Email Client Comparisons
Every client we work with has a unique market that supports their business. Every market is comprised of individuals who have their preferred means to send and receive email. I’ve taken a side by side comparison of 3 recent email campaigns we sent out and here are the results:
Technology
Music Industry
Corporate Office
As you can see the technology recipients lean harder towards modern email clients and operating systems. The music industry recipients tend to use free services such as Hotmail and Gmail and the corporate environment is still using Outlook by Microsoft.
This isn’t rocket science information but it is very useful to help make decisions about design style, coding practices and consideration in how simple or elaborate to make an email newsletter.
Email client testing is a standard report offered with most quality email delivery services (Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor or Mail Chimp). Using email client reporting with other tools such as Analytics can lend good insight into who are your recipients. Watch closely, learn and ensure a successful delivery that meets both your clients needs and their customers.
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Comments
I came across a Facebook group “Lotus Notes Sucks”. Pretty funny!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2236028379
My workflow would be to try and keep the HTML and CSS as lean and simple as possible. My newsletter designs are fairly straight forward and tend to stick to a relatively simple grid to avoid needing extra code.
The campaign monitor site says it well “Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.”
Campaign Monitor also offers a CSS cheatsheet to help reduce further problems and save time (I’m sure you know). http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css
Once the designs are coded I generally test them on various browsers and email clients. When I feel confident I’ll either send it or if its a more complex design I’ll run a Campaign Monitor design test for $5. The tests can really speed up the process and ensure quality delivery.
However as with all things online there is still lots to learn. As the industry starts to adopt better and more consistent standards it will make our job easier but it’s not going to happen overnight.
How about yourself? Do you have testing preferences?
Good video by Mathew Patterson – Delivering user experience to the inbox: designing for email. A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
That 4% share of Lotus Notes is scary stuff. Nothing mangles HTML quite like IBM software; they make Microsoft look standards compliant.
With these disparate results, what’s your testing workflow?