From: The Land of Nod

Subject Line: Try the new and improved landofnod.com.

Date: Thursday, May 11, 2006


From: Neiman Marcus

Subject Line: MARC by Marc Jacobs: Shop fall & win a wardrobe

Date: Tuesday, May 16, 2006


Ouch! While I often see minor footer splits and menu misalignments, this week we’ve got some serious technical incompatibility coming from Land of Nod and Neiman Marcus.


While I applaud Neiman Marcus for attempting to push the envelope in email creative implementation, I’d advise everyone to wait on incorporating Flash into their email campaigns until email browsers can actually handle it. I’m glad Nieman included a “Have trouble viewing the email below? Click here!” link at the top of the message so I could see a hosted version of the Flash in a browser window (Everyone should be doing this regardless of whether or not you use Flash, by the way!), however, from my experience, only around 1% of folks click this link. Rather than trying to implement an email in Flash, I’d recommend doing a flat design and including a link within the creative to view an interative feature.


Land of Nod’s glitch was particularly embarassing due to the context. The subject line invites us to “Try the new and improved landofnod.com.”, but, because of an HTML coding error, all Mac users see is a blank white screen! Dang! Again, we are able to see the actual campaign if we click on the “View this email in a browser window.” link, but for the 99% of folks who don’t click that link, this is not only a lost chance to tout new features, but a particularly embarassing foobar.


Let’s all make sure to test all of our email campaigns in multiple email programs, in Safari, IE, Netscape, Firefox, Camino and Opera browsers, and on Mac and PC platforms.