Can Recipients Read Your Emails? Here's How To Make Sure…

Circulation Management, Dec 1, 2002

Be disciplined about tweaking your email message after the quality assurance routine has been completed. Even tiny last-minute changes can be perilous, warns Waldal.

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Optimize your formatting. Advanced techniques such as style sheets, Java scripts and embedded forms increase the risk that some email readers will fail to handle the message correctly. Background images and redirect URL's also can create problems.

"HTML code in email messages should be kept as clean and minimal as possible," says Christine Manikas, account director at Wilson Rusch. "One of the ways we've gotten around some of the problems with email clients is to 'dumb down' messages by eliminating all HTML code except for personalization and opt-out or privacy policy links, then use a simplified, single-graphic image to convey the offer.

"We've also learned that some corporate firewalls and ISP's set limits on the allowable file size of email messages," Manikas adds. "Our rule of thumb is to keep HTML emails under 30K. Limiting message size also makes downloading speedier for recipients who use modem dial-up accounts."

Make sure that your message will fit in email reader windows. Waldal cautions that the screen space in many email readers is smaller than that in Web browsers, so HTML emails formatted at the same width as a Web page often expand wider than the screen.

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Be user-friendly. Offer recipients means of getting around email readability problems, and alternatives to accessing message content.

Entertainment Weekly's Monitor email newsletter, for example, includes this nontechnical, user-friendly help message about email display: "Does this format look wrong? If so, change your email to the text version...". In addition, this newsletter's URL provides links to a pre-populated form where the user can complete the format change with just two mouse clicks.

Southern Living's SLNEWS e-newsletter employs another smart technique: "Having trouble using this news-letter? Try our version on the Web site...".

"We added this message after our customer service group told us that they had heard from some of our readers about problems such as links that didn't work, and fonts being too small," says SL online manager Robin Spooner. "We discovered several reasons for the problems. One is that some people are using old versions of software. The Web-page version of the email newsletter provides recipients with an easy alternative to struggling with email glitches."

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Heed customer feedback. As SL's experience demonstrates, it's important to keep a communication loop open between customer service and your marketing and production teams. Frequently reported complaints, for example, should be considered red alerts about bugs that need to be addressed immediately.