The Anatomy of an Email and Email Environments
Imagine you are attending a meeting with a group of email marketers, and the topic is how to improve your company’s use of email. To understand what everyone is talking about, you have to know the lingo or the vocabulary of email marketing. In this chapter, we will cover the basic design of an email, how an email works, and what technical considerations a sender needs to consider. We will also discuss how email marketers must manage the design of these elements to maintain compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act while also increasing the likelihood of emails being opened and driving clicks.
The Look and Feel of Email
You have probably already opened and written thousands of emails, so you already know what an email looks like. However, we now want to more consciously and mindfully focus on the different parts of an email that marketers need to modify and optimize. There are typically seven key parts of a marketing email (see Figure 3.1):
1. Send date and time: Every email has a time and date stamp on when it is sent.
2. Header: This section contains the “to” and “from” information for the email. The “from” line contains the email address from which the email was sent. Given the amount of spam and fraudulent emails that are sent out daily, it is critical that the name and the email address shown in the “from” line clearly identify the sender.
3. Subject line: This line contains the reason to open the email. Most people will decide whether to open, delete, or save an email based on the attractiveness of the subject line to their needs combined with the sender’s identity.
4. Primary message: This is also the primary headline in the body of the email. It should support the message in the subject line.
5. Body: The main part of the email, which typically contains images and information.
6. Call to action: Often the most important part of the email is the call to action. This is what marketers are hoping the reader will act upon, whether it is “click here to sign up,” “learn more,” or “buy now.”
7. The footer: The final element is essentially the “fine print,” which includes information about the company sending the email, their physical location, and an option for the recipient to unsubscribe or opt out of the email list.
Figure 3.1 The elements of a marketing email
How marketers implement the last six elements dictate whether the email is in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The first six elements of the email can make the difference between success and failure of a particular campaign. Thus, a major part of developing a successful campaign is testing different variations of these elements to find the optimal configuration.
Staying in Compliance with CAN-SPAM
Recall from Chapter 2 when we discussed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 that there were seven key rules to follow:
1. Do not use false or misleading header information.
2. Do not use deceptive subject lines.
3. Identify the message as an ad.
4. Tell recipients where your company or organization is located.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly.
7. Monitor what other agencies are doing on your behalf.
Companies sending emails can be compliant with CAN-SPAM by designing and sending emails according to the above rules. As you can see in Figure 3.1, the header clearly identifies Unleashed by Petco as the firm sending the email. If the recipient clicked on the email of the sender, they would see the specific email address as well. Spammers often disguise the name in the email address with a different title. Similarly, notice the subject line of the email properly matches the body of the email. An unscrupulous sender might use a bait and switch where the subject line is written to entice opening but the body of the email would contain something very different. The body of the email in Figure 3.1 clearly represents itself as an ad for the firm, and the fine print identifies both the location of the firm and a link to opt out of future emails.
In addition, the sending firm is fully compliant if, upon clicking the unsubscribe button, the email recipient is brought immediately to a web page where they can change their subscription options. In some cases, companies will provide a notice that automatically unsubscribes the recipient. In other cases, the company may ask the recipient to verify if they want to unsubscribe first or possibly offer the recipient an option to receive fewer emails or select types emails. Unsubscribe requests provide an opportunity for the company to learn why the recipient is unsubscribing by either providing some multiple choice questions or providing a space for an open-ended response. This knowledge can be used to refine email strategies. Upon receiving an unsubscribe request, the company has ten days to remove the individual from their email list. In other words, if the company sends the recipient another commercial email (not including transactional emails) after the ten days have expired, they are in violation of CAN-SPAM and the recipient is within their rights to report the offending company to the FTC. For most companies, removing a person from a list should take less than 24 hours. A firm is also not compliant with CAN-SPAM if they either make this terminating process extra difficult or nearly impossible to complete (e.g., in the hopes that the recipient will give up). Finally, the last item on the CAN-SPAM list specifies that if a company uses a third party to manage their email process, the hiring company is still responsible for their email action completed on their behalf—so all the rules still apply!
The Technical Side: How Emails Work
As mentioned in Chapter 2, emails started as simple text messages between two people and gradually grew to include other functionality we take for granted today, such as multiple receivers, blind copies, forwarding, inclusion of attachments, HTML and images, and many other features. Even today, most emails exchanged between individuals, whether they are friends or work colleagues, are mostly text based. However, the emails marketers use most often take advantage of web programming languages HTML and CSS to add graphics, animations, action buttons, and other advanced formatting to grab customers’ attention and nudge them into action. To better understand the challenges that an email designer faces, marketers need to know the vocabulary and understand some of the technical aspects behind email processes and design.
The Three Email Client Environments
Although there are a variety of programs that can be used to access, compose, and send email we classify these programs into three types of email clients1: desktop email clients, webmail clients, and mobile email apps. Desktop email clients include Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, Postbox, and several others. Although they have their own special bells and whistles, they all send and receive email the same way and they provide the same basic functionality. Webmail clients include Outlook.com, Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com, iCloud.com, and others and are essentially web programs that are accessed through a web browser. These webmail clients offer similar functionality as the desktop clients, but perhaps not all of the features. The main benefit is that an individual is not tethered to a single computer to access their mail. Using a web browser, one can access email from any computer with an Internet connection anywhere in the world. Finally, mobile email apps, such as Android Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and others, are designed to specifically work on mobile devices, and although they handle the basic functionality like their desktop brethren, they are generally stripped down of many of the advanced features.
Given the number of people who own smartphones, tablets, and computers, it is very likely that many people use all three in a given day. What the three environments share in common is the process in which email is sent across the Internet. However, both across and within the three environments, several of the email clients have different mechanics that can cause the identical email to appear entirely different. For the typical user that sends a text email with minor formatting and maybe an attachment, this is a nonissue as text emails almost always appear the same. However, for the email marketer who is sending emails with graphics or animation with hyperlinks and other formatting, these three environments pose considerable display issues that have to be accounted for. While an expert design team or a third-party email agency handles or has a work-around for many of the issues that can come up, it is important for marketers to know a little about the mechanics of the email process and how emails appear in these email environments to properly plan their marketing activities.
The Process of Sending and Receiving Email
Every email address has two components, the recipient’s identification (e.g., j.t.kirk) and the individual’s location on the Internet called the domain address (e.g., @federation.gov). After we compose an email on our computer using a program like Outlook or a webmail client like Gmail and press the “send” button, the program sends the email and any attachments to an outgoing mail server using SMTP (see Figure 3.2). Using the domain address of the recipient, the outgoing mail server searches for the correct IP address and contacts the recipient’s receiving mail server to make sure the recipient actually exists there. If the recipient is not valid at that address, then the email is rejected and the sending mail server sends a failure message back to the sender. If the address is valid, the email is then sent to the recipient’s domain receiving mail server.
Figure 3.2 Graphical depiction of how email works
The receiving mail server, also known as a mail transfer agent, accepts the message and then places the email into the recipient’s “mailbox” where it is stored. In the 1980s and 1990s, this mailbox had limited storage capacity; however, today, most mail servers can handle an extremely large capacity. Additionally, many Internet service providers and other large companies that manage email exchanges have built a filtering process into the receiving servers that can block emails or automatically direct them into quarantine or a junk folder before the user has accessed them. For example, if a sender is not on an approved list or the email has contents that are identified as problematic, the email can be diverted from a user’s mailbox or blocked altogether.
The next time the recipient logs into their mail server, the email client they use will fetch the email from the server mailbox using either Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) processes. When using POP, all of the emails in the mailbox are downloaded to the email program and subsequently deleted in the mailbox. However, when using IMAP, the emails are copied from the mailbox onto the receiving email program. Whatever the user does to the email on their reading program, a message is sent back to the mail server mailbox to update its status. Thus, by using IMAP, one can access their mailbox on the server from multiple places or devices and see the status of their email no matter where and when they are accessing it. Whereas with POP, once the email is downloaded to the email program, it resides in that specific device.
Launch All Emails
One thing that a mass email sender wants to avoid is accidentally exposing their email list to all their recipients. If you put more than one address in the “TO” section, then all of the addresses will be visible. If you hide those names by giving it a group name, then there is a different problem. If one respondent responds to the message with a reply all, everyone in the group will receive the reply. Those issues aside, there are two important reasons why you cannot put multiple addresses in a mass email, regardless of how you place them (i.e., grouped, blind copy, etc.): (1) lack of personalization and (2) inability to track individual response. As we discussed in Chapter 1, a key advantage to email over other types of media is the one-to-one communication email affords you. By sending to a group en masse, the sender forgoes that opportunity to personalize. And, as we will address in the next chapter, without a unique email to each individual, actual response cannot be measured. Thus, if you have a list of 1,000 email addresses, 1,000 emails need to be sent. If you have a list of 1,000,000 email addresses, then 1,000,000 emails need to be sent out. (Note: No one hits the send button that many times! Specialized software services can send out thousands of emails simultaneously.)
Message Format: Attachments, HTML, and MIME
Email was originally built as a text-only communications form. So, to send a picture, document, or any other attachment, the file has to be converted to a plain-text format which is then attached to the body of the email. Once the recipient received the email, this plain text code had to be converted back into its file format. This conversion had to be done manually by the recipient until the creation of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). MIME is built in and works behind the scenes in all email programs and web clients during the process of sending and receiving. If an email is only plain text, MIME is not needed. However, if there is any attachment or HTML formatting, MIME works by first identifying the format being used (i.e., .jpg, .html, .doc, etc.) and whether it is an attachment or built in to the message, then converts it into plain text. Using the information from the initial MIME process, the recipient’s email program can then reverse the process to return the file to its original form.
Because of this process, emails should not include embedded files or other images that the email marketer wishes to show up when the email is opened. If image files are embedded, emails will often not render correctly. Instead, emails should be designed to just include HTML (which is just text), and the images should be hosted on a server and “called” by the HTML when the email is open. This process will keep email size small and result in the best-looking emails.
Look back to Figure 3.1 earlier in this chapter. In that particular email, the graphics and buttons you see are not attachments or files embedded in the email. In fact, properly coded commercial emails that have graphics never embed them in the actual email. If they did, there is no guarantee that the graphics would appear in the right place or load at all. Because of the MIME process, these files would be reassembled and then placed as attachments separate from the body of the email instead of included in the body of the email.
Emails today are created similarly to web pages. All of the images, buttons, animations, and others are stored on a web server managed by the sender. The email itself is coded like a web page in that when the email is opened, the code in the email sends a request from that server to download those images. In fact, most commercial email senders bundle the HTML code with a plain-text version of the email, so that if there is a problem with getting the image from the web server, at least the plain-text version will still communicate the message. Unfortunately, the way an email appears, or renders, in the (i.e., desktop email clients, webmail clients, and mobile email apps) can vary greatly.
The biggest concern for email marketing design is how the formatting and graphics will render (i.e., appear) in different email clients and environments. The process is somewhat technical and the complete details are beyond the scope of this book. Typically, these design issues are in the domain of email designers and coders. For those who already have some experience in coding, there are many tips and tools available on the Internet to learn more about the technical side of coding emails. However, many firms and small businesses outsource this process to agencies and specialty firms such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, Litmus, and many others that provide email templates and services. Regardless, anyone planning to be involved in email marketing needs to have a basic understanding of what is happening and the key vocabulary, as well as be aware of the biggest roadblocks to emails rendering the same in every client.
Email Rendering
Every email program, whether it is a desktop client, web-based client, or mobile app, has a rendering engine, which is a software component that takes HTML, XML, images, and others along with any formatting information (e.g., Cascading Style Sheets) and displays the content on the screen according to the instructions in the code. Email clients do not have their own rendering engine and instead typically use one that has been built for other purposes such as web browsers. Herein lies the difficulty: not every email client uses the same rendering engine, which means the identical email will not look the same across different clients.
For example, in 2007, Microsoft changed Outlook’s rendering engine from the one used in Internet Explorer to one that is based on Microsoft Word. This rendering engine relies on tables and different coding compared to most rendering engines used in browsers. As a result, emails opened in Outlook might have different colored text, lost background colors, or broken animations. Apple Mail for desktop and mobile devices uses a rendering engine called WebKit, which is the rendering engine in web browsers Safari and Chrome. WebKit is the most versatile and allows an abundance of formatting and style features. Any emails designed specifically for WebKit rendering may run afoul on Outlook. On the other hand, while one might expect Gmail, since it is browser based to render similarly to other browsers, it actually strips out style formats unless it is written in line with the coding, adding an extra step to preparing emails. Luckily, many third-party services such as MailChimp, PutsMail, and Litmus, to name a few, provide tools to help companies create inline styles.
Mobile vs. Computer
Mobile email apps are closely related to email clients with the key difference being that emails appear differently on a mobile device because of the screen size. In a 2013 study sponsored by Facebook, International Data Corporation surveyed 7,446 iPhone and Android users in the United States (18 to 44 years old) over the course of a week and found that email was the single most common activity on smartphones, ahead of web browsing, social media, and games. Further, recently in 2014, Experian reported that 53 percent of all email opens occurred on a mobile phone or tablet.
An immediate challenge in designing “mobile-friendly” email is that the sending server for the email cannot detect the receiving device to send differently formatted messages depending on the device. In contrast, servers can detect the receiving device for a web page and serve up a mobile version or a desktop version. This means email marketers must design emails that simultaneously work well on mobile and desktop devices. There are three approaches to consider when addressing how to design for mobile versus desktop apps: agnostic approach, fluid designs, and responsive designs.
The agnostic approach, also referred to as mobile aware or scalable approach, requires designing an email with mobile uses ahead of others. That is, design your layout based on what works on a mobile screen first (i.e., single column, large buttons, short and concise copy) and use that regardless of screen size. Alternatively, a fluid design has the email automatically enlarge or shrink to fit the screen size. The industry standard for email design is to make an email 600 pixels wide. In fluid-designed emails, the width is not fixed, and instead it is set by the percent of the screen you want to use, which in this case would be 100 percent. Thus on smaller screens, the email shrinks to fit, and on larger screens, the email enlarges. The downside of this approach is that text tends to wrap in the wrong places and buttons can get misaligned. The last approach, which is ideal but also more complex, is called responsive design. In responsive designs, the designer sets up conditions in the code that place elements of the email in different places on the screen depending on screen size. So for a small screen, a call-to-action button might appear in the middle of the email, but on a larger screen that button might shift to the right to align with another element. The designer has to create a different look for different screen sizes and build that into code. A media query, which is code written into the email to detect the screen size of the device is the key to responsive emails. However, some mobile apps like Gmail (both IOS and Android), some versions of Windows phone, and older versions of the Android Mail app, do not support media queries, which can be problematic.
If you want to learn more about the coding and design aspect of email, there are many free resources available on the Internet. Also, several of the email service providers such as MailChimp, Litmus, Email on Acid, among others maintain a blog with tips and advice for dealing with a variety of email design challenges. As we will discuss in later chapters, learning about your customers, purchase behaviors as well as device usage can help alleviate many of guessing games and allow marketers to send more effective emails both in terms of content offering and appearance.
Exercise: Evaluate Your Email
Consider the set of commercial emails you have received over the last few days. Can you pick out one that you opened and one that you immediately trashed? For these two emails, do the following:
1. For one day, collect all of the commercial emails that arrive between 12:00am and 11:59pm for one email account. How many did you receive? Did you receive multiple emails from the same sender?
2. Explain your reasoning for opening and trashing, respectively, these two emails.
3. Circle the seven elements discussed earlier in this chapter. To what extent did each of these influence your actions with the email?
4. Now, take the email you trashed. Explain how you could fix this email to increase the chances of opening it in the future.
5. Now, take the email you opened. Explain what you could change to decrease the chances of opening it in the future.
References
Experian. (2014). “Q3 2014 Email Benchmark Report,” Quarterly Email Benchmark Reports, Experian Marketing Services.
International Data Corporation. (2013). “Always connected: How smartphones and social keep us engaged” (Research Report sponsored by Facebook).
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1 A word of caution: The technical definition of an email client is a computer application used to access, read, and compose emails. However, the term email client is also used to broadly refer to all email programs regardless of environment.