Acceleral

Last month I received an email from MYOB that rendered in Outlook as a series of grey boxes each containing the text :

"Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet. Can’t see the images in this email? Make sure your browser is set-up to view/download images.”

I suspect that it will be familiar to Outlook users – and other email system users as well – and it’s Number 1 on my list of email campaign naughty’s.

The MYOB email as it appeared in my inbox

Did I bother to “set-up to view/download images”?

Nope!

Did I click the link that said “Can't see this email? Click here to view online.”

Nope!

So, what did I do...I ignored the email.

And based on my experience sending lead generation emails, I’m guessing that’s the default response from most recipients of emails that are set up to drag images from a corporate server somewhere in the Internet.

Now I knew from previous MYOB emails that buried somewhere on the page there would be a single line of text that explained why I might find it of interest, but basically, I did not care. It was too much trouble to find. Which sounds harsh, but it’s a critical lesson for email marketeers to take on board:

Customers are Lazy

The why of this is irrelevant, the acceptance of it not so.

So, a number of years ago I had a stoush with Yahoo! because they insisted that an expensive outbound email campaign from their subscriber database include linked, rather than embedded, images.

Apparently, their email service could not cope sending out 7,000-odd emails with a 250Kb JPG attached. At least, that was the story the sales guy told me on the phone.

I suspected at the time (and suspect to this day) that the real reason was that linked pictures make it easier to track user activity. Because by accepting the “Click here to download pictures” option that Outlook allows, the sender can capture recipients who bother to actually ‘open’ the email content.

Which suggests that the statistic means something to marketeers, and that’s where I enter with a contrary position, which is that knowing how many recipients download pictures doesn’t mean anything other than that they downloaded the pictures.

The real metric is how many recipients are motivated to act on the email – click through to an associated landing page, or call the hot-line number, for example.

And to know what to do, they have to see the content, so why place a hurdle in their way?

Forcing the user to take action before they’ve even seen what you’re selling seems the height of optimism to me. It’s like forcing retail customers to unpick the lock on your front door before you’ll let them into the shop.

So what to do?

Remember that customers are lazy. Send them emails with embedded pictures so they can easily see what you are spruiking. And start counting what matters – conversions from the email, not delivery of the email.

 

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PS: For the record, as you can see below, the content of that MYOB email looked pretty good when I downloaded the picutures, but honestly, I would not have downloaded it if I wasn’t writing this article! And interestingly, it includes an “Upgrade Now” action button, and if I was marketing in MYOB, getting customers to click it is the only thing I would be interested in.

The MYOB email in all its glory