What to do with “impossible” customer demands in email marketing
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 9:15 am
Last week we started reading a thread in the Litmus community that struck us as very familiar. It was about “unreasonable” client demands. The impressions expressed in this thread by email marketing professionals are very close to home. Here are some of the demands we hear from clients and why they cause problems or disagreements with the agencies that develop their emails:
– Make the unsubscribe link invisible:
The unsubscribe link is a key element in emails. Not only because it is legally mandatory to offer the user this possibility, but because it is vital for the health of our metrics. Clients often confuse a good mailing list with an extensive mailing list and we have already commented on other occasions why this is not always the case. We must let go of users who are not interested in our communications, who in the long run will become inactive users who will only harm our metrics or even classify us as SPAM.
– Layout texts in images to maintain consistent branding.
The predominance of images over text can harm deliverability, and many clients also block images, meaning that many recipients never see the message. Our advice gmx email list is to always use text as text, looking for a system font that provides maximum coherence with the brand's graphic identity. Sometimes, it is convenient to keep certain texts as images for branding, but we must always seek balance to achieve our objectives.
– Support in Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes does not support most of the HTML/CSS standards used in email, and as it is a very small customer, it no longer makes sense to dedicate our efforts to how emails are displayed in this service. It is preferable to serve the majority customers in order to be efficient.
– Responsive in Gmail
Gmail does not interpret responsive design. It does not matter how the client or we choose to do it. Much to our regret, applying media queries to emails in Gmail is IMPOSSIBLE. However, we can find a way to deal with this limitation. We cannot expect the result to be the same in Gmail as in clients that support responsive design, but with time, the developer can “hack”* the code enough so that the display in Gmail is at least correct, aesthetically acceptable and usable. The best option is to take these limitations into account in the design phase to obtain a malleable structure that allows adjustment in all clients.
– Remove the “view in your browser” link in the browser version.
As its name suggests, the “Mirror Page” is a mirror of the email we send, so if the email contains a link to the web version, this link also appears on its mirror, and we cannot delete it. To prevent this link from appearing, we can only refer to a page where we have hosted the version of the email without this link, instead of to the mirror page generated by the sending platform. The difficulty is that tracking the interaction and personalizing this page requires extra programming and we must ask ourselves: “Is the time and effort we are going to dedicate to implementing specific tracking and inserting customized parameters for the mirror page justified by the goal: to eliminate a link?”
Update : Some email marketing tools do allow you to remove this link, such as Cheetahmail, where we can make it invisible with the following code: %%IGNORE%% Mirror page link %%IGNORE%%,
– The email received is not an EXACT correspondence of the design we started from.
Email clients do not interpret the code in the same way, so it takes time to make sure that everyone displays it as similar as possible to the design. Often, to fix a small detail, a lot of time has to be invested in researching and putting into practice the techniques to fix it, and this time and effort is often not justified. Even more so if these corrections delay the moment of sending. The key is always to value the effort and dedication in relation to the results to be obtained and the initial objectives. In relation to this, we are left with some phrases from the Litmus forum: “Good and sent is better than perfect” // “Great for the majority, and imperfect but readable for the minority” // “We are dedicating X amount of time for minority Y, to the detriment of majority Z”
Clients have never developed an email and do not know the limitations they are subject to. Their demands, based on this lack of knowledge, can be unrealistic or even counterproductive to their objectives. As email marketing professionals, our job is to educate them and make them understand that they are wrong when they ask for “a smaller unsubscribe link” or to layout “the entire email in an image”… We must be able to provide the arguments they need to understand that we do everything possible to optimize the efficiency and ROI of their emails and that sometimes means wasting less time with minority email clients or laying out some texts in system fonts “skipping” their graphic rules. In the end, as Alex Ilhan says in this forum, we have the same objectives as our clients, it is not about Them VS Us. What is your experience as developers or as clients when it comes to dealing with these demands and needs? Do the situations we talked about sound familiar to you?
– Make the unsubscribe link invisible:
The unsubscribe link is a key element in emails. Not only because it is legally mandatory to offer the user this possibility, but because it is vital for the health of our metrics. Clients often confuse a good mailing list with an extensive mailing list and we have already commented on other occasions why this is not always the case. We must let go of users who are not interested in our communications, who in the long run will become inactive users who will only harm our metrics or even classify us as SPAM.
– Layout texts in images to maintain consistent branding.
The predominance of images over text can harm deliverability, and many clients also block images, meaning that many recipients never see the message. Our advice gmx email list is to always use text as text, looking for a system font that provides maximum coherence with the brand's graphic identity. Sometimes, it is convenient to keep certain texts as images for branding, but we must always seek balance to achieve our objectives.
– Support in Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes does not support most of the HTML/CSS standards used in email, and as it is a very small customer, it no longer makes sense to dedicate our efforts to how emails are displayed in this service. It is preferable to serve the majority customers in order to be efficient.
– Responsive in Gmail
Gmail does not interpret responsive design. It does not matter how the client or we choose to do it. Much to our regret, applying media queries to emails in Gmail is IMPOSSIBLE. However, we can find a way to deal with this limitation. We cannot expect the result to be the same in Gmail as in clients that support responsive design, but with time, the developer can “hack”* the code enough so that the display in Gmail is at least correct, aesthetically acceptable and usable. The best option is to take these limitations into account in the design phase to obtain a malleable structure that allows adjustment in all clients.
– Remove the “view in your browser” link in the browser version.
As its name suggests, the “Mirror Page” is a mirror of the email we send, so if the email contains a link to the web version, this link also appears on its mirror, and we cannot delete it. To prevent this link from appearing, we can only refer to a page where we have hosted the version of the email without this link, instead of to the mirror page generated by the sending platform. The difficulty is that tracking the interaction and personalizing this page requires extra programming and we must ask ourselves: “Is the time and effort we are going to dedicate to implementing specific tracking and inserting customized parameters for the mirror page justified by the goal: to eliminate a link?”
Update : Some email marketing tools do allow you to remove this link, such as Cheetahmail, where we can make it invisible with the following code: %%IGNORE%% Mirror page link %%IGNORE%%,
– The email received is not an EXACT correspondence of the design we started from.
Email clients do not interpret the code in the same way, so it takes time to make sure that everyone displays it as similar as possible to the design. Often, to fix a small detail, a lot of time has to be invested in researching and putting into practice the techniques to fix it, and this time and effort is often not justified. Even more so if these corrections delay the moment of sending. The key is always to value the effort and dedication in relation to the results to be obtained and the initial objectives. In relation to this, we are left with some phrases from the Litmus forum: “Good and sent is better than perfect” // “Great for the majority, and imperfect but readable for the minority” // “We are dedicating X amount of time for minority Y, to the detriment of majority Z”
Clients have never developed an email and do not know the limitations they are subject to. Their demands, based on this lack of knowledge, can be unrealistic or even counterproductive to their objectives. As email marketing professionals, our job is to educate them and make them understand that they are wrong when they ask for “a smaller unsubscribe link” or to layout “the entire email in an image”… We must be able to provide the arguments they need to understand that we do everything possible to optimize the efficiency and ROI of their emails and that sometimes means wasting less time with minority email clients or laying out some texts in system fonts “skipping” their graphic rules. In the end, as Alex Ilhan says in this forum, we have the same objectives as our clients, it is not about Them VS Us. What is your experience as developers or as clients when it comes to dealing with these demands and needs? Do the situations we talked about sound familiar to you?