Takeaways from the ‘Designing for the New Email Landscape’ webinar

Yesterday WhatCounts hosted a webinar on “Designing for the New Email Landscape,” which addressed designing and coding email in an environment of disparate email readers, increased image blocking and greater use of preview panes. (View the archived webinar.) Here are just a few of the great insights and learnings from the event:

The Environment
>>Michelle Eichner, the COO and VP of client development at Pivotal Veracity, provided the following information about the usage of image blocking and preview panes:





Design Advice
>>Lisa Harmon, the creative director of Smith-Harmon, advised email marketers to use (1) HTML text instead of graphical text so it will display when images are blocked, (2) “view email in web browser” links at the top of emails, and (3) “add to address book” links so subscribers will whitelist your address.
>>Eichner said that in the current environment, the “from” line and subject line are becoming more important.
>>Harmon also recommended using an “in this issue” section for longer newsletters and placing it high enough so that it appears in preview panes. You can see an example of that in Apple’s newsletter in this Jan. 19 AM Inbox. I’ve also seen retailers use this approach in smaller newsletters. You can see an example of this in AllPosters.com’s newsletter in this June 5 AM Inbox.

Coding Advice
>>Aaron Smith, director of technology at Smith-Harmon, advised folks to keep it simple and “code like it’s 1998.” He said to use standard fonts like Ariel, Verdana and Times Roman, and to avoid using WYSIWYG editors as they are optimized for the web, not for emails.
>>Smith said that email readers are constantly changing what codes they support, so you need to check your emails against all the email platforms on a regular basis. Eichner added that if you’re reusing email templates, you should test them every month to make sure the emails are still rendering correctly across email platforms.