Four Common Assumptions Masquerading as Best Practices
Written by Stefan Pollard
Sunday, 17 August 2008
"Your mileage may vary." You hear that qualifier whenever carmakers boast about their high-mileage cars. It also applies to the advice you hear from all the email experts (me included) who publish articles, newsletters, white papers, and give presentations and workshops.
Saying that doesn't diminish the quality of this free advice at all. However, one thing I have learned in my years of working in email is that advice that works wonders for one email program will barely move the needle in another.
So, when you ask someone like me a straightforward question – "What's the best day to send email?" or "How much email should I send?" – we'll give you our opinion, but always qualify it with this warning: "Before you change anything, test it on your own program to be sure it works for you."
Testing is the key element here, both for individual campaigns and for the overall program. One of email's great strengths is how easily we can study elements of each message to find out what works best, what increases response, how one variable helps more than another.
We should never hit "send" until we have some idea of the expected results. At the other end, we should review each campaign to learn what worked and what we can do better next time.
This knowledge forms the basis for much of the literature that created our current set of best practices. This is also why many of us who write email advice columns often disagree.
Our testing got different results, because we are testing different elements of different email programs, with different audiences. Not every email program is equal in all its parts.
That brings us back to the element of variability that makes even a best practice more of a recommendation than an absolute. Even the idea of best practices is fluid. What one expert considers a best practice is just a starting point, or even an assumption, to another.
I can think of four common assumptions that have been labeled best practices but might be more correctly labeled "conventional wisdom," meaning ideas people accept as worthy without investigating them on their own. As I move down the list, keep this mantra in mind: "Not every best practice will yield the best results."
Assumption 1: The Great Subject Line Debate
My colleague Dela Quist, of the English company Alchemy Worx, recently published a study on subject-line length, challenging the best practice that they should be short and snappy for best response.
Most best-practice advice promotes shorter subject lines to avoid having the inbox truncate them, thereby cutting off key information at the end.
Dela's study is a fascinating read, but I encourage you to read it yourself, because news coverage has focused on line length, rather than the more important issue: challenging assumptions and testing.
Dela noticed that shorter subject lines got higher opens, but generated fewer clicks. Longer subject lines tended toward lower open rates, but higher click-through rates. The study also found a mysterious "dead zone" that optimizes neither opens nor clicks.
Does that mean you should start loading up your subjects with compound sentences? Not at all. Dela emphasized in his survey that we as marketers must continuously test what works in email and not assume that one approach over another is the absolute truth.
Assumption 2: More Links = More Clicks
Most email-design experts will tell you that giving readers more places to click will drive higher click-through rates. Many of our own columns on design stress how important it is to make clickable anyplace or anything a reader thinks to click in order to increase the chance than someone will take the action you want. That includes navigation bars, headlines, images, text and calls to action.
However, the advent of mobile devices is having a great impact on this advice. It would be great if every handheld device rendered HTML fully and correctly. That might happen in a few years, but today, we're facing a perfect storm of bad rendering: More readers are checking email on their mobiles, but what they often see is not your message, but screens full of big red Xs where images used to be and ugly URLs (line after line of tracking code if your software or ESP attaches it to links).
If you think a sizable percentage of your readership views your email on mobile devices, try testing fewer links in your design. Remove headline and body copy links. Instead, focus on a clear call to action and link that. Test where your table of contents or navigation links display on mobile screens and try changing the positioning to improve readability.
Assumption 3: The Navigation Bar Rules (Or, Take the EEC Double-Dog Dare and Remove It)
Stephanie Miller has an interesting post on the Email Experience Council blog: "If you include your website navigation bar in your emails, test to see if it's truly worth the real estate."
While I'm not convinced that getting rid of a navigation bar is a sound strategy, it does make for an interesting test of the assumption that your navigation bar does drive responses.
I suggest, however, that you consider more than just removal as a tactic to maximize the real estate viewable in the preview pane.
I've seen evidence that some marketers are testing their email navigation elements, from the position below the masthead image to above the masthead in tab fashion. I've also seen them change the order of links, reducing or adding most-visited sections of the Web site, even moving it to the message bottom as a recovery module.
What's most important is to avoid complacency and to make sure, through testing and link analysis, that the location you choose to devote to navigation (or choose to lose, as Stephanie suggests) increases your overall response rate.
Assumption 4: The Blocked-Image Effect
Much has been written and continues to pour forth on blocked HTML images and how they affect email performance. Despite all this advice, many marketers still hesitate to give up designs that rely entirely or heavily on images.
The EEC's Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study details not only the resistance even among top-brand marketers, but also how much proper design could increase revenue.
Here's the challenge:
If your brand is strong enough, and if you use good recognition tactics, you might be able to get away with bad design techniques that rely on readers enabling your images to see what your message contains.
After all, who would want to get Victoria's Secret emails in text only? Alas, most of us can't count on this kind of reader loyalty.
Test this possibility by including elements that can increase the chance that readers will turn on images. Here's a list:
- Make sure the first line of your email (sometimes called a pre-header or snippet) is in text format and provides a value statement about your email content
- Replace text that's embedded in images with HTML text
- Put calls to action in text.
Don't continue to rely on full-image emails, because image-blocking won't go away anytime soon. Use a good email-rendering tool to see how your designs look in various email clients, and adjust what you can to improve your response rates.
Testing is A Continuous Process
As with all things, what works today is not guaranteed to work forever. Email continues to evolve, as does the advice we give as we learn more about what works (in general) and what doesn't (also in general).
Not all tests have to be complex, matrix-based, multivariate investigations. Most can be simple, one-element changes using a control and a challenger.
Make testing a standard part of your email process, and keep a journal of your results. Review your clear winners over the last six months or so, and test whatever changes you implemented again to see if they are still winners.
As you read advice columns, blog posts, case studies or white papers, and when you attend conferences, look to see what worked for others and review your own campaigns to see if you can get the same results. Sometimes you'll win.
Sometimes you won't. Either way, you'll learn something, which can only help your email program perform better.
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