I was pretty much amazed when I opened yesterday’s Email on Acid newsletter. The company’s email marketing blog rocks, and it seems their new feature Mozify is just as great. Take a look at my screenshots from their email below and you’ll know what I mean – the left one is captured with image blocking enabled (!), the right one with images loaded:
Converting images to HTML tables
As you can see, the recipient already gets an appealing look on the newsletter without the need to open it (in the sense of loading graphics). Image blocking usually affects about 50% or your subscribers. They won’t see any graphics that might help to grab their attention or raise interest. Now, it’s “tricked”.
To achieve this, the whole header image area until “Due to popular demand …” has been rastered into HTML table cells using Mozify. Clickability seems to be ensured by using an image map. The free tool, which was announced about a week ago and which is currently in beta (request access), allows email senders to
convert any image to an HTML mosaic or to formatted HTML text.
And it seems to work great:
[T]he Outrigger yielded a 376% increase in total click throughs! […] On the day after Memorial Day weekend 2012, USO.org sent a “mozified” email and saw a 36% increase in total donations raised! […]On a straight 50/50 A/B test to 60,000 recipients, Fairfax saw a 110% increase in total click throughs in areas that we optimized.
Tools and what other experience shows
This concept itself isn’t new. I re-shared some examples on emailmarketing.de (see bottom of the page) that I found on Becs Rivett’s Email Fail blog. There are already plenty of tools available on the net to achieve such effects. A very nice one, the “Image to HTML Converter for Email”, comes from STYLECampaign. (Grab it as a gift in exchange for subscribing to their newsletter.)
Anna Yeaman also posted an extensive guide on all the upsides and downsides (HTML code inflation/email weight, no support in Lotus Notes) and possible use cases. She even did a YouTube-Video that shows how to use her tool properly:
Conclusion
However, at first sight it seems that Email on Acid brought the topic to the next level with Mozify. Here is another example from their websites, which demonstrates its power. The screenshots seem to be taken from Microsoft Outlook 2007/2010:
Kudos to Email on Acid for driving email innovation.
[Tool] Bypassing image suppression in emails: Mozify! http://t.co/kNy0vB35 via @LukeAnker
[Tool] Bypassing image suppression in emails: Mozify! http://t.co/PaF4RXY0 via @lukeanker
Kudos to EmailonAcid for Mozify http://t.co/9fSkH1fp v @lukeanker
Thanks for the spotlight and the kind words Rene!
.. you’re welcome – Mozify looks really promising!
RT @stylecampaign: Kudos to EmailonAcid for Mozify http://t.co/OJZ2AIqM v @lukeanker – Thanks Anna!
RT @stylecampaign: Kudos to EmailonAcid for Mozify http://t.co/9fSkH1fp v @lukeanker
RT @stylecampaign: Kudos to EmailonAcid for Mozify http://t.co/9fSkH1fp v @lukeanker
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This looks pretty cool. I’m going to have to try this.
Bypass image blocking in emails http://t.co/UVNVEBpj
This is just a cheap trick to circumvent the customer’s preferences. If someone doesn’t want to see images, we shouldn’t be showing them any, blocky or otherwise. I can see the appeal for spammers but not for respectable companies.