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Let’s Scroll – Horizontal Baby

Jul 24 2008

There have only been 4 campaigns I have seen to date that defy the rules of the horizontal scroll thus far in my life. And every single one of them I have loved. As we at eROI are about to release one like this for an ongoing client campaign I wanted to ask you if you have seen any others. I have seen Coors Light, Diesel, FHM and a luggage company. In every case the creative has rocked and the implementation has worked successfully. 

Well in our attempts I wanted to share some knowledge with you about what we have found. 

1. You need to tell people or show people that they are going to do something different. If you are expecting people to know that the scroll direction has changed, then you are expecting too much from a conditioned behavior that we have ingrained into subscribers and the inbox. 

2. It will work in ALL clients as long as the pixel width is not over 2200 pixels wide. It actually works at over 12500 pixels wide (as the example in this post) but not in Outlook 2007. And I would assume that all of us have subscribers using that email client. 

Warning the below image is from FHM Magazine and you might find it offensive. 

 

3. You need to build it under 600 pixel high at the maximum. If you are teaching people to scroll right instead of down you need to show them that there is nothing below but only to the right. The creative needs to be tight. 

4. TEST TEST TEST. We used seed accounts for our testing bench of browsers and email clients as well as sent it through ReturnPath to test it again. You can never have enough data to support your decisions. 

Now here we are, ready to launch it. Are you ready? Are we ready? Are they ready? I hope so. 

If you have seen any other examples I would love to see them.


Published in Behavioral Marketing, Best Of Email, Email Design, New Marketing Ideas, Viral Email Marketing, eMail Marketing Optimization

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  1. 1
    Dela Quist says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 10:49 am

    Alchemy Worx is a UK based email marketing agency and in early 2006 we designed wrote and produced a horizontal scrolling newsletter for one of our clients Talk Talk part of The Carphone Warehouse group. We thought it looked really cool and the client loved it!
    However we were forced to redesign it as a vertical scrolling newsletter after only 3 issues and I thought you might be interested to find out why.

    Like you we had no problem getting the HTML to render correctly in any of the email clients (Outlook 2007 wasn’t out then). We had 2 main problems:

    1. We could never get anchor tags to work to our satisfaction.
    All our newsletters have a contents section above the fold to let subscribers know what goodies are contained within and inspire readers who are not interested in the hero proposition to scroll down (across). We also use them on keywords in the intro paragraph. No matter what we did we could not guarantee that the anchor tag would land dead centre. I would be very interested to hear if you have a fix for that.

    2. The template was extremely inflexible.
    Every article or feature had to have very precise word count to fit exactly into the template. Get it wrong and the email would then start to scroll horizontally AND vertically.
    The FHM email works because their newsletter is very image based which is clearly what their subscribers want, but relatively easy to format into standard full, half and quarter page units. If you look at it carefully you will see that all the content fits into standard size pods.

    If your client mailing is a one off then you won’t have any problems, if not then will have to use the same tactic.

    The only other UK newsletter that I recall scrolling horizontally was the Film 4 newsletter which ran for about 9 months before they switched to vertical

    ————-

    Thanks Dela. I hear you on all of the above and appreciate you sharing them. I do have a back up vertical version already produced as well JUST IN CASE we need to switch. But what I think we will do prior is to TEST (like that word) the 2 to see which does best and what challenges arise.

    Hope to see you in Nov in London or maybe in the States sometime sooner.