Newsberry

View email client statistics with Fingerprint

This entry was posted on September 17, 2009 by Natalie Nagele and is filed under News and Tips.

Ever wondered what email clients your subscribers use to open emails? There are so many (Gmail, Outlook, MSN, etc) and they all render HTML differently, so knowing what your subscribers are using may be important when designing custom HTML emails. This will help you design based on the most popular clients in your subscriber base.

Identify the problem

When you are designing an HTML email, you may want to know if it’s worth changing things around for a particular email cleint. That’s what a Newsberry customer recently asked themselves. Software Test & Performance Collaborative, a community for test and quality assurance professionals, found that their newly designed email was not showing up nicely in Outlook 2007. The changes that were required were drastic and it would have to be a change that would affect everyone (Gmail, Outlook 2003, etc). Before taking this step, they wanted to figure out if it was worth it.

Understanding your subscriber base

The first thing they did was try to determine the penetration Outlook 2007 has in the business community. While the statistics vary, a study performed in late 2008 showed that only 7% use it. That was great news, but obviously a lot can change in a year and it depends on your list. That’s when we directed them to use this great tool, Fingerprint, from the people that brought you Litmus. Their application lets you track your campaign to see what email clients your specific subscribers are using.

So, STPCollaborative signed up for an account and tried it out. They chose a campaign that was going out to all of their subscribers (not a sublist) and added the simple line of code into the HTML (generated in Fingerprint). That’s it. The campaign went out through Newsberry as usual.

Viewing the results

When the final results came in (we waited the full 14 hours), the numbers were much different than we thought. Of the subscribers who opened that particular campaign, 53% were using Outlook, and 21% were using Outlook 2007. That quickly answered the question, a redesign was definitely necessary so as not to ignore such a large group of people.

Final Thoughts

If you are using our Templates, be assured that we have tested them in all clients and, unless you do something drastic while editing, should show up fine in Outlook 2007 (and others). Also, if your usage for a certain mail client isn’t high, you may decide it’s not important to make any changes. For STP Collaborative, they made changes by simplifying the template and removing backgrounds (which Outlook 2007 may strip).

If you are using your own HTML, we highly recommend both Litmus and Fingerprint to review your campaigns and learn more about your subscribers.