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Pushing the Email Marketing Envelope |
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If there is one thing that you can count on in the ecommerce industry, its that things are always changing. New features, functionalities, protocols and more are released every single day. It's getting pretty hard to keep up with the latest....unless you're talking email marketing. This is a subsidiary of the industry that is well behind the rest when it comes to innovation. When is change coming?
Working in the ecommerce industry, I've become accustomed to technology changing and evolving practically overnight. There is always a new skill set to learn and new functionality to explore. I've actually grown to love this ever changing environment. It requires constant effort to stay abreast of the latest, but its rewarding when you can achieve it. Needless to say I loved the face paced environment of internet design and development.
Then I was given the chance to head up the email marketing efforts of the company I work for. I was more than up for the task. A whole new set of challenges and skills to learn. I thought this would be fun. What follows are my thoughts on the email marketing industry in general, and how I see it evolving.
How much different can designing for email marketing be than designing for the web? VERY different. Designing for the web is pretty straight forward, you're working to make sure the design performs as expected in a few different browsers. Designing for email marketing requires you to design for a wide range on online and offline email clients that may or may not be rendered from within a browser.
There are a couple of rules to learn really fast. First off. No embedded CSS files. If you want to use CSS then you're gonna need to break out the old inline css skills. The reason? Most online email clients will strip the header information from the content of the email, this means anything in the <head> of the document isn't going to make it through. So it goes without saying that any javascript files are out as well. So emebbed css and javascript are out, while were at it lets going to ahead and ellimnate any type of flash files....not going to work either.
So we've stated that embedded CSS isn't going to work properly, but most types of CSS layouts are also out the window. This means your stuck back in the days of HTML table layouts only. (while some clients have greater support for css than others, its best to play it safe and just stay away from css layouts) The bottom line? It you prefer to work in a standards strict enviroment....your out of luck. We're going back to 1999 with this stuff! I'm not going to go into detail about how to design for email marketing. There are plenty of resources online that cover this really well. I'll just say, if you're new to designing for email marketing then your in for a challenge.
The real reason that I'm writing this artilcle is this....can we make a change? Can we evolve the email marketing industry to a point were customers can expect similar expereinces in email that they get from the web? Several people have tried to make a change in the way design and UI are handeled for email marketing, but it remains to be see if it will make an impact on the industry. It isn't going to happen on its own. The major email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL) aren't going to go out of their way to make sure email marketing content has the same standards as the web. They want people clicking on their ads, not the promotions the users recieves. I'm not saying email providers are against email marketing, I'm just suggesting that to them it isn't a big enough deal to put the work into.
Even so, we're starting to see some improved support for CSS in email clients. A lot of people are working to see more and more progresss. Maybe soon we'll be able to fully interact with customers in email marketing.
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