We asked three of our expert designers to share their theories on why horizontal layouts work, and what other best practices and tricks of the trade they incorporate into their creatives to bolster their performance.

Senior Graphic Designer Roald Ansano recounts his inspiration for the unique layout:

“The first time I realized the potential of horizontal designs I was reviewing a retail client’s summer campaign. It was designed like a wide postcard, with products you could scroll left to right to look at. If the same products had been laid out in a normal template, I would’ve just scrolled up and down, out of habit. But I was already doing something different from the norm, so it kept me interested.”

What’s the tactical approach in designing these emails?

“As with traditional vertical emails, you must concentrate on the 420 pixel “above the fold” area. But for horizontals, you stress the total viewable width of 720 pixels. This is the average measurement we use to determine when the user needs to start scrolling horizontally to view more content. The important information must appear there, but there can’t be too much to take in, or it becomes overwhelming. The most important thing is to use cues that get the viewer’s attention and indicate that there’s more to the right. You must encourage interaction with the viewer.”

Graphic Designer Riko Austria explains the process further:

“To entice the viewer to scroll to the right, we incorporate graphical elements that provide a horizontal “visual flow” to the email, such as a long header image, a call-to-action, a product description, or a lifestyle shot that is intentionally cut off until you move right. It’s like a visual ‘teaser.’ That convinces the viewer to scroll to see more.”

Riko enjoys the challenge horizontal emails represent.

“It’s something new to bring to the table; it’s something new to master and test. There are different methods to use when designing. And, it’s the perfect time for this to come out, now that most monitors are wide screen. It’s a perfect technological fit.”

Graphic Designer Kathy Jankovic has been busy redesigning vertical emails into horizontal versions for the last couple of months:

“We like to give the client both options, and we’re doing testing to see what performs better. I’m looking forward to seeing the testing data and working more with horizontal designs.”

With each project, Kathy feels she comes closer to perfecting the art of these designs.

“I’m always thinking about ways to make the initial presentation, and user interaction more engaging, such as using a continuous image, and making sure content doesn’t end before the 720 pixel mark. One of the challenges for me, as a designer, is that the horizontal plane can go up to 2000 pixels (standard total width measurement used by several email clients), so I have to know when to end the design. With horizontals, too much right-left movement isn’t good. Viewers lose focus and then interest. It’s very much about using your instincts, while letting the design define the horizontal end.”

Time and testing will tell if the horizontal approach is a surefire hit, but so far, all signs point to yes.

One of the most important issues for email marketers is making sure the message makes it to the “inbox” of the intended recipient. An often overlooked key aspect of mailing delivery — in addition to IP reputation — is the actual subject line of the email. Not only does the subject line play an important role in getting delivered, it is imperative to accomplish the main objective of getting your marketing message opened and read by the user and keeping your list active. As such, here are some subject line best practices to follow to ensure your legitimate email is not filtered as spam.

• A subject line should be as short and descriptive as possible. The subject line should be informative and true. If your from name and address are not branded, the subject line should also provide assurance that the email comes from a trusted source. A general rule of thumb is to keep subject lines between 30-50 characters.
• A strong offer can be put right in the subject line. Evaluate your content to understand the likelihood of your message hitting spam filters, particularly if a high percentage of your list is at corporate domains. Corporate domains rely more on phrases or words that have been “tainted” by the spamming community. The major web-based email clients focus on your reputation more than your content.
• The from name and address can be as important as the subject line. A strong offer can be put right in the subject line, but it is important to use punctuation and grammar carefully to ensure that you are not perceived to be a spammer by the receiving ISP.
• The ‘from’ name and subject line should work in tandem. The ‘from’ line should communicate who you are as the sender. Do your best to not change this entry frequently and make it recognizable so that recipients understand that the email was sent by a reliable source.
• If you are cross promoting a sister brand, use the subject line to introduce the sister brand and do not change the ‘from’ address of the originally subscribed-to brand. Any other ‘from’ address is likely to increase complaints. For more information on cross promoting sister brands, please see our recent post on promoting sister brands.

That said, spammers use various tactics to fool people into opening their emails. Spammers often use words that announce a big incentive or urgency. We suggest testing certain keywords or alternative words to optimize your subject lines.

• Some key words and phrases such as “act now,” “trial,” “quote,” and “guarantee” can be tested against “complimentary,” “estimate,” “be our guest,” and “giveaway.”
• While “Free” performs well in subject lines (see Experian CheetahMail’s Free Shipping Report) you might try using “our treat” or “on the house” to see what works best for your brand.
• Avoid excessive punctuation — exclamation points, multiple periods (…), dollar signs ($$), etc.
• In the past putting full words in ALL CAPS was considered equivalent to shouting. Using all caps is a practice used by spammers. Test the use of all caps and monitor any drops in open rates potentially due to filtering.
• Using ‘Re:’ at the beginning of a subject line falsely leads the recipient to think the email is a reply to a previous email. This is a misleading tactic. This tactic is not CAN-SPAM compliant and creates a poor customer experience. If the recipient feels duped into opening an email, you might see an increase in abuse rates or unsubscribe requests.

Just a few little words/phrases in your subject line can make or break the success of your email marketing campaign, not just by impacting open rates but affecting deliverability too. To learn what works best, test. Following these subject line best practices can save your client from losing both excellent reputation and good subscribers.

• Who is responsible for all of the data?
• What problems exist with the data?
• What requirements need to be in place for quality to be at its best?
• Can a return on investment be quantified in such a case?

This is where Data Quality Management (DQM) comes into play. The goal of DQM is to establish roles, responsibilities, policies and processes to attack data quality issues. Cooperation and discipline is essential. It is important that everyone recognizes problems with the data and participates in determining a solution. Specifically, the IT department plays a major part in DQM, for they are in charge of the overall environment of the architecture, systems, databases, etc. Once problems are recognized and everyone’s on board, standards can be set. If you’re goal is to have a perfect database, you’ve set your expectations too high. We must all realize there is no such thing as a perfect, “spot-less” database. Data quality is a balance between accuracy and completeness. It is impossible to have data that is 100% accurate and 100% complete. We often find that we must sacrifice one or the other. Depending on the data’s value, one can make the decision to keep a record with an error or toss it.

Managing data quality is a continuous process that needs to be re-visited frequently. It is important to update your data in a real-time fashion. If you’re worried about the costs of managing your data, you shouldn’t be. Quality is free; it is the “unquality” that costs money.

Fraud prevention has been has been an industry concern for awhile now. As technology advances, so do criminals and consumers who set up fraudulent accounts in order to over bid, over order, or scam retailers. Typically, internet retailers have put certain software in place to reduce fraud. However, many are now looking towards address verification to help solve the problem.

We’re seeing a trend of companies turning to address verification vendors to help put a stop to the problem before it starts.

Taking the example of online retailers who use a “bidding” method to buy products, fraud prevention comes into play not only when making sure a consumer isn’t able to place more than one bid, but also maintaining the integrity of the website. People tend to get frustrated if they take the time to bid on an item, yet never win seem to win. This can result in consumer frustration and drop off. Capturing a verified physical address can help solve this problem by reducing duplicate accounts ensuring that a consumer is only able to bid once.

Interested in learning more about address verification services? View the latest offerings from Experian QAS.

This handy reference helps HTML coders quickly establish the cause of an error and outlines guidelines for proper email coding.

Why are HTML Errors in Emails Common?

Most issues are simply due to messy code. Very often, code gets re-used on a regular basis to deploy campaigns where the content and images are continually being updated and moved around. This can lead to unintentional duplication or omission of HTML tags, and QA oversights.

There’s also the matter of which email client (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2007, etc.) you’re viewing the code. Knowledge of what works across each of the major email clients will help in determining where rendering errors are occurring and why.

Checking Code with an HTML Validator

First and foremost, use an HTML validator, like the one built into the CheetahMail application, to check your code. It reviews the code and generates a report, detailing where errors like missing HTML tags, malformed table structures and alignment issues exist in the code.

In addition, make use of QA options like Mailbox Snapshot tools which provides screenshots of what the code will look like across multiple email clients.

Across the Board:

Some coding issues tend to be universal. Here are a few of them:

• Layout is off by one pixel or pushes out past the border of the design
  This is usually due to one of the <td> width measurements exceeding the total width of the table. The widths are determined by a simple math equation involving the table cells; usually the math just needs to be corrected. If you add up the individual table cells and they don’t equal the <table>’s width, you’ve found the problem. The problem could also be from the use of CSS to format the design. Certain email clients like Outlook 2007 and Hotmail won’t understand formatting CSS (margin:1px;) and will disregard it. The use of CSS in email is not a best practice.
• Parts of a layout don’t display
  This can be due to a malformed table structure, incorrect HTML syntax, or colspans that are missing or have incorrect numerical values.
• The background image behind the HTML text repeats
  The best practice is to design your creative so it doesn’t rely on background images. If a background image must be used, leave some extra space for the HTML text to “grow” when rendered in different email clients. Since various email clients tend to add extra line-spacing to HTML text, this will allow for the table cell holding the HTML text to expand while maintaining the integrity of the design.
• HTML text isn’t aligning properly and is leaving blank areas in the creative
  Make sure to use aligning properties inside the <td> like valign and align. Without those attributes defined, the HTML text will float in the vertical middle within the <td> tag. If that doesn’t work, review how the overall table is set up, and if the <td> measurements are correct.
• HTML emails in Outlook have a mysterious “break” every 800 pixels from the top of the email down
  This is caused by the rendering engine that Outlook 2007 and 2010 are built on. Since Microsoft Word inserts an automatic page break every 11 inches, or the length of a letter size document, Outlook 2007 does the same. There’s currently no way to code around this issue without changing the design to use flat colors and white space to counteract the automatic breaking.

Email Clients and Their Personalities

Once HTML code has been developed and validated, testing can begin across the major email clients on both the MAC and PC operating platforms. To know the specific coding pitfalls of the email clients is to have reached true HTML email coding enlightenment!

Here are some examples to watch out for:

• Gmail/Yahoo!
  Known to be very finicky, Gmail will pick up on the slightest coding mistake and render the email incorrectly. Extra line-spacing is added to HTML text which can break a design. This can be controlled with the correct usage of inline styles to control how the HTML text renders. Background images should be defined within the <td> tag, and NOT within the <body> tag.
• AOL
  Form functionality like search fields and drop down boxes won’t work. Consider dynamically inserting forms based on domain, or linking to a hosted page offering forms.
• Gmail in Firefox
  Adds extra “padding” to images which causes extra white space to appear around an image’s border. You can alleviate this by adding an inline style called “style=”display:block;” to the img tag. This work-around removes the imposed padding and fixes the issue.
• Hotmail in Firefox
  The same issue mentioned above regarding Gmail in Firefox also happens in Hotmail in Firefox.



• Microsoft Outlook 07
  Most issues involving Outlook 07 have to do with it being based on the HTML rendering engine of Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is predominantly for text formatting, so it cannot interpret sophisticated code. Basically, if Microsoft Word can’t render code correctly, chances are Outlook 07 will also have trouble with it.

  • Outlook 07 has no support for background images
    This is a common problem for clients who use system text with a graphic behind it. Because Outlook 07 won’t display the background, it will just appear as a blank white space. As a quick fix, pick a color out of the design’s background and insert it as a hex color. Another option instead of using system text, is to code that section of the design as an image.
  • Animations do not work in Outlook 07
    It will only display the first frame. Because of this, it is necessary that the first frame of an animation be a significant one; if the viewer is only capable of seeing the first frame, it needs to capture the basic idea of the message.

  Adhering to these simple guidelines will ensure your code will be presented properly across the major email clients. Now get coding!

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