So we’ve been having a little test of things in the mailingmanager towers over the past week or so and thought we’d pass on our findings for you.

The effects of images on email inbox delivery

So we had a thought about fully image based emails and how it might be possible to increase the deliverability of them by extensively using the alt tags to raise the image to text ratio.

Basically, the thought process was that Spam filters only read the emails they have received in code view anyway.  So if the content of the email was just inserted into the alt tags, the spam filter could still see the content and give it a more favourable score.

Using the Delivery Monitor system, we used one of our clients emails to test (thanks go out to Crimestoppers for letting us use their email – see the email here).

We sent out 5 variations of the email which are as follows:

Email sent at 10:35 – Full Image, No Alt Text

Email sent at 10:45 – Full Image, Alt Text Included

Email sent at 11:10 - Email split into multiple images, Alt Text Included

Email sent at 11:15 – Email split into multiple images, No Alt Text

Email sent at 12:25 – Full HTML

View the accompanying results here.

Though it can be argued that the Alt Text helped a bit with deliverability, there really isn’t a great gap between each variation.  What this did manage to do though, is outline how important it is to get a decent HTML designed newsletter created.

When you look at the inbox deliverability drop between image and html based email, are you willing to sacrifice a fifth of your subscriber list out of laziness?

A way of judging forwards without the forwards stats

I’ve always found the forward to a friend reporting system a bit of a pain as it is always so much easier to just click forward in your email client than go through the long winded approach that we have to use.

The only successful way I’ve found for this to work is to offer some kind of promotion code in the forward to a friend process, which allows them discount once the forward to a friend form is completed.

This though, really doesn’t manage to capture the “true forwards”, of people who have forwarded an email on to colleagues or friends as they found it interesting.

Now to my point.  Can I just say now that this is just an observation and in terms of getting a lot out of it, I’m unsure you can really use it as a metric.  This is really just something we realised in the office.

Sometimes you will find an email address has multiple opens within a really close amount of time.  This, it would be logical to say, is actually evidence of that person forwarding their email onto colleagues and friends.  The opens will still be registered to the original recipients address as the email has that users ID in it, but to say they opened it 6 or 7 times within two minutes seems a bit much.  

And yes, I know that this theory has a superb amount of holes in it but it may be worth considering that those multiple opens could actually be unique opens from people not on your mailing list.  Just a bit of food for thought for you.

Tags

forward to a friend | deliverability | email design

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