by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
24. marzo 2011 00:00
Email design received a revitalizing shot in the arm this past week with Yahoo! Mail rolling out a new futuristic Beta, which has included a crucial tweak that has email marketers salivating.
The most significant change to note is that images displayed in the body of an email are now ON by default in the new mail client, instead of having your design automatically butchered by being bruised with uncomplimentary blank areas. The engaging graphical content that lets marketers drive their message home will now be visible as a standard setting, as opposed to cautiously prompting users to decide whether they would prefer to see those or not.
As a direct email marketer one can sometimes be irked by how an anonymous developer, bound to a desk in some arid corner of Silicon Valley, is bringing home the bacon by regularly making alterations to their inbox functionality that ultimately, though perhaps unintentionally, hurt your conversion rates and reverse-engineer your profitability.
All of that, however, is fast becoming history.
Above and beyond the customary beating of the same old electronic-age piñata - of merely working to make email clients faster, safer and easier to use in any possible way - competition with social media platforms and their bids to incorporate all channels into one seamless client is forcing email service providers to follow suit and change how they operate and evolve. Blunting down the blows from Facebook’s favorite tirade on how limiting email clients are, these same companies are drawing new battle plans around the trend of messaging-platform agnosticism.
For once they are getting it right. The tides are turning for bulk email marketing in that HTML newsletter services are finally departing from having to be subjective to major mailing clients and amend their methods after update cycles. Innovative companies such as Yahoo! are taking steps in enveloping the internet user-experience as a whole, playing along with popular services to help close the gap to the population density of social media platforms.
Pundits who have been partial to pounding the “email is dead” drum should become systematically less vocal as email services re-invent themselves. All we know is we can’t wait to see how the next big move will benefit the bulk marketing world.
