Retail email rendering Benchmark Study.

The Email Experience Council (eec), the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), announced the release of its “Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study.” The new study examines the email design practices of 104 top online retailers tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot , and examines their performance in an images-off email environment. It also includes the results of a survey of 472 marketers regarding rendering issues, conducted in conjunction with SubscriberMail, the sponsor of this study.

“Increasingly, images are being blocked by default by email and webmail clients, changing the game for B-to-C marketers, many of whom have become accustomed to designing emails that are composed mostly of images,” said Jeanniey Mullen, eec founder and a chief marketing officer at Zinio. “The findings of this 41-page study should be extremely valuable to retailers, service companies, and other B-to-C companies who are looking for new ideas on how to make their email designs more effective in the current environment.”

“The results of this study underscore the importance of proactively designing email to compensate for image suppression,” said Jordan Ayan, CEO of SubscriberMail. “Specifically, email marketers must design emails to work with and without images present and test to ensure optimal image rendering. Marketers whose design accounted for image suppression reported impressive lifts in key performance areas. Still, a significant percent of email marketers realize this issue, yet fail to take action to address it.”

Commenting on the eec study, DMA Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan, Ph.D., said, “The email environment is constantly evolving, constantly challenging marketers to keep up with the latest best practices. Rendering within email clients and on mobile devices is currently one of those major challenges — and conquering these can make a significant difference to the success of a marketer’s email program.”

“By optimizing emails for image suppression, double-digit percentage improvements are possible,” said Chad White, the eec’s director of retail insights and editor-at-large, founder of RetailEmail.Blogspot, and the study’s author. “So there’s ample incentive for marketers to follow the leaders and redesign their templates and alter their design processes.”

The new study, which is available in the eec’s Whitepaper Room http://www.emailexperience.org/Login-Whitepaper-Room/> , found that 23 percent of retailers send emails that are completely unintelligible when images are blocked. Of the 77 percent that sent intelligible emails, there were significant variations in clarity based on their use of HTML text and alt tags.

For instance, only 42 percent of retailers designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63 percent of retailers used alt tags on their images adequately or extensively. A marketer’s use of HTML text and alt tags are major determinants of the intelligibility of their emails.

Findings from the eec’s Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study include:

· 14 percent of retailers compose their navigation bars with HTML text rather than images.

· 3 percent of retailers used HTML call-to-action buttons rather than images.

· 88 percent of retailers include a “click to view” link in their preheader text.

· 63 percent of retailers include whitelisting instructions in their preheader text.

· The emails from only 21 percent of retailers displayed meaningful snippet text.

The new eec study can be purchased for $219 by visiting the eec’s Whitepaper Room at http://www.emailexperience.org/Login-Whitepaper-Room. Members of the eec may obtain the report at a discounted rate.

For more information at http://www.emailexperience.org>.