Using Images in Email
We’ve written a bit here about how some of the Presidential campaigns this cycle have embraced stripped down emails that don’t include a lot of images or fancy formatting. In that previous post, the focus was on how this format can make emails seem more personal, and not on the technical reasons to avoid using a lot of images. Josh Levy’s post yesterday about John McCain’s email mistakes inspired me to look at the issue from a more technical perspective.
The most compelling reason to limit the use of images in HTML emails is that tons of people are never going to see them. Some people actively turn off images. Others don’t see them because their email programs turn them off by default (Campaign Monitor has a great chart showing a breakdown). Some people work at companies that block images in emails to save bandwidth/stop porn. And yet more people are accessing email on cell phones that can’t read images. I have yet to see a percentage I trust completely, but it is estimated that somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of email users block at least some images in HTML emails. That is a lot.
Speaking anecdotally, I’m a lot less likely to see images in email than I did a year ago. At work we upgraded recently to Outlook 2007 which has images blocked by default. I never changed the setting and now follow the process of opting in to see images based on whether I trust the sender. I use Gmail for my personal email and follow the same procedure. (You really should check out that chart breaking down default settings for major email clients.)
So what to do. Stop using images altogether? Use them sparingly? Although a bit old, the useful Campaign Monitor blog provides a great guide to email design. Here are their six tips on how to send emails that actually gets to the recipient in a readable format:
- Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
- Use alt text for all images for a better experience in Gmail and always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn’t throw your design out.
- Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
- Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).
- Test your design in a preview pane, full screen and with images turned on and off before you send it.
- Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.
Anyone that has sent bulk emails out knows that it is a really stressful thing. Even if you do your job perfectly (no typos, valid web links, good HTML, etc.), your email is going to be garbled for at least a small percentage of people who have weird settings or are using funky email clients (Hello Lotus Notes). And those small percentage of people will inevitably complain to your boss’ best friend from high school and you’ll hear about it.
Given the high probability for mistakes, email is really a format where you need to keep things simple. If you have to use images, design the email so that it will degrade gracefully if images are turned off. The emails we design that use images typically look like an online version of letter head, with a single header image. If you keep it simple, you’ll get yelled out less for supposed mistakes and your click through rates will increase since more people will be able to actually see the content of your message.
Note: I just saw this post from Michael Whitney at Tech President that looks at the use of email by Presidential candidates and expands on Campaign Monitor’s tips. Great minds. Give it a read, as it goes into things in a bit more depth than my post.
Lying with web traffic figures
<Cross post from our ImpactWatch blog>
Most people want to boil the success or failure of a website down to two easy-to-digest statistics. How many people came to my site? How many pages did those folks look at? Take those two numbers. Draw a line over time. If they go up, we’re doing good. If they go down, we’re not.
As the web has gotten bigger, these broad eyeball-based metrics have become less and less useful. Sure, eyeballs are still extremely relevant for websites that are selling online advertising. But for most websites, the total number of visitors really isn’t that important except in giving you very broad strokes. More important is whether your website is reaching its target audience.
Let me give you a couple of examples from our own blog, The Bivings Report.
(1) A while back this article of ours made it on to the homepage of the social news site, Digg. For those of you not familiar, this means we got thousands of visitors coming to our site all at once (this phenomenon is actually called the Slashdot Effect). To this day that is still the day we got the most visitors to our blog.
But to what end? As you’ll see, being on Digg didn’t lead to some great discussion in the comments on our site. In looking at usage patterns before and after being on Digg, we didn’t see a long term bump in users or RSS subscribers. Basically, being on Digg was (1) a nice ego boost for us and (2) a fun way to run an ad hoc stress test on our servers. Beyond that, it really didn’t accomplish much.
(2) Similarly, we wrote an off-point blog post a while back on HD-DVD vs Bluray. Based on our site stats, I’d a lot of people are researching which to buy as hundreds of people are visiting our blog each day after finding our article on Google. Like with Digg, this traffic is doing us very little good. We’re not a consumer electronics blog and the people coming from Google on that particular search aren’t being converted from visitors into readers.
If you boil our bottom line for this blog down to a line chart showing visitors over time, these two events make us look great. Our trend line is going up. Hurray. But in both these cases, the people we attracted aren’t really interested in what we write about on our blog and aren’t members of our target audience.
The overall traffic numbers don’t really tell us whether our blog has been truly effective or not. To know that, you’ve got to look a lot deeper than visitors and page views.
Why did the Fred Thompson Blog Work?
As most of you know, The Bivings Group was a part of the team that built Fred Thompson’s Presidential campaign website. Our main client contact on the project, Michael Turk, has a good post up rounding up the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the online program we all put together. It is worth a read.
In the piece, Turk points out that one of the most successful aspects of the program was the campaign blog, the Fred File. He writes:
As an example of the strength of Thompson’s online effort, look at the Thompson campaign blog and you’ll see something remarkable for GOP candidates – comments. And not just a few comments, but hundreds and even thousands of comments.
Rudy’s blog doesn’t allow comments. Romney’s gets a few per post. Ron Paul just recently launched a blog (despite the fact that blog software is largely free). He currently gets between a handful and a few dozen comments.
I don’t think this indicates a lack of supporter enthusiasm as much as it indicates that the campaigns have created a blog with nothing to say on sites that are so scrubbed of interesting content they’re almost sterile. Most of the posts are rehashed press releases, rehashed campaign e-mails, or occasionally a video so overscripted it becomes almost completely unwatchable.
I think Turk is right on here. With any successful blog, 90% of the battle is producing readable content and engaging with readers. Many, many campaigns want a blog in theory but don’t have the stomach to do the heavy lifting that will make it actually work. The Thompson campaign, lead by staffers Sean Hackbarth and Austin Walne, deserve the lion’s share of the credit for the success of the Fred File. But I also think there were some small, more technical decisions that were made that helped give the blog a greater chance to succeed. Continue reading “Why did the Fred Thompson Blog Work?” »
Using SEO to Select a CMS
My favorite SEO blogger, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz in Seattle, has an excellent post titled “Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective).” It is about various aspects of SEO to consider when choosing a content management system (CMS) to build a site.
Instead of doing a comparison and contrast between different systems like Drupal and WordPress; Rand provides 12 issues to consider. These issues revolve around the ability of a site owner to control various design elements that search engines consider when assessing a site. These issues range from page title tags to CSS.
It is worth reading. Other than SEO, what are important issues you consider when selecting a CMS?
Tip: Updating Copyright Information on your Website
Just about every professionally done website you visit includes a copyright date at the bottom of the page. Every January you see websites that forget to update the year in their copyright statement. Many actually fall years behind before catching it and updating the dates. Above is an example of this phenomenon from the website of the Democratic National Committee.
We’ve made this mistake ourselves plenty of times. It is just something that is really easy to forget to do. That is why the best solution is to automate in the process instead of manually updating it every January. Here are two simple ways to accomplish this that our design/production department uses:
(1) If you are working in PHP (like sites in WordPress and Drupal), use the simple PHP code below to render the copyright date in your footer. The date will automatically change at 12:01 am on January 1 every year.
<?php echo date(‘Y’); ?>
(2) If your site is in plain HTML or another language, you can use the following JavaScript to generate the date.
Put this code in the site header:
var date=time.getDate();
var year=time.getYear();
if (year < 2000)
year = year + 1900;
Then place this code where you want to generate the date:
<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>document.write(year);</script>
Two easy ways to save yourself some time/headaches.