The iPad and what it means for Email Marketing
Today, the iPad was released in the UK. Whilst everyone rushes out to buy one, I’ve complied a brief summary of what this new platform means for email marketers. Opportunities, considerations and constraints; It’s all here.
Apple iPad
A new day, a new platform
The iPad is not a laptop and although many have accused it as simply being an iPhone with elephantiasis, the iPad certainly isn’t a mobile or cell phone either. This is the start of a new platform in which users will consume content in a completely new way. It’s being labeled by some as ‘feet up’ technology’ which says it all really. The iPad is most likely to find itself on the sofa as a casual alternative to the laptop, which means it is likely to be used slightly differently to a laptop. This is where we’ll see the opportunities that this new platform brings us.
Content
We all know that Steve Jobs has refused to support Flash on iPhone or iPad but content opportunities are endless. Sky have already launched a mobile TV iPad application that means users can watch channels such as Sky Sports on their iPad as long as they have a Wifi or 3G connection. The 9.7 inch screen does pave the way for all sorts of great stuff, and although this example isn’t directly related to email marketing, it does give a flavour of how things are changing and I would not be at all surprised to see video fully supported and working in emails in the next year or two, especially with email clients become more and more open to video content and the new technology that HTML 5 brings.
Email Rendering
If you’re already building your emails 100% to best practice guidelines, you have nothing to worry about. iPad renders emails with the Safari webkit rendering engine and if your emails are already rendering nicely in Safari, they’ll render fine in the ‘mail’ feature of the iPad. On the other hand, you need to test all of your emails and the way they render in all of the top email clients in the Safari browser on the iPad. The best ones to test to ensure that the majority of your audience don’t experience any issues or irregularities in rendering are Yahoo!, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail/Google Mail and AOL. Test these to death now and periodically test to ensure that email client changes and upgrades don’t break your emails. As always, when changes do happen in email clients and you have to amend your code, remember to roll-out the new HTML rules across all of your triggered activity too.
Are there any urgent changes that you need to make?
In short, the answer at the date of writing this is categorically ‘no’. iPad will make preview panes bigger and it will have a bearing on how your emails are interacted with in some scenarios, but you shouldn’t be tempted to make any changes to your creative unless ‘feet up’ devices end up dominating the market, and that will take years to happen, if ever.
The bottom line…
I would encourage all email marketers to get hold of an iPad and start testing. You need to see how your emails look on this new device and make sure that they are rendering correctly. Over the next few years we are going to see a lot of changes that will affect mobile, feet-up and computer-based email, so hold on tight because this really is just the beginning.
[...] The iPad and what it means for email marketing Today, the iPad was released in the UK. Whilst everyone rushes out to buy one, I’ve complied a brief summary of what this new platform means for email marketers. Opportunities, considerations and constraints; It’s all here. [...]
[...] iPad, and what it means for Email Marketing [...]
I don’t think that buying an iPad is 100% necessary for testing your emails… yet. You can test on Safari / Apple Mail on your personal computer and the results will be the same. Until HTML5 becomes much more prominent in email (which is inevitable), save your $400.
But with the abundance of smartphones and devices such as the iPad, and the emerging popularity of HTML5… the future is very exciting for email marketing.