Email Design

When is it Right to Resend an Email?

If you’ve been doing email marketing for any length of time, you will — at some point — have sent out an email with a howler of a mistake in it. Even the most diligent proof reading will occasionally miss something which is later painfully obvious. This scenario raises a few questions about doing a resend of your campaign, for example:

• What are the criteria for judging when you should do a resend?
• When should you just take it on the chin and chalk it up to experience?
• If you decide to do a resend, what exactly should you send out?

First let me say that, in nearly six of doing email marketing, for hundreds of companies, I have never resent an email. Not once, not ever. This isn’t to say I am some kind of email marketing superhero who has never made a typo (I’m not and I have); rather it says that I think the metrics for judging when a resend is appropriate nearly always skew in favour of not hitting your subscribers with two emails.

Reasons not to do a resend

• Typos, spelling mistakes, grammar
• HTML/rendering problems causing your design to break in certain email clients (the “view in browser” link convention serves your purpose here)
• Broken images
• Some content you forgot to add
• You forgot to set up tracking, analytics, or anything else which is irrelevent to your recipients

Reasons to do a resend

• A vital hyperlink is broken (and it absolutely, postively, cannot be fixed by a redirect page being put on your website to handle click throughs)
• Pricing, terms, or conditions, are wrongly advertised and your company could face legal consequences for providing false, inaccurate, or misleading information

Implications of a resend

In our industry, we know better than most that individuals’ inboxes are flooded. It is a fact that you will annoy people if you do hit them with a double send (even if you think your reasons are truly justified). But what does this anoyance mean and how does it manifest?

Your list’s health with take a hit, as will your sender reputation. It is a given that you will get some unsubscribes, but it may be even worse than that. Hitting people with two emails in succession will undoubtably motivate some individuals to “go vigilante”; in other words, they will want to punish your company for annoying them, and the “spam” button is their de facto weapon of choice.

There are implcations beyond your marketing department too, in particular for sales. If you have successfully annoyed your customers and prospects with your emailing antics, how likely are they to buy from you? It is all too easy for a marketing department’s mistakes to develop into a full-scale farce, affecting other areas of a business. A marketing department, no matter how talented, that works in disconnect from sales, serves a company no purpose. Take a step back, stop trying to dodge flak, and put your business head on.

How to handle a resend

The absolute worst case scenario here — and I’ve seen it too many times — is to simply fix the mistake and resend with no explanation for your recipients. We know, according to Jupiter Research, that despite receiving more email than ever, people are spending less time reading it. Therefore, there’s a good chance that even if your contacts did open your message, they may not have noticed mistakes that now seem glaringly obvious to you. To them, it just looks like your email marketing system is on the blink and that you cannot be trusted with their email address any longer.

Some examples of resends

Last November, I received an email from lastminute.com which contained a link to a competition (see left). Before I even opened the message another one had popped into my inbox, with the subject line “oops… let’s try that again”.

The message itself was more or less unchanged, but the big pink title had been swapped to “oops, our superpowers are on the blink”.

Brilliant, I thought; they’ve made a mistake and have handled it in a funny and friendly way which is exactly what I’d expect from lastminute.com.

Being the diligent archiver of email campaigns that are interesting, bad, brilliant, or bizarre, I duly saved both messages to refer to later.

Having dug them out this morning — thinking that I had a brilliant case study for this article – I am afraid to say that I am now less impressed with them. Whilst lastminute.com’s handling of the resend was excellent, I have since discovered that their motives were, frankly, terrible.

Initially I had thought that the resend was because the link for their competition was irreparably broken and, seeing that it was the entire purpose of their message, I thought the resend was justified. On closer inspection however, the only thing wrong with the link is that they initially forgot to put the tracking code in!  That, to be brutally honest, stinks.

Another example I saved was from Tesco (see right). Whilst Tesco apparently lack the sassy wit of lastminute.com, their sober resend strategy is probably one that most companies would be well advised to consider.

I had received an email inviting me to my local Tesco’s Wine Fair, which included 1,000 Club Card points when I booked tickets. It seems someone got a bit over zealous with their zeros, and the offer was in fact ten times less generous than they were saying.

Now that is an “oops” (unlike forgetting to setup your link tracking).

The rather dull, but suitably apologetic, email I received lacked graphics, jokes, or anything else of note. It was to the point and didn’t involve a total resend of their initial message. It probably didn’t impress anyone, but it cleared up a potentially sticky situation for Tesco. A success, then.

However you decide to handle your resend strategy — be it sober or sassy — I would urge you to first think very carefully about whether the resend is justified, what the benefits really are, and whether the risk to your list’s health and your company’s reputation is actually worth it.

Yahoo Mail Paragraph Spacing to be Fixed

Good news for email marketers who have been fighting Yahoo Mail and its eating of paragraph spacing. Ryan Knight, Community Manager for Yahoo! Mail, said the following on the Yahoo Mail Blog:

“Just a quick update for those of  you concerned about the spacing in HTML emails.  Our engineers have sleuthed out the problem, and a fix will be rolling out in the coming weeks. “

You can read the full post here.

In the mean time, if you’re still experiencing a problem, hop on down to our tutorial which gives a work around for this.

Unsubscribe Day

According to Jupiter Research, the average person receives 274 emails per week; and that’s just to their personal email account. They receive a further 304 emails per week to their work account. As I heard these figures being quoted earlier this week at London’s Inbox/Oubox Show, I was thinking yes that’s probably true and, at the same time, yes I should really do something about my own inboxes.

This morning, then, email lists the world over took a serious hit as I attempted to unsubscribe from all the newsletters I do not regularly read. As an email marketer myself, I can only apologise to those companies and organisations. It’s nothing personal, I just don’t have the time anymore.

Research seems to confirm this trend, too: although people get more email than ever, they are spending less and less time reading it. Social networking sites are a popular thing to blame here, but for me it was sheer attrition. If you have had the same email address for a few years, you’ve probably found your way onto countless mailing lists; all legitimate, all opted in, but now of varying degrees of irrelevance. At some point — say when you wake up to 100+ of these emails — you know that Unsubscribe Day has arrived. It’s time to devote a good hour or so opting out of everything that is no longer an essential read.

It was interesting — having written this article on unsubscribe links — to see how different companies handled the unsubscribe process. It’s fair then — in my capacity as a consumer and position as an email marketing professional — to name and shame a few organisations, and offer up praise and advice where appropriate too.

The Good

The First Post

The unsubscribe link was admittedly small, but it was not buried amongst paragraphs of blurb. It was black on white, outside of the main body of the message, and clear enough. Clicking through I was then presented with options — in the form of large colourful buttons — to opt out of specific mailings or opt out completely.

I also noted a help email address on the page too. Nearly top marks, then. I almost felt sad to leave them, particularly as they had FINALLY figured out how to stop their emails looking terrible in Gmail.

In terms of improvements, I would say it might be useful for their unsubscribe form to capture details about why recipients are opting out. A few basic, but not required, radio-buttons would provide them with invaluable feedback on why people leave them.

The Bad

Reuters

Another tiny unsubscribe link at the foot of the email, but it was clear enough despite the hyperlink being the “click here” text rather than the noun. I suspect that’s just sloppiness rather than mischief.

Upon clicking the link, things took a serious turn for the worse. I was taken to a login form asking for my email address (no problem) and password (a big problem; I signed up years ago). At this point, I was tempted to go back to my inbox and hit the spam button; Reuters were now on my list of annoying organisations. However, in the interests of science, I continued the unsubscribe process, playing along with their unnecessary game despite it being my precious time they were wasting.

After completing the forgotten password form, an email from Reuters EMEA e-commerce (e-commerce?) popped into my inbox within a minute and I clicked its link to… another form. This form allowed me to reset my password, which I duly did. Only to be presented with enormous green text saying: “Your changes have been saved successfully.” Lovely. Except, what now? Where was my unsubscribe form? Where was anything, in fact? I was seemingly stranded on a webpage that had nothing to do with the process I was trying to complete.

If you look long and hard at the screenshot you will see — in the smallest text, mixed in amongst links like “advertise with us” — a Newsletters link. Clicking the link I was presented with a glorious unsubscribe form, with screenshots and descriptive text about all of Reuters’ newsletters. Beautiful; but far, far too late.

The Ugly

Dell UK Small Business

A tiny unsubscribe link, buried amongst paragraphs of legal blurb. Worse, the link was — in Google Business Apps at least — coloured in the default system blue on the dark grey background of their email, thus making it nearly unreadable.

Clicking through, I was presented with a form where I needed to type my email address. Fair enough, but underneath it were two links: Unsubscribe from all Dell E-mail Marketing and Edit my Subscription or Unsubscribe. I took the former, only to be taken to another form. Why not just unsubscribe me at this point?

This time the form asked me if I wanted to subscribe or unsubscribe (didn’t I literally just tell them that?) and what format I’d like my emails in (plain text or HTML)! Quite bizarre, and one wonders here what the edit subscription link did.

Undeterred, I completed this second form and then got an error saying: “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with the page you are trying to get to.Please try again later.” Being a bit savvy about how email marketing works, I thought I’d fire an email back to the sending address with a few keywords: unsubscribe, remove, etc. Seconds later, a confirmation email popper into my inbox. Oh dear.

* * * Update 26/06/2008: Despite my unsubscribe seemingly being successful from Dell’s UK Small Business Newsletters, today another one popped into my inbox. How can such a big company get something so simple completely wrong? I’ll be hitting the spam button, then. ***

Stop Hiding Unsubscribe Links!

A common tactic amongst email marketers is to try to bury their email’s unsubscribe link. I hope to demonstrate how this kind of thinking is now considered not merely naïve, but in fact dangerous for an entire email list and a company’s broader reputation. In an age where 26% of recipients do not trust unsubscribe links and would rather hit the delete or spam button (Nate Elliott, Jupiter Research), it’s time for an agonising reappraisal.

We’ve all seen it, and a fair few of us have done it. The unsubscribe link is there, of course; legal compliance demands it, and we’re nothing if not law abiding persons. However, the link is tiny, in a barely visible shade of grey, and hidden amongst all those sentences of legal blurb people rarely read (you are meeting your company’s legal requirements on email legal footers, right?)

The hope — although few would be honest enough to admit it — is that by hiding the link you might convince someone who wants to unsubscribe to change their mind. Maybe if they can’t find the unsubscribe link they will give up, shrug their shoulders, and silently acquiesce to the ongoing attack on their inbox?

There are other techniques too.

Instead of offering a simple unsubscribe link, recipients of a marketing email are sometimes required to log into a website account to change their email preferences. This, combined with the above link-obscuring techniques, is the worst possible pairing of tactics. The motivation is obvious and understandable; marketers want desperately to preserve their list numbers. The problem comes when companies are so fixated on it that they are blind to the broader ramifications for their business.

Let’s take a worst case, but not unheard of, scenario. In fact, I’m sure you’ve all seen something like it.

A person receives a regular marketing email from a company and, after a few months, they decide that it is no longer relevent; they’re going to unsubscribe right now. They find the link in the message that will allow them to unsubscribe, but they then discover they need to log into a website before they can do anything about it.

The company has used good time and money building this website too. Customers have an “account” or a “control panel”; none of this basic unsubscribe link stuff around here. This system is like fly-paper. If you can escape, it will be painful.

Once a recipient logs into the website, they must then locate the page where they can set their email preferences. Assuming they find this page, they must then be sure to have their brain switched on properly; this company’s marketers are a wily bunch and like to mix and match their checkboxes. On this mailing preferences form, a checkbox means OPT IN for some things but OPT OUT for something else. In the context of the same form, true means false… except where it means true. Very clever! The form is like a mini intelligence test; good fun, unless you’re grumpy and in a hurry… which unsubscribing recipients will be by now, natch.

It gets worse, too.

All this account management malarkey assumes that the recipient remembered their password to log into the website in the first place. I think you see where I’m going. If they didn’t remember their login details, providing a forgotten password system is, in this context, too little and too late. Think a red rag to a bull. The recipient has likely already gone back to their inbox and flagged the offending email as spam.

Now the recipient who was grumpy and in a hurry has a blood vendetta against the company that sent the message. They do not merely want to get off of the marketing list, they want to punish the company sending the emails and watch them burn in the fiery pits of hell.

This annoyed recipient is not just bad news for the marketing manager’s email campaigns; it’s really bad news for the company as a whole. Think about your company’s image here; who wants to do business with a company that seems so, well, shady and difficult? If the marketing department is using such sneaky tactics, what does that say about the rest of the business?

The Big Picture

The impact of these disgruntled subscribers hitting the spam button every time the offending email pops into their inbox is serious. As a company you will see a decreased sender score and thus reduced deliverability to all of your recipients — including the recipients who love your email. Why? Because ISPs, spam filter services, and webmail providers attempt to build sender profiles which are essential in their spam profiling algorithms. These sender profiles are based on, amongst other factors, how users interact with a sender’s emails. If enough people are flagging a sender’s emails as spam, then the sender’s reputation is tarnished and the deliverability of future emails is decreased.

This kind of sender profiling is not limited to people hitting the spam button either. In Hotmail, if you regularly delete email from a sender without reading it, the system learns that you don’t like this sender and starts flagging the message as spam automatically. If enough people start deleting a sender’s messages without reading them, then the overall sender rating is again decreased, and deliverability to the total list is reduced.

It is worth saying here that relying on the benevolence of mass recipient white-listing of your sending address to combat a poor sender reputation is rather optimistic.

The Solution

Here’s my checklist for quality list management:

• Ensure your unsubscribe link is prominent. Convention sees this link somewhere at the bottom of an email (which is fine if, it’s clear), but I suggest this is taken further. An “About This Email” box in a sidebar, offering an unsubscribe link, as well as details about your send frequency, an email format preferences link, your sending address, contact details, and the typical topics of the email (particularly useful if you operate several email streams), all increase the integrity and transparency of your email marketing.
• Always provide a one-click, unsubscribe link. “Manage preference” links are fine, but should be as well as not instead of the unsubscribe link.
• Any email marketer who knows their stuff will tell you, the total subscriber number is secondary to the number of active subscribers. Don’t risk your active subscribers, by punishing those who don’t want to hear from you with emails they don’t want.
• Do not mix and match checkboxes in the context of a single form; make sure checked always means the same thing with regards to a recipient’s preferences.
• Keep a close eye on your sender score — companies like Return Path can help here. If people are flagging your email as spam, then top of my list is a thorough investigation into how smooth your unsubscribe process is.

In summary, I would like to say that if you treat contacts who don’t want to hear from you badly (by complicating the unsubscribe process), you will damage the deliverability of your messages to all recipients and tarnish your company’s reputation.

Who’s up for moving their unsubscribe link to the top of their email, then?

Email Footer Legal Requirements

Often neglected, or a grudging afterthought, companies should be aware of their legal obligations with regards to the the footers they put on their commercial emails.

The Mandatory Stuff

If your business is a Limited Company or a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP), the UK Companies Act 1985 requires all your emails to include the following details, which must be in legible characters:

• Company registration number
• Your place of registration (e.g. Scotland or England & Wales)
• Your registered office address

These duties were clarified on 1 January 2007, as a result of an amendment that was made to the Companies Act to comply with a European Directive. Be aware that failure to comply with these requirements puts your company at risk of a fine. These details are not required of Sole Traders or Standard Partnerships.

If you’re a US company sending commercial email, the CAN-SPAM Act requires that you include the “valid physical postal address” of your business in your email footers.

The Optional Stuff - Confidentiality Notices and Disclaimers

Organisations sometimes add a confidentiality notice to every outgoing email. If the disclosure of the content of an email becomes the subject of a dispute, it can be argued before a court that the recipient should have known to not disclose the information.

However, there is no legal authority for this, and there is always a risk that a court might reject the notice as ineffective, particularly where the notice is added automatically to every outgoing email. Where such notices are used they have a better prospect of standing up in court if they appear above the body of a message.

Disclaimers are often added to all outgoing emails but they should be written with care. What you attempt to disclaim will depend on the nature of your business, and if your disclaimer is too wide it will fall down in court.

Email monitoring

If your organisation monitors some email traffic data, your outgoing emails should say: “[Organisation Name] may monitor email traffic data”.

If your organisation also monitors the content of email, you should say: “[Organisation name] may monitor email traffic data and also the content of email for the purposes of [give reason e.g. security and staff training]“.

What are the laws governing email?

The monitoring of business email is primarily governed by the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) Regulations 2000 but it is also affected by other laws including EU rules and, in the UK, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. In the US, it is governed by the Federal Trade Commission and the CAN-SPAM Act.

Marketers in the UK should also make sure they have read understood the following documents provided by the Information Commissioner’s Office:

• Electronic Communications Guidance: Part 1 (PDF)
• Electronic Communications Guidance: Part 2 (PDF)

Yahoo Mail Paragraph Spacing Being Eaten

Some weeks back we posted an article on our wiki which highlighted how Yahoo Mail had started to eat paragraph spacing in HTML emails. We also posted a fix for this (details in this post). We hoped that this was a mistake by Yahoo and, according to the Yahoo Mail Blog, it looks like it is.

The post on the Yahoo Mail Blog says they’ve had a “handful” of reports on the issue — mostly from email marketers, I’d guess — and that they are investigating. We’ve sent them over our evidence of the paragraph eating too; so fingers crossed they can get to the bottom of it.

We will keep you posted on any developments.

In the mean time, our suggestion to email marketers is to temporarily replace your HTML paragraphs with a double <br />. In HTML terms, this means:

<p>Lorem ipsum pro elitr delenit nostrum ne.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum pro elitr delenit nostrum ne.</p>

Would become:

Lorem ipsum pro elitr delenit nostrum ne.
<br /><br />
Lorem ipsum pro elitr delenit nostrum ne.

Which is a simple enough fix and we’ve tested it across the following:

 
If you’re using a WYSIWYG editor, backspace your lower paragraph onto the same line as the preceding one, and then do hit Shift + Enter twice. It’s a pain for sure, but it looks hopeful that the Yahoo Mail team will get this fixed.

As for why this has happened, at the time we speculated that this may have something to do with a particular aspect of YUI (the Yahoo User Interface library) being applied, wrongly, to Yahoo Mail’s email rendering panel.

YUI is an excellent framework of utilities and controls that allow web developers to add rich interactivity to their websites. A core component in the library is YUI Reset CSS, which effectively zeros all HTML document elements (including the margin-top and margin-bottom on your paragraphs). The idea is that you then semantically reset all of the attributes yourself to what you want them to be, thus forcing web browsers to render your web pages exactly as you imagined: what looks right in Internet Explorer, should also look right in Firefox, Opera, and Safari, because you’ve removed the browser’s default settings.

It’s a brilliant idea, but definitely not right for a user’s inbox. We will be keeping a close eye on this and will update our readers as soon as Yahoo roll out a fix.

Disappearing Table Padding in Gmail and Yahoo

Changes to Google’s webmail clients (both Gmail and Google Business Apps) and Yahoo Mail (when used in Classic mode) see the HTML table attribute no longer being respected.

Depending on how you’ve built your email, and it’s quite likely you will be using HTML tables for layout, you may notice your emails looking rather ugly in Gmail and Yahoo webmail clients. See below for the before and after version of the same email:

Before the update:

After the update:

How to fix this?

Both Yahoo and Google’s webmail interfaces are suppressing the padding attribute inside the HTML <table> tag. Our suggested work around for this is to keep the existing padding attribute and add an in-line style on each <TD> (table cell) where you require padding.

Example:

<td style=”padding: 20px;”>Your content</td>

How does the fix affect other email clients?

See the below table for our test results across popular email clients:

Why have Google and Yahoo started ignoring table padding?

This strikes us a decision without any real benefit to Gmail or Yahoo’s end-users. In fact, if end-users have anything to say about this decision, it’s likely to be ”why do my favourite email newsletters look even worse than before?” If Gmail and Yahoo are arbitrarily starting to embrace web standards, this seems an odd place to start.

If you work for Yahoo Mail or Gmail, please drop us a line; we’d love to know more about the thinking behind this.

Multiple Versions of Gmail

Designing HTML emails for Gmail can be a challenge (e.g. no background images, no cell padding on tables, little respect for web standards, etc), but the situation may be even more complex than you think.

A few weeks ago I was investigating some layout issues with a client’s newsletter in Gmail. What became obvious — following several “it looks fine for me!” type discussions — was that, at any given time, your subscribers could be on multiple versions of Gmail.

The reason for this, it seems, is the sheer size of the Gmail infrastructure, the complexity of the recent upgrade (an entirely new code base), and the number of supported languages (currently 37).

On February 14th, Robby Stein (Associate Product Marketing Manager) made a post on the Gmail Blog, announcing the roll-out of the new version of Gmail targeting Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Over two months later, the post was updated with a note saying that they had not yet finished the roll-out.

Finally, on the 5th of May, another update was given announcing that the new version had been completely rolled out.

That’s a pretty huge update and for a while it had me, as an email designer, pulling my hair out. Most of the hassle I encountered was around the new version no longer supporting the cell padding attribute on tables. Not a big deal, but a pain when you have to come up with a quick solution to fix a lot of templates. I might still be pulling my hair out too, because as great as the new features are for end-users, it’s another step in the wrong direction for any kind of standards for email, more obstacles for email designers to navigate, and more limitations to our creative options.

Of course, compared to end-users, the opinions of email designers aren’t very important — but do these changes actually benefit end-users? I’m not sure. In fact, I suspect many user’s reactions were along the lines of “why does my favourites newsletter now look even more mangled than before?”

A final thing to note about this update was that Google Apps users got it on or around the 21st of March, which the Gmail team said was because they “like to listen and learn from users before launching updates to businesses, schools and organizations that use Google Apps”. Which sounds reasonable; let the great unwashed test your software before paying customers or organisations have it unleashed on them.

By the way, if you’re a Google Apps administrator, it’s worth noting that you can get new updates quicker by changing a setting in your domain settings.