Never Presume…..

Earlier this week I got a newsletter from a company that we do business with. As is common with a lot of newsletters the body of the email did not contain all of the articles, so you were invited to click through to read the rest of it.
Unfortunately clicking on any of the links led me to the company’s main page and not to the articles they were interested in readers seeing.
Why did this happen?
Putting it bluntly they presumed that we all used Internet Explorer as our primary browser!
What a wonderful assumption to make!
Imagine you have 20 thousand subscribers to a mailing list. If the mailing list is for a technical product then the percentage of users who have opted for a browser other than Internet Explorer is going to be quite high. Even if you were to conservatively estimate that 10% were users of Firefox, Opera, Safari or some other browser, then that means that 2 thousand readers won’t see your content.
If they can’t see your content they can’t read it and be enticed by your special offers, so they won’t buy!
It doesn’t take much effort to check that a newsletter’s redirect links work cross-browser (why they wouldn’t is beyond me anyway..) and the 5 minutes of testing if it means not losing 10% of your potential customers is obviously worth it.