The blog post is based on data gathered after Gmail did image caching.
https://litmus.com/blog/gmail-data-analysis-reveals-image-blocking-affects-43-of-emails
Yup, never done it that way. Outlook is not a large enough market share to lose out on the benefits of responsive for our audience.
I don't use responsys, but I figure most ESPs these days can automate this and host it for you so you are never getting the url and pasting them in. Negative from an SEO perspective, but for my company all of our emails are personalized to the point where a manual view in browser is pointless.
Hi Andrew,
Sorry for the delay responding. I think it depends entirely on how many transactional emails you have, and how you check your metrics. If you're doing a lot of different trigged campaigns, you'll want verbose names so you can keep them all separate. I prefer verbose naming so I can tell exactly what the campaign is without documenting them and referring to a sheet.
On my end, we do brand-date-(description)-language, so I can filter between brands easily.
I'm generally more interested in how the links within emails are tagged. I like to be able to track things across brands and channels, so all of our links are tagged by type of link (image, text, button), value of link (goal, secondary, utility), and link description.
For example, I'll use
gl-img-hero-shot
gl-btn-learn-more
sd-txt-more-information
sd-img-logo
ut-txt-footer-unsubscribe
Which let's me look at all of our logo clicks across all campaigns, or goal vs secondary clicks, whatever I'd like to break down the actions by.
I'd look into the research around non-image opens.
I can't remember the exact number but when gmail enabled images on by default there was lots of discussion about this. I believe Litmus crunched the numbers and based on the changes in opens, estimated that 43 - 47% of emails are opened without images turned on. I don't know about you, but I want that 40+% to get a better experience than alt text.
Hi Andrew,
Do you mean email naming conventions, tagging links within emails, or both?
Watching this closely – I keep trying these but I've never gotten far enough to make it totally worthwhile. I need partials, html variables, and logic that lets me choose partials depending on variables. Bonus points if I can read the filename to set variables.
While I'm wishing: I'd love to scale it to other team members, and being cross-platform would be wonderful too.
All that said, I'm also wondering if I should move away from my complex system and find something more visual and shift the team into people who maintain templates and people who build emails with a wysiwyg tool.
I'm very open to workflow suggestions. Hoping to kick the tires on taxiforemail soon.
Cheers,
Nathan
I don't want to dwell too much on the mistakes of the past (images on dev server, broken personlization, forgetting to translate a line in an email), but instead focus on the learning from mistakes aspect.
I think you have to recognize there are no undos with email marketing, so the best thing you can do is be insane about testing and try to build failsafes into your campaigns.
For example, every email we deploy in my company gets tested by at least 2 people. Every month I receive copies of every transactional email to make sure everything is still working as expected. We have a stakeholder list who receive emails up to 24h ahead of time to try to catch that one typo that everyone else missed.
Also, automate your workflow as much as possible to avoid introducing errors. Let's make our computers do the heavy lifting for us!