Author: Adrian Young

Email Marketing

Are your emails ethical?

3 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Alcohol makes you attractive! Vaping is cool! Some marketing is obviously unethical.

But most unethical marketing isn’t so cartoonishly blatant. Not only can it be unknown to the customer, but even the marketer may not necessarily be aware that they’re doing anything wrong. So, how do we make sure our emails are morally sound?

Defining unethical

Firstly, let’s agree on what is meant by unethical. Merriam‑Webster defines the word as:

not conforming to a high moral standard

And in turn, moral is defined as:

conforming to a standard of right behavior

So we’re dealing with right and wrong, good and bad. A subjective topic to an extent, and one with blurry boundaries.

With regards specifically to the ethics of marketing, let’s refer to some third party sources. Forbes, Kendrick PR and Brafton are among the top results when searching for the topic. They all agree that misleading information is unethical. Some other factors include the incitement of controversy, marketing without consent, and exploitation of emotions.

Tell the truth

Honesty is a recurring theme in the ethics of marketing. No legitimate marketer would misrepresent a product. Or would they?

You don’t have to make outright false claims about a product to be dishonest about it. It’s not uncommon to employ Photoshop or other trickery to simulate – and likely exaggerate – a product’s properties. That de-ageing cream works wonders… in the digital realm!

Or what about the offer itself? A get‑it‑while‑it‑lasts 24‑hour sale certainly creates a sense of urgency, especially under the ominous presence of a countdown clock ticking down to zero. But if the offer’s surprise extension is pre‑planned, then it is dishonest. A lie is a lie.

Your customer is not a fish

So don’t bait them. A misleading or vague subject line might lure some openers. But ultimately that does customers a disservice. If the big surprise turns out to be a little disappointing, then people rightfully may not be so tempted next time.

It’s respectful to the customer to be transparent in subject lines and message previews. State the offer up-front and let the reader – a human being – make their own decision.

Accept disinterest

Subscribers come and go. But they don’t always close the door when they’re leaving. It’s good practice for various reasons to ultimately remove inactive subscribers from your mailing lists.

Strive to make emails for everyone

Somehow we’re in the mid-2020s and accessibility is still often skimped on or outright ignored in email. Image-heavy emails with insufficient alt tags, a confusing tab order and lack of semantic code are not uncommon.

Worryingly, there is sometimes an attitude based on pre‑conceived notions of the audience’s level of ability. Our readers are young and hip – we don’t need to worry about accessibility! Don’t be that marketer.

Even in a hypothetical and statistically-impossible scenario where 100% of a company’s mailing list is completely able, there’s an important point to remember: an accessible email is a better email for everybody.

Take the bad with the good

Don’t take our word for it… take the word of these glowing customer reviews that we have cherry‑picked! For a more balanced and believable view, a link to Trustpilot along with a live score combines the powers of brand advocacy and honesty. Bad reviews will naturally happen from time to time. Take it as an opportunity to show the world how you put a problem right.

Some fundamental contradictions

I mentioned earlier that the customer is not a fish. And yet this is an industry in which hook is an accepted piece of terminology.

Kendrick PR cites fearmongering as an unethical marketing practice. But marketers swear by FOMO – the fear of missing out.

Similarly, Brafton criticises the triggering of negative emotions as a means of manipulating consumer decisions. What is fear if not negative?

Does it matter?

Honesty may be the best policy, but is it good for business? If relatively minor sins help to bring in the numbers, and customers aren’t even aware of being played, then it could even be perceived that there’s no harm done. Doing the right thing might not always be a sufficient motivator when there’s pressure to hit targets.

But what if a company can earn a reputation for transparency? What if customers become aware of one brand’s honesty in the face of their competitors’ tricks? Maybe that’s hoping for some unrealistic karmic justice, or maybe it’s something worth striving for.

Artificial intelligence

Humanised email marketing in the age of AI

3 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

We live in the age of artificial intelligence. Sort of. More accurately, we live in the age of algorithmic content‑generation.

Computer programmes can write copy, draw pictures and generate code in seconds. Again: sort of. The intelligence aspect of AI is very overstated – these programmes have no actual understanding of what they’re doing. Therefore they are blissfully emotionlessly unaware when errors occur in their output. And those errors can be both glaring and numerous.

This of course is a technology in its early stages. With a human at the helm, to guide and refine, it can already be used to great effect. So what happens as the technology develops, and the need for human input becomes less and less?

Marketing by machines

Computer programmes can analyse customer behaviour and serve up unique one‑to‑one content in email marketing. The scale, speed and accuracy far exceeds the capabilities of any human marketing department.

For years this has primarily meant product recommendations. These often take the form of a block of personalised content within an otherwise static email. As we move into a more sophisticated era of content generation, it’s not far‑fetched to imagine entirely computer‑authored emails tailored to each unique customer’s preferences from top to bottom.

Be contactable

Email is – or at least should be – a two-way communication medium. All too often however, companies send marketing emails from no-reply addresses. It’s a closed door, and tells the customer: our message matters, yours does not.

As marketing becomes increasingly robotic, leave that door open instead. Give your customer the reassurance of accessible human help.

Join the conversation

Social media is the perfect medium to humanise your brand. Reply to comments, good or bad. Show a sense of humour. Let the world see that there’s a human presence behind the corporate facade.

Likewise, don’t let negative feedback or complaints go unanswered. Nothing puts me off a company like cookie‑cutter replies to bad reviews on Trustpilot. Turn negative into positive by demonstrating a human solution when things go wrong.

A matter of preference

Machine-learning is powerful. But an algorithm will never know your customer better than they know themselves. That’s why a preference centre remains an excellent starting point for personalised email content.

A tick‑the‑box preference form gives customers an easy way to tell you their interests. The obvious benefit is more relevant email content. The less obvious but equally important benefit is the message it sends about the value you place on human choice.

Turn customer into creator

You can create content for your marketing emails. Machines can create content for your marketing emails. But you know who else can create content? Your subscribers.

Invite your customers to share photos or other content themed around your products. Perhaps tie it to a competition. Incorporate this content into marketing emails and suddenly they have more of a community feel rather than corporate.

Everyone gets a vote

Continuing the topic of subscriber interaction – why not encourage engagement through surveys? A simple click‑to‑vote system can be tied to a database at the back end. And let’s keep that two-way communication in mind – current results can be shown via images generated in real time.

The benefits are numerous. Customers see that their opinions are valued. Surveys serve as an insight into consumer behaviour. And your emails become an engaging, living thing.

Be individual

Authentic human content is going to become increasingly uncommon… and increasingly valued. A unique brand voice will be more important than ever.

But why stop at brand level? A company is made up of individuals. Opinion pieces by team members or guest content by industry experts can give your emails a captivating human touch.

The value of authenticity

Generative AI is a fascinating development of the digital age. Anyone can become artist or author or musician at the push of a button. And yet when that work is devoid of effort and meaning, it becomes a kind of creative candy not worthy of perusal. Does that matter when the purpose is marketing rather than self expression? Does it matter when the desired output is a catchy pop song rather than a heartfelt ballad? What happens when it becomes impossible to discern between the creations of a human and a computer? This is a technology that raises many questions across all aspects of human life.

Bringing the focus back to email marketing – it’s important to keep up‑to‑date with technological developments. But perhaps the best marketing in the coming years will be that makes a real human connection with customers.

Email Marketing

Goodbye email preheader?

3 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Subject lines have a tough job. They’re the front line of email marketing. With just a few words, and possibly an emoji or two, they need to capture your customer’s attention and relay some useful information.

Thankfully they’re not alone out there. Your sender name plays a part. Maybe you’ve introduced Gmail annotations. And of course your trusty preheader is always there to back up your subject.

Why, then, has Apple taken steps to change how it works?

The trailing characters trick

First things first. There are different ways to implement a preheader. It can be visible in the email content, usually as small print at the top. Or it can be hidden, so that it is only readable in the inbox listing and not in the email itself.

Either way, there’s a generally unwanted thing that happens – additional text content will be pulled into the preheader by default. That could be your nav bar, or main heading, or whatever comes immediately after your preheader on the page. The result is messy.

Example of a messy preheader

Email developers, being a crafty lot, came up with a hack to stop this happening. It doesn’t really have a name, but I like to call it the trailing characters trick. It works by adding a load of blank characters after the preheader (regular spaces won’t fool it). The effect is a neatly trimmed preheader without any unwanted junk cluttering it up.

Example of a tidy preheader

And how is this achieved? Well, it’s not pretty. A string of unseen special characters is appended to the preheader, until enough rogue characters have been pushed out of view.

Code behind the trailing characters trick

That’s a non-breaking space coupled with a zero-width non-joiner… over and over again. Email is no stranger to unorthodox development techniques, but this is a contender for the most bizarre.

Except it doesn’t work any more

During recent updates, Apple has intentionally disabled the use of this trick. It still works in some places, but not in Apple Mail on either iPhones or Mac.

There is already an alternative method that works, for now. Rumour has it that this will be short-lived, and similarly blocked in the near future. And perhaps the likes of Gmail and Outlook.com will follow suit.

So, there’s a battle taking place. Why are companies going after our precious preheaders?

Functionality reclaimed

The phrase preheader wasn’t one coined by email providers. It was invented by marketers. Email app developers and webmail services have different names for this particular piece of inbox anatomy: preview, preview text, message preview.

That terminology suggests a different purpose than a secondary subject line. It’s a quick way to see some message content without having to open the email. That lets the reader determine if it’s worth their while to open, or not. A ‘preheader’, by contrast, is an artificially injected snippet of marketing blurb. Arguably this repurposing of the message preview is hijacked functionality. That is why it’s being taken back.

And it isn’t the only example of a functionality tug-of-war in email. Marketers and email devs go to lengths to suppress auto-linking (and auto-styling) of dates and addresses. Javascript doesn’t work in email, so resourceful coders have stretched the capabilities of CSS to allow some basic interactivity. There have even been celebrations of clever mosaic-style imagery as a fallback when actual images are blocked. What the marketer wants to achieve and what the email provider allows do not always tally.

Can’t we all just get along?

Email is a digital communication format that originally mimicked a letter. Its modern pumped-up visual format has pulled the medium in a different direction. Things change, of course. Particularly in the world of technology. But while progress is good, misuse is not.

Perhaps it’s time we all stopped thinking in terms of preheaders. By beginning emails with an interesting heading and useful paragraph of text, the message preview fulfils its intended purpose again – without the need for trickery. So, it’s not goodbye after all. It’s welcome back.

Email best practice

Three content lessons from Gmail’s email sender guidelines

2 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Google is tightening up the rules from early 2024. If you want your emails to land in the inbox and maintain a good sender reputation, you’d better follow them!

We recently covered the authentication aspects of their acronym-laden email sender guidelines. Within the same document are a few stipulations regarding the actual email content. But don’t worry – Google isn’t really interfering with what you put in your mailings, but instead reminding everyone about best practice that should already be followed.

Take an objective approach to your subject

Email sender guidelines: Message subjects should be accurate and not misleading.

Misrepresenting your message content is obviously bad. But so too is vagueness. Baiting customers with promises of tempting but unspecified offers may attract some curious openers. What’s the point however if those same openers walk straight back out the door when that offer turns out to be a disappointment? It’s better to make your message clear from the word go.

Inboxes are saturated with with emojis, gimmicky copywriting, and other look-at-me tricks. Perhaps the email that stands out the most will be the one that respects the reader and talks to them straight.

Have a think about your links

Email sender guidelines: Web links in the message body should be visible and easy to understand. Recipients should know what to expect when they click a link.

Linked elements in emails should be easy to spot, easy to click, and their purpose crystal-clear. Should is probably the operative word in that sentence. All too often, emails have fallen victim to link frenzy. It’s not uncommon to see confusingly multi-linked features, often to the point of being a landing page lottery.

Going wild with links may succeed in funneling more (confused) customers to your website. But if they’ve arrived on an unexpected page, they won’t be buying anything. Keep it simple and clear instead.

What are you hiding?

Email sender guidelines: Don’t use HTML and CSS to hide content in your messages. Hiding content might cause messages to be marked as spam.

Do you code emails with separate desktop and mobile images, or other such split content? That means lots of hidden elements. Apart from being a clunky pseudo-responsive development technique, it’s also a potential spam filter trigger.

Of course, there are other uses for hidden content such as ‘preheaders’ (actually a message preview) and fallback content for interactivity. But if hidden content of any kind is frowned upon and we still find the need to include it in our emails, it raises a question: are we using the medium properly?

Stricter rules… for a better inbox

As harsh as it sounds, the email marketing sent by some otherwise legitimate companies is ethically questionable and not a million miles away from being spam. Google and other companies are taking steps to combat bad email practice – and improve the medium for everyone.

Interactive email

Four useful ideas for interactive email

2 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

You can do all sorts of things with the checkbox hack. But not all of them are useful. For the unfamiliar, the checkbox hack is a clever CSS trick that makes it possible to build interactive emails.

All email content must be useful to the customer, and interactive content is no exception. So, forget about those gimmicky drop-down nav menus product carousels. Let’s aim instead for the kind of interactivity that enriches our emails.

1. Rotatable products

It’s common on a retail websites to be able to view products from multiple angles. But in email there’s usually only a single, static product shot. It doesn’t need to be that way.

By assigning animation triggers to left and right arrows on either side of an image, you can let the user rotate a product right there in the email. Drop in a few frames of animation for each of the quarterly rotations and you can achieve an effective illusion of movement.

For our demo, I grabbed a mug from the kitchen. But just imagine this technique used for cars or any other product where every angle matters.

2. Colour selector

On the subject of cars – they tend to come in a variety of colours. So too do clothes, phones, items of furniture, toasters… and so on. You can guess where this is going.

Place some colour swatches next to the product image and let the user browse all colours before committing to a website visit. This isn’t just a cosmetic effect. Whilst swapping out the image, you can also swap the link, thus directing the customer straight to their chosen colour variation on your web page.

3. Multiple choice quiz

But maybe your customer isn’t so sure about what they want. Why not guide them? A multiple-choice quiz is the perfect way to present the customer with a result based on their personal interests… and you don’t even need any prior data. In fact, you can even use it to start building up a customer profile by tracking the links. How good is that?

Our demo uses a topic close to my heart: dogs. There are 18 possible combinations of answers, each leading to a specific breed of dog. This technique could of course be used for any topic under the sun. Perfect holiday destination, perfect perfume, perfect anything-you-like.

4. Randomiser

Oh, about those holiday destinations – sometimes it’s fun just to spin the globe and discover somewhere completely new. Well, you can do that in email too. Engage your customer’s curiosity with randomisation.

Here’s how it works: you can secretly cycle a series of identical-looking buttons. The random factor is time – i.e. when the user clicks the button. Dress that up in some fancy animation and you’ve created an engaging piece of content based on the element of surprise.

We’ve chosen holiday destinations for our demo, but as always you could pick any topic you like. The possibilities are endless.

What else can you think of?

Done right, interactive content can really bring an email to life. With a bit of imagination, the medium of email can be transformed into something incredible. (Just don’t forget that fallback content for non-compatible email apps!)

Email best practice

Your email marketing accessibility checklist

5 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

It’s the 2020s. Your marketing emails need to be accessible. It’s an ethical and legal obligation. Actually, scrap that – it’s simply the right thing to do.

But there are a lot of accessibility considerations, and therefore a lot of things to accidentally overlook. Here’s a handy checklist to keep your emails on track.

Use proper text

Images of text is awful practice and a major barrier to accessibility. Don’t do it – ever.

Use a minimum body copy font size of 16 pixels

That is generally agreed upon to be the smallest acceptable size for body copy. A bit bigger is even better. And it’s worth getting out of old habits of rendering footer content in miniscule lettering. If something is important enough to include in an email, it’s important enough to be readable.

Left-justify paragraphs of text

Centered text is fine for headings and calls‑to‑action. Larger blocks of copy, however, should always sit to the left. It’s easier on the human eye and an easily-implemented accessibility improvement.

Code semantically

HTML is full of descriptive elements like <h1> for primary headings and <footer> for, well, footers. Use them. Alternatively, you may wish to consider their ARIA equivalents.

Describe your tables

Add role="presentation" to every table that makes up your email (unless it is actually a data table of course). The HTML <table> element is repurposed in emails for structure rather than data, so make sure it’s marked as such.

Use responsive code properly

Your email’s content should fit to any screen size. But if you need to resort to cheating – i.e. doubling up blocks of content with separate desktop and mobile sections – then your design needs to be re-evaluated.

Use high contrast colouring

Low contrast can be difficult for a visually‑impaired person. Make sure your text, buttons and images stand out. How do you know if the contrast is sufficient? Try running your view online link through the Web Accessiblity Evaluation Tool.

Use high‑resolution imagery

Low resolution (or actual size) images look blurry on modern high density screens. Make sure all of your images are saved at double the maximum logical resolution at which they’ll appear in your email.

Optimise your images

Big file sizes + email is not a good combo. Mobile users in slow network areas will experience sluggish download times and potential broken images.

Describe images via alt tags

Readers using screen readers won’t know what your images depict unless you describe them. Developmental laziness excludes customers. Take a few seconds to type photograph of this or illustration of that.

Use blank alt tags on decorative images

But don’t waste your reader’s time by tagging images as decorative curve or suchlike. It’s just fluff.

And keep decorative images to a minimum

The more complex your design, the more section‑hopping a screen reader needs to perform. Not to mention the greater the chance of your email breaking. Web is the place for fancy. Email works best with a little more restraint.

Prepare for non‑animated animated GIFs

Outlook doesn’t like GIFs. It’ll only show the first frame. If something essential sits later in your animation, not everyone will see it.

Go easy on the GIFs

TV shows are announced with a warning when strobe effects or other flashing colours are coming up. You don’t have the luxury of forewarning people in email, so keep your animated GIFs gentle.

Use PNG images with transparency

Logos, icons and other non‑rectangular images can be unexpectedly left sitting in blocks of colour on dark mode. Use PNGs with transparency instead to let them blend naturally.

Don’t put critical content in background images

Because background images in email have a flaky history. Use them for cosmetic purposes only, and make sure your email still looks good if it falls back to a flat colour.

Maintain a consistent layout

It’s fairly popular in email to have alternating left/right layouts for images and text from story to story. Because it… looks cool? But from a screen reader’s perspective, the layout is confusingly inconsistent. A uniform design is much easier to navigate. Oh, and don’t be tempted to mess with the page’s tab index sequence instead!

Use plenty of white space

Too many things crammed together is visually distracting. Space items apart and give your design room to breathe.

Don’t cluster links

Text links or other small elements should never be close to each other. It’s confusingly fractured, and a finger pressing a touchscreen is liable to hit the wrong one.

Big buttons

Your major links should be presented as large, easy‑to‑press buttons. That keeps them both visually and functionally prominent. For maximum accessibility, make sure they are clickable all over and not just the text in the middle.

Design and code for dark mode

Oh, and on that topic – make sure your email is explicitly coded for dark mode. That means a carefully selected alternative colour palette and possibly substitute images in places that make sense.

Write concise copy

Rambling passages of text are not well‑suited to marketing emails (great for blogs though!). Tell people the essentials and let them click through to a website if they’re interested in the full story.

Don’t use cryptic subject lines or preheaders

Open-bait subjects don’t do anyone any favours. Respect your customer’s time by letting them know in advance if a message is worth opening.

Use descriptive calls‑to‑action

Ambiguous and mixed links are common in email. Often a feature’s image links to a different place than its button. You may know what goes where, but your customer does not.

Don’t overlink

Linking every square inch of your mailing to a landing page is frustrating for the end user. Only link calls-to-action or images that make logical sense. Paragraphs of text do not warrant links!

Keep your code under 100KB

Or your email will be clipped in Gmail.

Always include a view online link

Your email may be rendering perfectly in all of your tests, but that’s not the point. Your user may prefer or need to view it in a browser for personal reasons.

Don’t send from a no-reply address

Email is a communication tool. Don’t send the wrong message by making it a one-way street.

Send relevant content

Segmentation and targeting isn’t the most obvious aspect of accessibility, but it is one nonetheless. Presenting people only with relevant information helps to ensure that your mailings feel inclusive.

Test, test, test

Testing deserves a checklist all of its own. Broadly speaking, the following accessibility aspects of your email need to be checked for every send:

  • Visual check: the most obvious one. Your email needs to look presentable on as many devices and email applications as possible. A bank of real devices and/or previewing service like Litmus is a must.
  • Screen reader check: knowing how your email sounds is often overlooked. Look out for phrases like “2X points”. That may make sense when read, but when spoken it’ll sound like “two x” than “two times”.
  • Dark mode check: if you check light mode only, you’re only getting half the picture. Always take the time to check your email in forced dark mode environments like Outlook, and in controlled dark mode environments like iPhone Apple Mail.
  • Images-off check: your email needs to remain perfectly understandable even if images fail to load – which can happen for various reasons.

Is that everything?

Probably not. Accessibility is not black and white – it’s a scale. But the good news is that you don’t need to produce the perfect accessible email overnight or indeed ever. Every step towards more accessible emails is a victory in itself.

Email best practice

Let Outlook be Outlook

3 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Microsoft Outlook is notorious in the email marketing world. It doesn’t do modern HTML and CSS. It has a thing for splitting emails apart at the seams with rogue white lines. All in all, it’s a pain.

But that’s ok. Here’s why.

You can’t repair software via an HTML email

Outlook is a desktop application. The kind that’s coded in a complex language like C++ or suchlike. Oh, and it uses Microsoft Word – yes, the word processor – as its rendering engine.

A remote email developer has the following tools at their disposal: HTML, CSS and VML. None of these are programming languages. Their purpose is content and presentation. Therefore none of them can be used to re-engineer Outlook’s functionality. The best that can be done is to circumvent Outlook’s quirks and take steps to minimise their chance of occuring.

Acceptance ≠ apathy

Accepting Outlook’s limitations doesn’t mean doing nothing about them. Marketing emails should be designed and coded to degrade gracefully. That means designing and coding in such a way that your email can be progressively simplified and still look presentable.

Your reader probably isn’t using Outlook

Are you in the B2C market? It’s likely that only a tiny portion of your readership is using the desktop Windows application. Outlook has a mere 4% market share.

As you’d expect, most Outlook users will be present in the B2B sector. This however is no reason to panic. Design and develop accordingly.

Outlook can mean many things

It’s a Windows application. Plus there’s an online interface for Outlook 365. There’s also a Mac version that is quite different in every way. Oh, and there’s Outlook.com the webmail service. And its associated mobile app. With iPhone and Android flavours of course.

We’re not done yet. The Windows application has various editions. 2013, 2016, 2019 for starters. How these render your emails can even change according to screen density. Have you lost count of all the Outlooks? I have.

Your subscriber doesn’t care (so neither should you)

Email is a transient, fleeting thing. Its purpose is to communicate a message or an offer swiftly and clearly. Looking pretty is secondary.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort to design great‑looking emails. It is. It’s even worth a bit of effort to sort out Outlook problems.

But what is not worthwhile is frittering hours and hours of your time to get rid of a 1‑pixel glitch in one version of Outlook. Your customer is interested in what you have to offer. I can’t guarantee that they won’t notice a trivial rendering glitch, but I’ll bet money on the fact that they won’t care.

Example of a rogue white line in Outlook
White line: campaign-stopping crisis or trivial fact of Outlook life?

Time is money

This is business and we’re all here to make money. Investing resources on trivial matters is a poor effort‑to‑reward payoff.

If you’re sending a richly designed mailing, you’re likely to trigger an unwanted rendering glitch in at least one version of Outlook. From an email developer’s perspective, the cause is purely down to chance – as is the solution. And that solution could potentially take hours to unearth, if even possible. Accept it as a triviality and move on to something more important.

We’re stretching the medium beyond its intended capabilities

Email used to exclusively mean a letter‑like digital message sent from one person to another. Probably with some kind of hilarious cat joke, and possibly a threat that something awful will happen if you don’t forward it to ten friends. As a format, email consisted of words typed on a plain background, perhaps with a picture or two attached for download. That’s what email was.

At some point along the line, the technology became (somewhat) intertwined with the HTML and CSS code that powers the web. That afforded significant improvements in styling and branding, which is nice. But the pendulum has perhaps swung too far. It’s now common for companies to send marketing emails that resemble mini‑websites – a far cry from its electronic mail origins. Should we be surprised that it breaks?

Conclusion

Outlook isn’t all bad. Seen through the right lens, it’s a reminder to focus on content rather than decoration. Follow best practice in your emails and let Outlook do what Outlook does.

Email best practice

It’s a feature, not a bug: email edition

2 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Are those pesky email applications messing with your design? You didn’t want that address to be automatically linked to Maps, and you certainly never asked for telephone numbers to be underlined! It’s time to squash the bugs.

The battle begins

Overriding a piece of email software’s functionality often isn’t a simple task. The only tools at our disposal are HTML, CSS and a bit of imagination. Email development forums are awash with questions and suggestions on this topic, plus a graveyard of now-defunct solutions. There’s much trial & error, and the successful method usually amounts to some kind of hacky trick.

Here’s an example. Some versions of the Outlook mobile app will recognise and auto-link dates and times to the user’s calendar. This also turns the associated copy blue. One effective solution is to secretly break up the text with an invisible special character called a zero-width non-joiner. Congratulations – you have successfully tricked an application into losing functionality!

Don’t fight functionality

But why would anyone want to do that? The fact that there’s often no easy ‘fix’ for these ‘problems’ says a lot. The problem does not lie within the application’s functionality. It lies within the sender’s design and objectives.

Suppressing a piece of functionality is not in the spirit of accessibility. And to be frank, it’s not the sender’s decision to make. Nobody likes it when a website blocks or forces the opening of links in new tabs. A similar etiquette applies to the world of email.

Design around it

Addresses are another type of content that could be auto-linked and coloured blue. If they’re sitting on a coloured background, that could result in an ugly clash and illegible text. The solution: place them on a white background instead. Cosmetics do not trump usability.

Example of address in an email being auto-linked to maps
Outlook has helpfully linked that address to the maps application. Should we break that… or change our background colour instead?

Reallocate the effort

I mentioned trial & error earlier. That means editing code, uploading it to an email platform, sending tests, and checking them on real devices and/or previewing services. All of this all takes time. But this is not a task that deserves it.

Imagine what could be created in that time rather than destroyed. Optimum email designs. Improved accessibility. Better content. Don’t squash the ‘bugs’ – give them a better habitat instead.

Email Marketing

The six steps of email personalisation

3 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Do you seek the holy grail of email personalisation? Or as it’s known by its other name: one‑to‑one content.

As technologies have become more sophisticated, so too have customer expectations. But to reach the point of true personalisation is a journey with several steps.

1. Say my name

Let’s start with the bargain basement of personalisation. Greeting your customer by name in a subject line has been measured to increase open rates by more than 25%.

Just don’t mess that name up. "Hi, Adrian" is good. But "Hi, ADRIAN", "Hi, adrian", or "Hi, Young" looks bad. Yes, it would be me the customer who had made a mistake with your form in the first place. But the onus falls upon you to validate and fix your data.

2. Preferential treatment

At The Email Factory, we swear by preference centres. What better way to embark on an email journey with a new subscriber than by letting them pick and choose what to receive?

A preference centre gives your customer the choice of content or product types. But why stop there? Grant your customer further control over their inbox by including frequency and timing options.

3. Divide and convert

Whether your mailing list weighs in at a few hundred or a few hundred thousand, it is comprised of individuals. Not everyone is interested in the same content. So why send everyone the same email?

Segmentation is an essential part of email marketing. Divide up your lists into categories and keep your subscribers engaged with relevant content.

4. On your best behaviour

Personalisation isn’t all about what your customer likes but also what they are doing. And none of your customers are doing exactly the same thing at the same time. There are those that have newly discovered your brand. Some have just treated themself to a shiny new product. Others haven’t engaged with you for a while. Your task is to communicate with each of them based on their current actions.

Behaviour‑based emails let you react automatically to your customer’s activity (or lack thereof). When someone signs up, a welcome series is launched. If your customer has recently purchased a product, that can trigger an invitation to review it. For those who haven’t interacted for a while, a re‑engagement programme can rekindle their interest.

5. Where in the world

Your customer’s location matters. Maybe there’s an in‑store event or other locally relevant content to share. You might even want to send automatically-tailored content based on the local weather. Those hooded jackets sound a lot more useful when it’s pouring outside.

Location doesn’t only determine what to send but also when to send. Send time optimisation ensures that your subscribers receive your emails at a time of day that is personally convenient.

6. Welcome to the machine

As humans, we can only do so much. Luckily that "much" includes the development of ever‑more‑sophisticated machine learning software. As email marketers, we can harness that technology and take personlisation to another level.

Product recommendations are the obvious showcase, for now. Why guess at what your customer might like to buy when you can learn patterns from their previous purchasing and browsing activities?

While the current capablities of generative AI have been over‑hyped, its future potential is hard to grasp. Every aspect of your email, from copy to imagery to layout to timing to colouring, could all be generated on an individual basis.

True email personalisation

Your customer is a human and an individual. But they are likely one of many thousands. To talk to them one‑to-one ironically requires a fundamentally impersonal means of machine‑based automation. The concept of chummy person‑to‑person communication is an illusion.

But what really matters is relevance. Present your subscribers with the content that matters to them and the results will speak for themselves.