Posts Tagged ‘Gmail’

Goaltending on what should be an Email Slam Dunk

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Return on Subscriber HQ’s are in Portland Oregon, which is home to the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers.  The Blazers are a team on the rise, and the community is buzzing over the prospect of this team leaving the “junk folder” and returning to the “inbox” (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Naturally, email marketing is an important part of the mix for building buzz and driving revenue for the upcoming season. The last thing you want to take away from this buzz is email rendering issues (how your email appears across multiple email clients) and a confusing conversion process.

This particular email, which highlights single game suite options, appears fine above the fold in Gmail.  But once you get into the options, the bullet points strike right through the content. Unfortunately, the calls-to-action are right below this.

Did this result in a complete failure for the Blazers?  Probably not. But it had to have a negative impact on conversion. Similar to looking at your watch in a movie, you are not fully engaged anymore.

Instead of breaking down why this email rendered incorrectly in Gmail, I wanted to talk about 5 simple tweaks to this email campaign that would increase click through and conversion.
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Wall Street Journal gets Gmail’d

Friday, February 8th, 2008

wsj-gmail-vs-web-tb.jpg

Supersize this Image
Here is a good visual example of what getting Gmail’d is all about. On the left is the WSJ email in Gmail, on the right the Webpage version of how they want it to look.

After reviewing the code, we noticed that the bgcolor code is missing the “#” (bgcolor=”336699″ should be bgcolor=”#336699″) in the banner, headline and content boxes where there are issues.

Some email clients/browsers will show the bgcolor without the “#” in the code, Gmail won’t.

Here at eROI, we use the Rendering tools provided by Return Path, to catch these things, a real lifesaver.

For more info on coding email for Gmail, check out the Gmail page at the Email Standars Project. Hopefully Google is listening.

San Diego here we come!