The most important aspect of any email campaign is making sure the information can be displayed correctly once it arrives in an inbox. A message that is improperly formatted and difficult to read can lead to customer dissatisfaction, a negative reputation and an increased unsubscribe rate – even if someone had already opted to receive communications.
The marketing site eMarketer writes that ensuring readability is important for a number of reasons. Citing research conducted by Gigaom, 86 percent of digital marketers in the U.S. used email tactics. Additionally, a study conducted by Extole found that email marketing was an effective tool when used in retention efforts, raising awareness and customer acquisitions and conversions. Because of the many benefits, marketers participating in these studies stated that they planned to spend more money marketing on these channels while also investing heavily to ensure that messages were properly optimized for mobile devices.
Now that 54 percent of all email opens occur on mobile, ensuring that emails display correctly on all devices is critical to the success of any email campaign. More than 70 percent of people will simply delete an email that doesn’t look good on mobile, so conducting HTML testing before emails are sent to subscribers ensures that email efforts have the intended effect on participants.
Litmus, a PostUp partner, offers a number of helpful suggestions to ensure that testing of this kind goes smoothly. It can be a difficult proposition if the finer points of coding aren’t understood. However, these tips can help make the process easier and ensure that messages are properly formatted across all platforms before being sent to subscribers:
- Be as detailed as possible: Depending on the type of browser used for testing HTML configuration, there may be different rules with respect to the way messages are displayed. To combat this, it is very important to be specific when it comes to values used during coding. Also, be precise in the way you would like text displayed as it relates to font sizes, colors and even alignment.
- Check calculations carefully: It doesn’t take much to throw the layout of an email off if incorrect values appear during coding. Litmus suggests conducting calculations to ensure that table cells are correct. Also, be careful when dealing with margins because these are calculated differently depending on the email client being used.
Improve open rates with HTML testing
To convince consumers to open emails that advertise products or services, marketers should always conduct HTML tests to ensure messages are properly displayed, regardless of the reader’s device. Failure to do so can lead to ineffective campaigns that don’t deliver upon the intended results.
These are just a few suggestions that should help improve email design. For more ways to boost your email design knowledge, check out our free eBook of HTML hacks. Couple these tips with engaging content, and you should be on your way to delivering the most effective email marketing campaigns possible.