Boy, Did I Look Goofy…
July 29th, 2008 Chris
I have to admit, I am a bit of a techno-file (aka geek). I’m easily attracted by new, shiny electronics. I even bought my first PC in grade ten. That may not seem that early but not only was it my first PC, it was essentially the first PC.
OK, probably not the very first PC but the first popular one. In fact, to call it a PC is not fair and some may even suggest sacrilegious. It was an Apple II+ and in the early 80s, it was very cool.
Fast forward several years (I would appreciate you not doing the math) and, while having dinner with a friend from New York, I first saw the iPhone. No two ways about it, it was cool. And on July 11th, when they first came to Canada, I had to have one.
Luckily, a friend of mine at my former employer had a line on an unlikely place for a stache of iPhones that morning – the corporate head office of a local reseller. So, I crawled out of bed at 6am and headed out to their office where, along with my friend, we perched in our lawn chairs in line for the phone.
While lots of people lined up at other retail stores that morning, there was perhaps no more pathetic sight than that of two guys, sitting in lawn chairs for hours, all by themselves. Yep, it was such a good plan that no one else came. We sat there by ourselves as every employee coming to the office walked by, shaking their heads. We looked goofy.
Of course, after we got our iPhones, all was good. It is indeed everything that people say. After years on a Blackberry, it was very cool to see our company’s emails coming in with all their full HTML formatting, looking good…
That was now. Three months ago, those emails would have looked goofy. Month after month, we’d been pumping out emails that looked great in Outlook 2003. Then a friend of mine in the email marketing business warned me about Outlook 2007. Turns out that Microsoft’s implementation in 2007 depricated a bunch of different HTML functionality. The result is when I looked at our emails in Outlook 2007, the formatting blew up – it looked goofy. And our emails never looked quite right in GMail. And I don’t even want to think what they would have looked like on my iPhone.
What did we do?
The first thing we did was to remove all <style> commands and moved to in-line CSS. In addition, we converted everything to tables. This is the kind of stuff your web developer should be able to do.
A really cool tool we used was provided by Campaign Monitor. Their testing site allows you to pit your email against virtually every web, thick and mobile email client. For the micro business, this is a god-send. You literally get something that looks like the screen shot below… Do up your template and test it – it only costs $10 a shot.
So – if you haven’t done testing on what your emails look like, how do you know you don’t look goofy?
C.
Posted in E-mail, Email | 1 Comment »
Last post, I discussed the scourge of evil “free” offers and how they can be used for good… But how do you get that message to your users. Especially with email where you always run the danger of being tagged as a spammer?
