Slideshow Eblasts and Outlook 2007

Upgraded to Outlook 2007 recently? Besides some basic layout changes and extra features some major changes happened under the skin. Many of which will not affect you but they have had a profound effect on email marketing.

Many realtors in Sarasota and beyond are familiar with eblasts which have rotating images, often called slideshow eblasts. These eblasts rely on an image type known as an Animated Gif. Essentially this is an image which contains multiple images are used to create an animation. This technology has become a web standard and has been around since 1987. Because of the new rendering engine used in Outlook 2007 these slideshow eblasts now show 1 static image. This has many realtors questioning the continued effectiveness of these eblasts.

This post is to address the core concern of how this change will affect real estate email marketing. The full effects of the upgrade to Outlook 2007 will be outlined in a later post.

Gwun believe that the use of animated gifs will continue to be the most effective way of displaying multiple images of one property. The numerous benefits outweigh the limited drawbacks.

From the data collected from over 1,000 eblasts we found that slideshow eblasts continually outperform static image eblasts in both Open Rate and Click Through rate.

After analyzing the data it became apparent that slideshow eblasts are more effective at driving traffic to a website than standard fixed image eblasts.

Let’s face it the core goal of eblast is to generate leads or interest in your property. So if the eblast doesn’t make your target audience pick up the phone and call it should successfully drive traffic to your website. We have found slideshow eblasts do exactly that.

If you are worried about static images in Outlook 2007 we recommend that you optimize your images so that the first image in the animation sequence is the best image. This image will be the only image shown within Outlook 2007.

It is also good to remember that anyone who uses an email client other than Outlook 2007 such as Outlook 2003 or a webmail client will continue to receive slideshow eblasts as they are intended to be seen.

Please feel free to post your comments or questions below.