 No matter how much your reader audience has in common, you have many mini-audiences buried in it. This article explains who your eight audiences are and how you can meet their needs.
As a marketer, you might send only one message per campaign to a highly targeted list of active recipients, but it will actually be seen by eight email audiences, each of which reads your message a different way. You need to find a message design that appeals to as many of these audiences as possible, without creating a unique message for each one.
Just to complicate matters, the audiences can shift each time. The same recipients might read your message differently from edition to edition, depending on their mood or time constraints. When you understand who your major email audiences are, you’ll know which design tactics can maximize the potential that everyone will read and comprehend your message.
These are the eight major audiences for your email audience. (Which one do you find yourself in right now?)
1. Identifiers
Identifiers have one goal: They use the “from” address and the subject line to whittle down their overcrowded inboxes as fast as possible, deleting everything they don’t want to read. Clear branding and great subject lines have the greatest impact.
Additionally, preview-pane text and the all-important first sentence can often make the difference between being read and being deleted. If your audience is primarily business people, envision readers who are trying to clear their inboxes before their first meetings of the day or while they’re waiting for a flight.
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2. & 3. Skimmers vs. Readers
Skimmers moved past identification and actually opened your message, but they want to read as fast as possible, using headlines, subheads and calls-to-action to help them decide whether to act or discard the message. When you craft your message, have all these copy points working in unison to deliver the main idea and lead the skimmer to the click-through.
Skimmers also are the ones likely to read your message without enabling images. Thus, proper design for image blocking can greatly increase your results with this audience, delivering content without the added burden of enabling images.
Readers, on the other hand, will take time to read the two to three sentences of body copy between the headline and the call to action so they can "learn more" about the specific topic the email is discussing and help them over the click-through hurdle. Often, these are the same readers that will turn images on or click the "view as a Web page” to see the email in their browsers.
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4. & 5. HTML vs. Text Readers
Without rehashing this format debate, which is as old as HTML itself, just remember why multipart MIME format has two parts: HTML for those who like images and text for those who don’t. Every email you send should include both versions. Many readers now view email on portable devices, most of which render text much better than images.
Although HTML design will take more time, spend an extra five minutes to format an attractive text version with URLs that are as clear and as short as possible. You'll be surprised at the number of clicks that come from nice- looking and easily readable text messages. Don’t just plop your HTML copy into a text format, either. Time and again, I see text copy that says “Click Here” but omits the URL. Proof both versions to ensure that all links work properly.
6. & 7. Mobile vs. Desk
Email design is finally catching up with the challenges posed by the growth in the numbers of mobile readers.
Some PDAs display HTML just fine. Others show a text version including lines and lines of ugly HTML code. It would be nice to send the right format to the right reader every time, but that’s impractical right now.
And, it’s actually beside the point, because these email addicts will most likely save your message to read later on a desktop or laptop. Few mobile readers will click through, and many will delete if something doesn’t grab their eye fast enough to flag for follow-up.
Desk readers are the ones for whom most marketers design their emails. Rendering tools like EmailAdvisor check email messages with this audience in mind. They are the majority and the most likely audience to act on your message. Anything you do to optimize your design strategy for your other audiences will also help you reach this audience more effectively.
However, you can’t focus solely on this audience, because this afternoon’s desk reader could also have skimmed through his inbox using his Web-enabled cell phone.
All the general rules of proper preview-pane design apply even more to this audience. Concentrate especially on the first sentence or two. That’s all the mobile reader will actually see while driving in traffic or checking email in the church pew.
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8. Searchers
Searchers start out as members of one of the other audiences. Somewhere along the line they saw something they liked in your message but couldn’t deal with it right away and saved your message for later.
You’re not home free however. They need to find your message again in a flash. If it doesn’t stand out, it will be overlooked or forgotten and eventually deleted.
Proper branding in the sender address and subject line – including brand name and offer – have the greatest impact. The searcher will probably remember your brand name (and might even have even filed it away in a folder someplace), but when the time comes to retrieve your message, how easily can they find you again?
Which Audience is Yours?
This is a trick question. The answer: Every single one of your readers falls into one or another audience and possibly even more than one at the same time. If you incorporate design tactics to maximize one message for multiple audiences, you multiply your chances of reaching the broadest spectrum of readers with different needs, time constraints and platforms.
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