We at Stripo recently held a webinar with two rock stars of the email world: Mark Robbins, a software engineer at Parcel.io, and Dmytro Kudrenko, the founder and CEO of Stripo. The central theme of the entire webinar was the technical state of email marketing, the problems associated with it, and whether marketers should be tech-savvy or not.
So, let's remember all the important highlights and insights discussed to keep you on the cutting edge of email marketing's technical side.
Non-standardization is a problem
Today, there is a lack of technical standards in the email industry. Each email platform and email client has its own vision for the future of email marketing in general and email in particular. Such versatility in visions leads to the following:
- all ESPs, email builders, email clients, and other email creation tools have different rules for coding emails and rendering them, which makes it hard to design an email that renders as planned across all email clients (especially without coding);
- making emails compatible with screen readers, which often requires code adjustments, is tough because not all platforms allow marketers to edit the email code when needed;
- interactive elements work differently or are completely cut out of the code by the platforms themselves, so it's important to have good fallback solutions in emails.
All this leads to the fact that marketers need to change a lot in email code, simplifying and adding many conditions to the code for each case. This is difficult to do without access to the code.
However, even though some email marketers skip interactivity, making emails accessible is essential.
Email accessibility suffers from a lack of standards
If your email is not accessible, your email is broken.
Mark Robbins,
It’s worth starting with the fact that Mark and the Email Markup Consortium revealed a not-very-rosy fact for all of us: 99.97% of emails sent do not meet accessibility requirements due to imperfect code.
Email accessibility has become a big email trend. However, a lack of standards, proper email testing, and locked email code from marketers stop it from flourishing to the fullest. Some platforms are trying to overcome this tendency on their own. For example, we at Stripo made a big accessibility update on making all emails (and their code) that users create in our editor fully compatible with screen readers. However, this is just a drop in the ocean.
Only with the advent of email standards and thorough accessibility testing by marketers can we change the situation.
Building email standards is a must
Raising awareness among email platforms and pointing them to the lack of technical standards is vital for improving things. Each marketer can notify their platform in various ways that their created emails do not meet accessibility requirements, and they have no access to email code to fix these things manually on their own. Send them emails, mention it in reviews or comments under the videos. Customer reviews can do miracles.
In addition, it is worth raising awareness within the email marketing team as well. Ask technicians and managers to spend more time on accessibility. Everyone can contribute to solving a global problem.
Become better email technicians to solve problems
At the moment, while there is no global progress in building technical standards, marketers should think about delving into the technical part of creating emails. This doesn’t mean that every email marketer should become a programmer with ten years of experience and code emails from scratch. However, Mark advices to start understanding the email code with basics will be a great plus.
Starting with foundations would be enough for now. Figure out what is HTML. What is CSS? Why is email code different from web code? Look at some of those basic, fundamental things like syntax explanations and understanding how the code is put together. These things will help you know how emails work, how to fix little problems and how to clearly communicate with programmers knowing their capabilities.
The best places and tools to start your email programming journey are:
- Parcel lessons from the coding guru Mark Robbins;
- Email Resources, email coding courses;
- ChatGPT can help you solve simple problems and find answers to basic questions (but rely on it partially, as it lacks understanding some email coding nuances).
Wrapping up
This was a great webinar. More than an hour of valuable insights and tips from email marketing gurus will help marketers understand there is a problem with lack of technical standards in email marketing, that impact accessibility, interactivity and force marketers to be more tech-savvy. And we revealed you how to easily start your knowledge gaining. Knowing the basics of coding will open up new dimensions of understanding how emails work, allow you to solve problems yourself, and also take an active part in creating advanced emails.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for more experts on our webinars to stay on the cutting edge of email marketing.
0 comments