Marketing Sherpa featured a case study about Sierra Club, which involved revamping their email newsletter for better viewing in the preview pane. The resulting may not be as beautiful as the old one, but the results are what matter.

Email newsletter is an important marketing channel for Sierra Club. The team even went as far as doing extensive tests for months, which yielded a remarkable 63 percent increase in click rates over the year.

The Web team’s content building decisions began to center on would email recipients want to click this? This is exactly the opposite with many organizations, where email content is driven by the site.

The idea to revamp the newsletter came from the study data, which showed that 69 percent of Outlook email users view messages in their preview panes, Hotmail and Yahoo! users would soon follow suit.

The two big differences after the redesign:

1. Removing admin messaging from the very top - Whitelisting instructions and click to view HTML version if garbled take too much valuable space, despite their presentation in tiny type. The team at Sierra Club tried to move the information further down.
2. Tacking a Table of Contents at the top - Hess asked the design team to add a table of content section directly above the top of the old newsletter template.

During the first test, the click rates held steady. This is when they decided to carry out a full-fledged campaign because obviously while the new design didn’t help as much, at least it didn’t hurt.

The good news is that month after month their click rates began to swing upwards. The click rates had risen an additional 55 percent again, outside of the increase of reported 63 percent above.

The reason behind this is simple. Although the new look and navigation is far more usable, the audience need some time to get used to the new design, so the slump in visitor conversions — and in this case the steadiness of the click rates — was normal and exptected.

Marketing Sherpa has creatives samples of Sierra Club’s newsletters and preview pane views. Head over to their site, it is worth a look.

Comment: I will take greater click rate anytime rather than perfect design, but somehow I feel the table of content is too independent, as if it is not part of the newsletter. May be they can run with the tactics that work and redesign the newsletter to look more professional in design too.

Source: Marketing Sherpa.