Background Colors Can Help Improve Your Open Rates
Take a look at this example from Simple Shoes.
The default background colors alone—not the alt text—compelled me to display images. Which is not to say that alt text isn’t important… this email has alt text within the main call to action, which reads “Collect: Our Friends Over At Good Magazine Took Over Our Blog And Left Us With Some Really Great Stories. Check Out What They Have To Say About Water Waste, Music And Earth Day.“ but this was too long for most email clients to render. Another lesson learned in brevity with alt text.
Regardless, this email succeeds where most fail in terms of readability and eye-catchiness in email clients who block images by default.
I received this in my Gmail inbox and after testing in other major clients, this email looks the same in all but ONE email client. Can you guess which one doesn’t display correctly? Give up? Ok…
Outlook 2007:
Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.
Not every email campaign or brand can get away with using color this liberally, but most can at least try. Always remember to test your email with images off, as the majority of desktop and web clients don’t render them by default.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 03, 2011
Comments
Right, I noticed that in their code. If they had declared table row heights, it would not have looked collapsed in Outlook ‘07.
Posted by Bryan on 05/04/2011 02:20 PM
I try to design email templates that don’t rely on images, so I’ve always purposefully given images no height attribute, in order to keep the text content readable… But I’m sold on this technique, it’s a great idea, glad you noticed it.
Would love to see an A/B test prove this.
Posted by Justin on 05/05/2011 01:35 AM
Justin,
I’m glad this post helped out. I’ll try to run my own A/B test within the coming weeks. Stay tuned for my findings!
Posted by Bryan on 05/09/2011 09:29 AM
I can certainly see how this would improve conversion a lot more than other studies that I see where longer copy improves conversions. This one makes common sense since a person is more comfortable with certain color than other but the long sales copy still baffles me. Thanks for the post it was a good one!
Posted by Tony on 05/12/2011 10:32 PM
Nice. It’s a shame since the email could have had plenty of text in it. But it’s definitely one way to make lemonade out of one giant image of a lemon.
Posted by Tommy on 05/17/2011 01:45 PM
Interesting theory but applicable for image based emails. It will pass test in Outlook2007 if you would add some heights to it. Very interesting anyway
Posted by Dan on 05/04/2011 08:50 AM