Promo - July 2008 - (Page 34)

E-Mail MARKETING Continued from page 33 e-mail clients don’t render a “From” line, marketers also need to cram their brand identity into that subject line. As in PC-based e-mail, consumers are much more likely to open a message that comes from a brand they trust. So find a way to win that confidence by getting your brand in the subject line and, again, high up in the message body. Speaking of compelling, Krum recommends offering mobile readers the option to click a “display all” link to a Web version of the message high up in the body copy. That will give them access to images, which many mobile e-mail clients block by default. In some cases, mobile carriers’ proxy servers also impose limits on per-message downloads that can wipe out images. Image-based mobile e-mail and other rich media experiences may become easier to broadcast by next year or even later this year, Krum says. But for now, marketers need to work with some odd constraints on using graphics in mobile e-mail. For example, images within standard email are often “sliced up” and sent in sections because it’s easier to download four files of 4k than one 20k file. On a PC, those files recombine properly into an image. But a mobile e-mail client is just as likely to receive them stacked one on top of another in a graphic hash. “At the least, marketers need to make sure that any text in an image that needs to stay together gets cordoned in the same section,” Krum says. “Otherwise, your ‘Free through Sunday’ banner will not be readable.” Mobile text e-mail should also get the value proposition and call to action out to recipients quickly. “People don’t like to scroll on a handheld device, so marketers need to work fast,” Krum points out. “Sometimes you’ll see a mobile e-mail with a strong subject line, but open it and there’s nothing up top but a bunch of links. Remember, you’ve got a whole new fold in mobile e-mail, and it’s higher than on a PC. So you’re working with less room, and you have to produce your offer quickly.” And it may be only one offer, because mobile screens have less room both top “TEST THE HELL OUT OF IT.” —CINDY KRUM to bottom and side and side: usually 120 pixels across, compared to 600 on a standard e-mail. For marketers who tend to load multiple discounts, coupons, promotions and value offers into single e-mail messages, that enforced brevity may be a good argument for developing a separate strategy for mobile readers. When you think you’ve got that email message in a shape that will work well on a wide range of mobile devices, Krum has one final tip: “Test the hell out of it.” Send it out to a dozen people in your office. Getting a number of people to open it, using their different handsets and devices, is an unassailable reality check on how well you’ve optimized for the broad spectrum of mobile hardwaresoftware combinations. It can be even more effective than the online simulators some service providers offer to predict how a given phone type will render a given message. “I love it when people in our office get new phones because it means new ways to test messages,” Krum says. “I’ve seen occasions when the online simulator for my phone type produces a different result than the same message sent to my phone in the real world.” Using friends and colleagues as guinea pigs may seem like a ragtag way to spot-check a mobile e-mail blast. “But when the rubber meets the road, it’s how the message renders on phones that matters, not its appearance on a computer simulator,” says Krum. l P 34 July 2008 / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / Promo http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - July 2008

Promo - July 2008 Contents Editor's Note Shelf Help Beautiful Bovines Rest Stop Who Let the Dogs Blog? A Helping Hand Commentary Solid Gold Q and A: Mighty Mattel Flying the Coup Putting E-mail in Motion Resource Center The Agency Center The Young Prefer Mail Index of Advertisers

Promo - July 2008

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