If you send email to Yahoo subscribers, chances are you’ve heard of the recent rendering issues within Yahoo Classic. The email experience council’s RetailEmail blog helped identify the issue and the workaround to prevent it, while Pivotal Veracity confirmed via their testing that the coding solution listed there is indeed correct (so if you’re looking for the solution, make sure to check out the blog!)

Since we’re primarily a B2B email marketer, only 5% of our list is comprised of Yahoo addresses. However, as we prepared to send the September InSight, we figured it was a significant enough number to segment out Yahoo subscribers and include a targeted message about rendering to help combat the problem.

After creating a group called “Yahoo Subscribers” we did a simple A/B split using our random sample tool. For the “Group A” version of the Yahoo Message, we changed the “View as a Webpage” header at the top to read: Trouble viewing this message in Yahoo? Go here to view as a webpage. The “Group B” version included text within the body of the email that read: Trouble viewing this email in Yahoo? Click "View as a Webpage" found in the header. This was the only variable element in the email newsletter.

We sent the two versions off into the wild and waited to see which version generated a higher click percentage on the “View as a Webpage” link. And then we waited…and waited…and waited.

In truth, neither version generated many clicks on the “View as a Webpage” link. Certainly, the number was not significantly higher than any other email we send. In fact, rather than noticing an increase in clicks, we noticed that the overall performance of the email was pretty lackluster.

As we sat puzzling over the results, a member of our team pointed out that we rarely segment and send by domain – let alone segment out a commercial domain such as Yahoo. This revelation led to many more questions: Are our metrics low at just Yahoo? Or all commercial domains? Is it an isolated incident or a trend? Since we’re primarily a B2B sender, is it even worth the effort to try to find out?

For us, the consensus is that finding answers to these questions is a worthwhile endeavor – if for nothing else than to reconfirm that what we’re doing is working. So this month, we segmented our list by domain even further and are keeping a close eye on the performance of InSight. If the results of sending to commercial domains end up statistically significant enough to show that what we’re doing isn’t working, we’ll need to do some evaluating and testing about the envelope fields, calls-to-action, etc.

We’ll make sure to share the results of our tests with you if they’re significant. But the most exciting part about the Yahoo exercise is a reminder that we can find inspiration and direction for our email programs in the most surprising places – whether or not we’re looking for it. So the next time you find yourself wondering “What should I try next” or “Is it worth testing?” stop for a moment. Take a deep breath. The answer is almost always yes.

Cheers,
Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communications