Since our June 26 webinar is an advanced session on email marketing with Loren McDonald from Silverpop co-presenting, I thought I would take a minute to share an awesome ”before and after” email case study featuring Sitebrand client, Legendary Whitetails. The study isn’t hot of the press; in fact it was picked up by MarketingSherpa back in March.  But you know what, the findings are highly relevant and there’s still a lot of learnings to be learned! According to the Email Experience Council’s recently published “Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study”, a shocking 53% of marketing execs say they are NOT factoring the realities of “images off” into their email designs. Call me crazy, but there’s a lot of money being left on the table! Let me explain why…

Very simply, this case study zeroes in on the impact of an email design’s ratio of HTML to text…especially as it relates to deliverability and response rates…which of course lead to revenue.

For this study, we did an A/B split test: the retailer’s image-based campaign vs. a nearly identical ‘email-optimized’ version which factors in best practices for preview pane/image blocking software.

KISS (Keep it simple, silly!) was the driving factor behind the creative strategy for this campaign. The message was simple and compelling “Free shipping for a limited time”; therefore the creative was simple and straightforward, using common look and feel elements from the web and previous campaigns. The only difference between the two versions was that text from the optimized version was coded in HTML (not images) in order to render properly even when images were disabled. In the screenshots below, you can see how both versions appear with images on…and then off…

While the concept, message and creative may be summed up as ’simple’, the results are nothing short of amazing. To get meaningful, accurate results, the database was randomly split into two with each containing almost 33,000 recipients.  

The optimized version received higher results across the board. Deliverability went up from 78% to 98%, opens climbed from just under 10% to over 13%, clicks went up from 3% to nearly 5%. While, aside from deliverability, the improvement may not seem too dramatic, the most important metric, conversions, were unbelievable. The ‘before email’ brought in 139 purchases at a 0.4% conversion rate. The ‘after’ version brought in a whopping 495 purchases, or 1.5% conversion rate.  This represented a revenue lift in excess of 379%.

With results like these, Legendary Whitetails could clearly see the lifts associated with optimizing emails for the inbox. And the “after” is the “always” when it comes to their email designs.

While this campaign may not be glamorous, complex or even have any bells and whistles, it does have the power of best practices and respect for the email medium backing it up. The numbers don’t lie and they show a compelling argument for what email expertise can do for a retailer’s bottom line. Unfortunately, as exposed by the EEC, many retailers are ‘behind the times’ in this area.

That said, I believe this case study and its results are another ”wake-up call” to those who’ve been ignoring or skeptical of industry expertise.

In closing, I have two questions and I encourage you to comment with your thoughts:

1. As a recipient of retail emails, are you seeing a trend towards emails that render well even with with images off or are you still receiving lots of image-heavy, direct mail style emails?
2. If your email client defaults to images off, how often do you turn images on? Never? Sometimes? Often?