Shea Beck

Now up on the not-so-hot email platform is Victoria’s Secret. I get these emails at least three times a week, usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday – WTF? I don’t wear that much underwear and especially not thongs.

Anyhow, because Victoria’s Secret uses a web ready font in their creative, there is no reason this email can’t be entirely text rather than one big image. They even take it one step farther in actually making the disclaimer text. The disclaimer in many emails should be the part of the email that is an image. I say this because most disclaimers are loaded with Spam trap text.

This email is very simple to create using Times New Roman text, Black backgrounds and a few white borders. the only items that need to be an image would be the Pink logo and Victoria’s Secret logo.

In conclusion, text it up brotha, sometimes I don’t want to enable my images.

Peace,

Shea

So it was actually a slow weak in Email for my Inbox this week. So I will pick a local internet marketing firm to pick on. I get FireDrum emails pitching their services every so often, props to them for actually practicing what they preach (not all email marketing companies even send emails on their own). So the email came from an email marketing company, should be perfect right?

Wrong, I will point out three mistakes to help you from making the same ones:

Error #1
From the start the subject line wasn’t to appealing: “Happy New Business Year from FireDrum!” Also, everyone knows you should NOT include special characters in the subject line for Spam reasons and some email clients don’t recognize special characters.

Error #2
They have plenty of opportunity to use text rather than graphics. Using text whenever possible is very important because it allows the subscriber the opportunity to READ the email without having to enable graphics as you know the default is not to have graphics turned off.

Error #3
The lack of using the img display block trick has allowed the email clients to place an unwelcome bottom margin on the images. This is confusing to explain, but I’ll give it a shot. Some email clients (in this case I am using hotmail) use a Strict Doctype to display the HTML. The Strict Doctype gives the bottom margin because it is trying to allow room for characters like g,j and q. This can be overcome by adding the above mentioned display block to the header.

Okay enough talking, just add this piece of code to your emails and you won’t have unwelcome bottom margins. I understand that CSS gets stripped in some email clients but the ones that give you the bottom margins will accept this cheat.

Copy and paste this code directly below the </head> tag:

<style media=”all” type=”text/css”>
table img {
display:block;
}
</style>

Well that concludes this issue of Fallible Friday’s, where I tell you your email sucks. I hope you are a better emailer after reading this.

iStockPhoto is the first victim of “Fallible Friday.” Each Friday I will showcase an imperfect email and explain why it happened. 

In this Hot Shots email from 12/17/08 we get a fairly good coded email. It has a great text to graphic ratio and makes good use of background colors.

The email goes bad in the header, a pretty big mistake. iStockPhoto used <div> tags which is okay in some instances but obviously not here. I personally stay away from the use of any <div> tags in email because of the reason highlighted in the screen shot. iStockPhoto should use tables and hard code the widths. This is a pretty simple fix and would have been caught with a simple test to multiple email addresses. If you are indeed too lazy like iStockPhoto, give Pivotal Veracity a shot they will test the emails for you.