The Email Wars

Now this is not to slam any of the competition. As I am sure the creation and delivery of this email was out of their direct control. But seriously, if you are advertising yourself with the likes of Amex, shouldn’t you make sure that the email creative is going to render right? This example was from Outlook 2007, which is a battle for many people, but I would suggest some simple pre campaign delivery testing. Even if you don’t use the best system on the planet (ReturnPath) like we and many other companies, agencies and ESPs do, set up a simple seed list to test the rendering.

If I was promoting an email solution, I would want to put my best foot forward from a branding standpoint. Wouldn’t you for your brand? When I saw this I had to double take and decide whether to air it or not, but you know me by know and I show you what I see so that we can all learn from it. We actually built a email to promote an inbox rendering webinar and purposely created with RED X’s so that it looked like images were broken. That set off the phones and emails to us from clients and people asking us if our email was broken. Guess it worked, but it was deliberate.

Lesson for today: Use a system like ReturnPath, or set up some test accounts across all email clients. The lat thing you want is to make a bad first impression.

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