False assumptions cause email design and list management problems

Rarely does a day pass without some new piece of information cracking my veneer of email self-assurance...sigh!

A functional unsubscribe mechanism is a marketing and legal requirement for anyone sending commercial emails. Fortunately, we're all secure in the knowledge that we have a nice web form that lets people get off our lists no problem.

Or does it?

Dylan Boyd and Joshua Baer each point out real examples of unsubscribe pages that don't work if you use particular web browsers.

Lesson 1: when you check if your unsubscribe function works, test it in all the different web browsers (and versions of these web browsers) you can lay your hands on. (Which means Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.)

You've probably also checked how your basic email design template displays in various email clients and webmail interfaces. Using one of the design testing services out there.

Lesson 2: Don't assume what looked good last week looks good this week.

The Email Standards Project, for example, just spotted changes in the way Yahoo! Mail handles paragraph spacing, eerily reminiscent of a similar issue with Windows Live Hotmail.

Since these design testing tools cost as little as $5 per test, it's now realistic to pre-test the rendering success of every email before you send it out. But...

Lesson 3: Don't assume that your email will always render correctly just because it looks good in the design tool screenshots.

Eh?

It's the web browser problem again. At the big webmail sites, there are two layers of rendering going on.

The first is the way that the webmail interface displays and handles HTML email (which is what the design tools do a great job of testing).

The second is how the different web browsers display the HTML email. So it's perhaps worth setting up test accounts at the very large webmail services and checking your designs in various web browsers now and then. Just to be safe...

Tags: email design, unsubscribes, web browsers

Permalink | May 21, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
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