“Web standards” in email
by Rob Mason ~ October 4th, 2007 Filed under: Accessibility, Strategy, Web standards.
Most email programs do not support any form of web standards. What this means in real terms is that there’s no guarantee that the pretty email you create with nice pictures and coloured text will look and behave in the way you originally intended.
The guys at Campaign Monitor are leading the way when it comes to research and understanding this issue and in turn providing a focal point for community action. By community in this context I mean the web and email community: website/email designers, marketing agencies, consumers of email, email program makers, etc. Similar in many ways to the original web standards movement championed by the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman et al, their aim is highlight the issue and make software and service providers sit up and take action.
The business case can be quite compelling if seen by the right people: you pay a designer to create a snazzy looking email to help promote your latest widget - anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand quid. Unless they know about the issues, what to do about them and how to test it all, you could end up with around 30% of your emails not having the maximum impact (depending on what email system the recipient is using).
So 30% of your budget not having the impact it should means money wasted or at least not put to best use. Which in turn means that you’re lowering your chances of emails be opened, links being clicked on and sales being made. It’s a traditional sales funnel, the more you put in at the top the more you get out of the bottom.
