Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

I'm not a spammer, it's my monkey (cautionary tale)

I've been experimenting with the email service provider Mailchimp as a way of delivering email newsletters for the Oxford Oxfam Group (of which I am Treasurer). So far, I like it a lot. Today, I've been putting together a draft of the next email newsletter, and sending it  to the  rest of the committee (both as a test of email delivery and so they can see my draft). Lacking details in places, it seemed funny to go with the chimp theme and replace missing information with "OOK OOK EEP EEP  OOK OOK EEP EEP"(Noticeable for sure, or I just have an odd sense of humour, perhaps)

Result - most of my emails don't make it past the spam filters. But removing the "OOK OOK EEP EEP  OOK OOK EEP EEP" promptly puts that right.

Day 1 lesson 1 therefore - when the say "test your email before you send it" they really mean it.

Day 1 lesson 2 - spam filters have no sense of humour (or possibly don't like monkeys). Repeated nonsense words are really a bad idea.

mangled emails, mangled "open rates"

Neatly following on from the last post about Outlook mangling HTML emails is this post about open rates from Anne Holland's Marketing Sherpa Blog.

"Open rates" are the calculated proportion of an email marketers emails that actually get opened: measuring this is often done by using images embedded in the HTML, as then you can count the number of times the images are requested from your server.

Anne's post is also interesting in covering what Outlook users do with the preview pane, and how this affects measurements. But then, what Anne writes is usually interesting...

missing pictures, mangled emails

When I upgraded to Outlook 2003 a while back, one thing that took a little getting used to was the way in which some HTML emails were full of missing elements because

"To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message".
Some emails, usually newsletters and marketing shots like the one pictured here, are so full of images as to be incomprehensible when Outlook has done this.

Insofar as it is possible to notice one's unconscious actions, I catch myself -

1. Checking who the email sender, which I seem to do with all emails as part of deciding how important they are and whether they might be spam.
2. Not checking the title (probably from (1) I know it is not likely to be especially interesting.
3. Visually scanning the email briefly in Outlook's preview window before deleting it.

So emails like the featured one certainly don't work for me. Ones with at least one paragraph of prominent text are going to work better, because I might read something of interest in my scan (the next image from the Online Publisher's Association) is a more successful design to get my attention. You can see that they have put a list of clickable news items that I can read, even though Outlook has nuked all the images.
The third email (from Boots, a well know chain of chemist shops in the UK) also does better - reasonably prominent paragraph of text addressed to me in the middle of all the image place holders.

I say "doesn't work for me " etc. not because I am vain enough to think marketers particularly want to market to lil' old me - usability being what it is I am left wondering whether I am typical in this (my Outlook settings, my behaviour on encountering these kinds  of emails and so on).
But if I were working on email newsletters, I probably would want to try looking at drafts with all the images nuked: it can be more disturbing than you might think.