Knowing how your emails render is critical to your ROI
 If you don’t know what your emails look like once they get to your recipients’ inboxes, you lose control over your carefully planned message and design. Meaning your message and design are likely not going to have the impact you had hoped for.
Just because an email looks perfect in your version of Outlook doesn’t guarantee it looks good in other versions of Outlook, in Hotmail, Yahoo or on an iPhone. That critical call to action might be below the fold. Your compelling headline could end up catawampus. Studies from MarketingSherpa are constantly pointing out the importance of placing elements within an email for maximum effect. Once you’ve figured out the best layout for your campaign, don’t let the differences in email clients negatively affect your results.
Just how many email clients are we talking about? A September report generated using Fingerprint, an analysis tool, shows the breakdown between the 10 most popular email clients. For almost 3 million users, the breakdown for the top three email clients looks like this:
B2B
- 36% of recipients opened their email in Outlook, with the vast majority using Outlook 2003 and earlier
- 33% used Hotmail
- 14% used Yahoo! Mail
B2C
- 29% of recipients opened their email in Yahoo! Mail
- 27% used Outlook, with a nearly even split between Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 and earlier
- 25% used Hotmail
Although your own results may differ, these numbers should give you a sense of what your breakdown might look like (or you can have Fingerprint do an analysis for you and know for sure). All this should get you thinking about rendering. Knowing how your emails render is a crucial part of effective email marketing. How do you find out what your emails look like in different email clients? A tool like eDesign Optimizer from Pivotal Veracity lets you quickly and easily see how your emails will render in all the major B2B and B2C desktop and web-based email clients. Run your email through the test, then make adjustments to ensure your email looks the way you want, no matter which email client your recipient uses. If you would like to try it out, please contact us.
And don’t forget about image blocking! Most email recipients won’t see your images because they are blocked by default by programs like Outlook and Hotmail, so your email must be designed to be effective with or without the images. For tips on designing emails with image blocking in mind, view our whitepaper, You've made it to the inbox. Now what? Follow this link
See the full Fingerprint report.
Rendering tip
Your email should not be any wider that 600 pixels. It may or may not work correctly in Outlook, but it is definitely prone to failure in other email clients. Your email can be thinner than 600 pixels, but not wider. Even at 650 or 700 pixels, you can get wrapping issues or make users scroll horizontally…which is never good for the user experience!
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