Email Marketing has come a long way since the last decade. Despite security concerns and early calls for text based email campaigns, HTML emails have become the standard for most companies because of their visual appeal and higher conversion rates. HTML emails also allow companies to measure how many emails were opened and which links were clicked. When combined with a good customer relationship management (CRM) database, this can be a powerful medium for reaching out to your customers.
But there is still some room for improvement. As I increasingly depend on my iPhone to check my email, I have noticed a pattern where companies write a message on top of the html content for email clients that don’t support html or have it turned off (see screenshot). This is certainly a nice thing to do and the recipients lacking HTML support should not be ignored. But valuable real estate is being used to inform a small group of people that this email can be viewed differently. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to use this space to improve open rates for your email campaigns?
This change is trivial to implement. Simply add the text to a lower section in the html code, for example in another table. Recipients who open the email will see the message when the email is opened and all recipients will see an additional call to action when previewing the email.
Assuming you have tracking in place, why not give it a try and see how the open rate improves?
