Errors hamper nearly half of HTML e-mail messages, study says

Although promotional HTML e-mail has grown in popularity as a marketing tool, many retailers and other companies send e-mail marketing messages with broken graphics and other errors, according to a study by Silverpop Systems, an e-mail technology vendor. It notes that 13% of HTML e-mail is virtually unreadable. But fixing these errors, marketers can improve response rates 10-40%, Silverpop said.

Silverop, which based its findings on an analysis of 1,327 HTML e-mail messages sent by 419 companies, also noted that 42% of promotional HTML e-mail contains at least some errors. The study focused on companies from nine industries: retail, financial services, travel-and-leisure, media-and-entertainment, technology, consumer goods, health care, automotive and food-and-beverage.

In its study, “The Broken Link: What Do Recipients Really See?” Silverpop indicates that many companies are unaware of how to best leverage e-mail as a selling tool. For example, it said, the majority of the companies it contacted, or more than 300 out 419, did not make e-mail sign-ups available to browsers who were not already customers.

Silverpop also noted that companies need to be aware that there are hundreds of different and constantly changing combinations of e-mail vendors, covering areas such as operating systems, ISP mail systems and browsers, and that the wrong combination can adversely affect how messages appear in a recipient’s inbox.

Its other findings include:
-- E-mail platforms with the highest percentages of errors in HTML messages were AOL 4.0 (100%) and Lotus Notes 5.0 (80%). Others included in the study were AOL 6.0 (30%), Hotmail (25%), Outlook 2000 (22%), Eudora 5.0 (22%), Yahoo (19%) and EarthLink (17%).
-- 25% of e-mail messages landed in bulk mail folders at Yahoo and Hotmail that are designed to collect what the recipient considers to be spam.
-- 27% of e-mail messages were personalized for the recipient, including information such as the recipient’s name and e-mail address.