ESP EmailLabs says it’s time for B2C marketers to through out their old templates and replace them with longer, narrower versions.
The betas of both Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s online e-mail clients enable the preview pane by default but these spaces are much smaller than what consumers were hitherto used to. Hence, e-mailers are advised to put calls-to-action and other critical information at the top of messages.
“B-to-C marketers who want big results had better start thinking small,” said Stefan Pollard, the company’s director of consulting services and ClickZ’s e-mail deliverability columnist. “Many are completely unaware that preview panes and automatically blocked images can make their current design templates virtually unreadable. If they were to use a third-party rendering tool to actually test how their e-mails look in consumers’ inboxes, they might be shocked.”
More reasoning is in a press release, but I’m guessing Stefan’s going to provide additional insight in his next column.