Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

I have been a loyal Gmail user for along time. Lately though I have been frustrated with Gmail, mainly due to the images in my HTML emails not displaying correctly. Well they have announced some changes that shed some light on the image issue.

From the Gmail Blog:

Now displaying images in messages from your contacts
Monday, July 20, 2009 5:58 PM
Posted by David de Kloet, Software Engineer

When an email references external images, Gmail usually doesn’t display them automatically. Instead we show placeholders and present you with the option to “Display images below” or “Always display images from” that sender.

We do this to help protect your privacy from spammers, who can use images and links to verify that your email address is real.

But often the messages you get with images are from friends or family and there’s no reason to worry about your privacy — you just want to see the photo of your newborn niece or the invitation design they’re sending you. So, in these cases, we’ve decided to start displaying images by default. Now, whenever someone you’ve emailed at least twice sends you a message containing images, you’ll see them right away. Note that we picked this threshold of two messages to start with, but we may tweak it if it doesn’t seem right going forward. And we only display images by default for authenticated messages (using SPF or DKIM). Gmail and other big mail providers usually authenticate their mail, but other services might not, so it’s possible you’ll get an email from one of your contacts where images aren’t displayed by default.

If you prefer to go back to the way things were, you can choose not to display images from certain senders or from anyone. To disable images from an individual sender, click “Don’t display from now on” under the “Show details” link of an email from them with images. To disable images from everybody, select “Ask before displaying external content” under “External content” on the general Settings tab.

What does this mean to Email Marketers?

Gmail will display images by defualt for emails from addresses that are in that person’s Contact’ list. It will also display images if you have sent that address at least 2 emails and that the address in question is authenticating using SPF or DKIM.

What Can I Do in My Email Marketing Program?

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A breakthrough for Email Marketers may have been achived today when Gmail Labs launched “YouTube previews in mail“.  Once activated in Labs, Gmail automatically detect YouTube links in emails and displays previews with the ability to view the entire video below the message. Also included in this roll-out were Picasa and Flickr links, and Yelp reviews.  I took a few screenshots of YouTube video links in personal emails to my Gmail below:

Preview

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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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