Golden Leads

A few days ago a few of the Listrak guys were talking about the current relevancy of the text part within an email campaign.  This topic grew more attention on my desk as the Email Experience Council just released their 2007 Rendering Report this week.  The history of the text part has its roots in the MIME specifications which we won’t go into, however from a marketer’s perspective has been used primarily for legacy versions of the AOL client and certain installations of Lotus Notes.

The graph below shows some research that we did looking at over 500,000 email campaigns over 5 years time.  Our  key indicator of text part usage is people who clicked a link within a text part of a campaign.  Our thought process is that if they can’t see the text part (ie, the HTML part rendered) then they can’t click the link, thus showing a lower click through rate.  The only potential flaw in this logic is that our data assumes that marketers include links in both the text part and the HTML part.  We know for sure, however, that some marketers are doing away with the creation of either a partial or even full text part version within the campaign opting only for the HTML part.  The flip side of the coin is that some marketers represented in this data do not use an HTML part and only send campaigns in the text.

The graph pretty much speaks for itself.  From our perspective, the usage of text links continues to fall.  We attribute this to the almost entire phasing out of legacy AOL clients not supporting HTML as well as many Lotus Notes-based organizations switching to Exchange Server and Outlook.

The bottom line from Listrak:  Text Part viewership is so low that we recommend providing only a link to the HTML version in your text part.  Take the time that you would have spent on your text part and use it to test better subject lines.

Enjoy the data.  –Ross

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.