are affecting the way email code is displayed in these inboxes in Firefox browsers. What’s happening is that some of the images are pushing extra space into the emails that shouldn’t be there. If you want to see if this is affecting your email template you can look at tests in your Gmail and Hotmail inboxes in a Firefox browser. I see this is also affecting IE8, at least in Gmail. Here are some updates you can make to your template that will help with these situations.
 
The first fix is for Hotmail in Firefox which requires adding the code:
 
<style>img {display: block;}</style>
 
Between the open <body) tag and the first <table> of the email. This should fix the issue in Hotmail.
 
I have written a blog with more info here about this:
http://blog.timberlineinteractive.com/post/Email-Energy-Hotmail-in-Firefox.aspx
 
This was my original post but now there is an additional fix for Gmail.
 
The second fix is for Gmail. This requires adding the code:
 
style="display:block;"
 
to the end of each image tag
 
Here’s an example:
 
<img src="http://www.yoursite.com/email/images/imagename.jpg" alt="text here" width="200" height="200" border="0" style="display:block;">
 
Now for all the email templates I have done this on I had added the first fix for Hotmail and come back around with the Gmail fix. It is a possibility that if you just do the Gmail fix first it might fix the Hotmail issue. Not sure, but worth a try if you like.
 
So those things should work to help the issues in Hotmail and Gmail. You can take a look at some of your older emails in those inboxes and see that the images probably have more space around them than they should. The changes are sweeping through the old emails which used to look perfectly fine.
 
It’s a possibility that this might change the way that some of the other coding looks and you may need to make some adjustments to the tabling. If you test out the email in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Outlook you can take a peek at how it’s laying out.

I recently read an article about leveraging minor holidays by Chad White that was very inspiring called Standing Out Among All the National Pecan Pie Day Messaging. In the article he says:

"It's a major strategic and creative challenge to stand out during the holiday season -- as well as during other major holiday seasons like Mother's Day, Father's Day and Valentine's Day. It's significantly less challenging to stand out during the April Fool's Day or Cinco de Mayo season. Show up and the battle is half-won.

"But in addition to having little to no competition around messaging for such minor holidays -- and therefore injecting instant uniqueness into your email campaigns -- the focused nature of many of these holidays means that messaging is tighter as well."

I think this is a fun and creative idea to bring a unique twist to your email messages. Interesting and engaging content is a big part of a successful email campaign and will likely render more clicks from your subscribers. There are quite a few emails he highlights in his article that are good examples of leveraging minor holidays.

Here’s a minor holidays write up for August and the first bit of September that Chad White referred to in the above mentioned article:  http://returnonsubscriber.com/2010/08/10/email-marketing-calendar-ideas-for-august-and-september

I don’t see another write up for September, October, etc on that blog but below are some holiday ideas that I put together for further inspiration.

September - December Holidays

Back to School - September

Grandparents Day – September 12th

Autumn begins – September 22nd

National Good Neighbor Day – September 28th

Breast Cancer Awareness Month – October

http://www.retailemailblog.com/2009/11/season-finale-breast-cancer-awareness.html

Columbus Day – October 11th

National Bosses Day – Oct 16th

National Chocolate Day – Oct 26th

Halloween – Oct 31st

Election Day – Nov 2nd

Veterans Day – Nov 11th

Thanksgiving – Nov 25th

Black Friday – Nov 26th

Cyber Sunday - Nov 28th

Cyber Monday – Nov 29th

Winter begins – December 21st

And of course, the December Holidays…

Email is continuously changing and there are yet again some new things on the horizon. Chad White, Research Director at Smith-Harmon, has written a great article entitled The Inbox of the Not-So-Distant Future. Some of the topics he discusses are social media in the inbox, Targets new scannable barcodes sent in emails, video in email and other relevant topics. Its definitely an ever shifting world we live in on the web.

Doing some email blog reading the other day I got lead down a path that was unintended but found out something very interesting. The interesting tidbit was about Yahoo Shortcuts. Yahoo Shortcuts is intended to add value to the emails in people’s yahoo inboxes but for email marketers and business who are trying to get the ultimate amount of clicks it can have just the opposite effect. I have noticed Yahoo underlines Phone numbers and dates before but hadn’t noticed this.

What it does is open a Yahoo search box right off of the email content the email sender has written with link ideas that may or may not be to the site the sender intended. This is a dashed line, not a solid line but a customer may not notice the difference. Keywords that have not been linked in a description, etc are affected.

So for instance if I was sending an email for my client abc123.com and they specialized in flowers I would link all of the products we are featuring not necessarily all the keyword text as that might seem like too many links. What Yahoo Shortcuts does is go in, find some keywords that are not linked and add a "shortcut" link to it. If for instance I hadn't linked "spring flowers" in my general text about my offer Yahoo Shortcuts may go in there and add a link. This link would open up a search box with a few options to search. These search options may or may not have anything to do with the company abc123.com. They may just go to some other company specializing in spring flowers. This is a real big drawback to the intention of the email.

The takeaway for me is to be aware of it. Test to your Yahoo account and see if there is any really valuable text that is being taken over by a Yahoo Shortcut link. Especially at the top of the email in the pre-header text or introductory text of your email. The links at the top of emails are clicked on far more often than links lower down in email sends. You can add your own links and the yahoo shortcuts will not be able to overwrite these. I used a real client example in exploring this. When I noticed some keywords linked in the pre-header text I went in and added my own link. But what happens then is Yahoo Shortcuts searches for more keywords to add links too. Its driven to do this. The trick is to be aware of it and add your own links to the really valuable products/text that you want to be linked to your site. This will give you the ultimate value for your email send.

Recently I read an article by Smith-Harmon entitled "Majority of Retailers Fail Hotmail-Firefox Rendering Test". I was immediately intrigued. So, I went to go check some of the emails I send out and sure enough I saw a few extra spaces that I had not planned on in those emails. Very subtle differences but something I wanted to fix as I like to be consistent in all email clients. There can be more obvious errors too and in the Smith-Harmon Press Release they explore this more in depth.

This is a great read and highly recommended for those of you who put your own emails together.
Majority of Retailers Fail Hotmail-Firefox Rendering Test  - http://www.smith-harmon.com/news/2010/03/majority_of_retailers_fail_hotmail-firefox_rendering_test.php

There is a constant barrage of changes and "improvements" that are released in email clients and can affect the way your emails are rendered. Lesson: It's good to check your emails in both Internet Explorer and Firefox especially in Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. In addition, Outlook is essential to test in. Keeping an eye on these email clients will give you a good idea of how your emails are rendering for your subscribers. It may take a few extra minutes but if not done regularly can affect your brand reputation if emails are hard to read or broken in some way.

The Press Release begins

"Because email clients support different CSS and HTML coding, getting your emails to render correctly in all the major email platforms can be challenging, especially since support tends to change without notice. Rendering challenges are compounded by the fact that the browsers used by subscribers can also affect how an email displays.
“Testing rendering across every major email client isn’t enough,” says Aaron Smith, director of creative technologies at Responsys. “You should test rendering across every email client-browser combination as well, because there are unique issues that can arise for each combination.”

Email marketers that fail to account for the vagaries of rendering risk brand damage from broken designs and poor subscriber experiences from broken functionality."

Quoting again from this Press Release by Smith -Harmon Research Director Chad White

"The Fix- Luckily, the solution to the problem is quite simple. Just include the following immediately after the <body> tag within the HTML code for your emails:
<style>img {display: block;}</style>
Please note: You must place the <style> tag after the <body> tag instead of within the <head> section as normal web coding practice dictates. This is because Hotmail strips out any code within the <head> section.
While we usually discourage including CSS <style> definition tags in emails because of the limited support across webmail clients, in this case it’s a simple fix that will have no negative impact in any other email clients and will ensure your emails render correctly in Hotmail with Firefox."

Without this line of code they suggest extra spaces above or below images can occur. In my case I just saw a little extra subtle space but I looked through my hotmail inbox in Firefox and saw quite a few different things happening in others emails, including broken tables and major spaces that really pushed the content of the email down and looked funny. Check on yours and add that small line of text. It will be a great addition to your email code and be one more step in helping your email render properly.

I send out a lot of client emails here from Timberline. The lists vary in size from 1,000 to 25,000. I have read much about what to do and what not to do when it comes to sending out emails. There are only so many rules you can follow before you want to really know what makes those emails tick, what gives them the best results, what inspires people to take the leap and buy off that email. I hear "Don't put percentages or exclamations in your subject line" but still I see some land right in my inbox. I hear "Don't put big images with little text in your email" but still I see some land that way in my inbox. I hear "Don't send at this time or that time" but they come at all different times. So this, to me, is the year to test. There are a lot of theories out there and some very good ones that I will stick with but I really want to get down in the trenches and see what works best client for client. Depending on what you sell and who your customers are things may be different from industry to industry. I think subject lines and times of day are the first things to start testing. One test at a time so you really know the results you are looking at. I think some tests will be a hit, some will be a miss. The clicks will tell us, the reporting that we see after the send - who clicked on what and who opened what will be a big sign post for us to keep up the testing and know which direction to go with for the next one.

I recently read up on testing on SubscriberMail. Following are what they called some "Key Things to Remember When Testing"

• Testing in email is crucial
• Start testing today--you don't need to have the master plan
• Establish a test protocol
• Be creative and thorough in your testing areas
• Test beyond the click and look at conversions
• Test and review frequency and timing
• Make sure you test accurately with lists
• Always have one change action as a result of a test
• Never stop testing

With the New Year comes resolutions. This will be a big one for me this year. I found this recent quote from Internet Retailer particularly inspiring "The Best Informed E-Retailers Will Become the Leaders in 2009. That is particularly true right now. Web sales are growing despite the recession, which is more than can be said for store chains. Indeed, e-retailing is the only island of hope in a depressed retailing market. That's the good news. The bad news is that everyone wants to move to that island, which means 2009 will be the most competitive year yet in the e-retailing market. It will be the year which likely separates web merchants into two groups: the long-term leaders and the also-rans. This is not a time to retreat; it's your time to shine." So to me shining means knowledge about what your customers want and acting on it. Test, test, test.

Wishing everyone a Healthy, Happy New Year.

Kathie

The Chief Marketing Officers Council released its Marketing Outlook report, based on a global survey of 800 marketing execs. Among other topics, survey respondents identified key areas of marketing systems and automation in which they planned to invest. The top six areas of planned investment include:

More details at CMO Survey report summary