All good online marketers know that email is an excellent source of potential revenue. Most of those also know there’s a fine balance between being informative and being a spammer; users are all too happy to click that unsubscribe link, the worst thing possible for an email based marketing campaign. So, apart from sending uninteresting or just too many emails, what other reasons would somebody who had signed-up to your marketing gleefully unsubscribe?
One of the answers may well be with how your emails are constructed. Making marketing email is often much trickier than building a webpage; there are so many mail clients out there that you really are against it to make your email look similar across the board. If you know what you’re doing this can be achieved relatively well, however; it would seem that a large quantity of companies simply don’t know what they’re doing, or at least, their developers don’t.
Let’s take our first example: Adobe. Adobe is a multi-billion dollar company that distributes popular media software such as Photoshop, and even webpage creation software called Dreamweaver. Would you therefore conclude that its array of competent professionals were experts at meticulously crafting emails that looked perfect everywhere? If you would, you’d be wrong. Take a look at these images:
Instantly we can see a problem. With images disabled the email is just a random collection of links, some of which are just ‘click here’ or ‘learn more’ (which is also a large accessibility issue – the last thing you want to hear as a disabled user when you ask your screen reader to read out the list of links is: ‘click here’, ‘click here’, ‘click here’, etc). With images enabled the email doesn’t get much better, it’s still completely unreadable. This email was rendered in Outlook 2003, still a popular email client for businesses across the world. A definite candidate for unsubscribing, if you can find the link.
Adobe isn’t alone in being a large client who doesn’t test their email properly, here we also have problems from TomTom and Nintendo in Outlook 2007:
Clearly there needs to be more quality control at large corporations when it comes to their online marketing.
There’s another way to confuse your user-base: using the text version of the email for the wrong thing. Traditionally when you send an HTML email you also send a text version so that people who either have HTML disabled on their email client or users whose client simply doesn’t support HTML see the same content but without the images. Unfortunately some email creators are all to happy to ignore text-only email viewers and direct people straight to an HTML page on the web to view their newsletter instead. Now, you may be thinking that that would be an acceptable solution, but; you’d be wrong.
Take a look at our next example add tell me what you see?
Now the problem is all too evident: some email clients such as Mail on iPhone and iPad, and the desktop alert in Outlook will use the textual version of the email to give a handy preview. Obviously as we can see from this example, it fails horribly when you use it the wrong way.
There is something worse though; sending out the wrong email. And not just the wrong email, but the text only version of the email to people who actually have HTML clients. And you’ve used your text-only version incorrectly, to tell people that they need an HTML compatible mail client to view the email. And then supply a link, a single link. Which is in fact, an unsubscribe link. This is without a doubt, the ultimate fail:
How many clients did they lose that day?
One of the things the new iPhone 3GS has is an internal geographic compass. This is achieved with a device known as a magnetometer – something which can give you a 3-dimensional X, Y, Z co-ordinate to the magnetic north pole. The great (and sometimes frustrating thing) about these devices is, that they’re influenced by nearby metallic object, albeit, not by much. Still, this ‘negative’ effect is one we wanted to exploit, and turn into the first visual metal detector app for the new iPhone.
During tests I noticed that metals which tend to be more influenced by magnets were also the items most easily detected – Iron was found easily, but Aluminium barely registered. One of the other things I discovered was the influence of magnets on the 3GS – the stronger the magnetic flux, the higher the influence on the 3D geometrics. After this discovery, and our current lack of icon for the project I had an epiphany and said “Flux. This thing measures Magnetic flux too. How about a flux capacitor?”. Anyone who loves Back to the Future will know what that is! This remains my most significant contribution to the project.
After we’d finished producing the app and start of the site, we went to record the video in my dining room, with my Panasonic Lumix (The resolution on that thing isn’t too bad for a video). The final cut of this video features me swearing (sorry about that) and the sound of the doorbell, as a nice man delivers our Indian curry. Mmm.