The Email Wars

There was an interesting idea at Online Marketing Summit in Chicago last week about mapping the image paths you use in your emails to file locations that you can change IF there is a timely event. What does this mean? Well imagine that you have a time based event or sale going on and your email creative has images in it that give a time based offer or discount code. So what happens to this email if your subscribers open it after the event is over? Should they still get that image and offer? OR could you control the email after the send?

Not at all like this image here in this post, but it is a little tricky and if you do not do it right you could fail. What I mean by this as if you are going to do it you need to be really careful that you are matching the file path location exactly. If not you risk inserting the wrong image or blowing out the creative. They need to be the exact same size.

Well I think that you can and maybe you should. Why? Well to get an email that is now past it’s date could create a bad experience. Maybe you REALLY wanted that offer and it is gone. You can swap out those images when a sale or event is over if you hard map the image locations in the email creative. Then when the time comes you can simply replace those images at those hard coded image paths so that if they get called or loaded they are replaced with new ones. No one ever knows. No harm no foul.

Many email platforms store or cache your email creative from those that I am familiar with so you will need to look into that in your specific scenario. But if possible you could extend the life your your campaigns to have an even greater impact on those that did not open them (due to so many reasons) after your event is over.

It was an interesting idea that was advanced that I thought I would share with you to see if it might help you in your email campaigns.