Include Tab/Collapse Scroll in email newsletter

[sweety_singh]

Hi all,

We are new to Marketo and want to include tab or collapse scroll, if possible, in my newsletter email. We tried using anchor tag but still scrolling the newsletter is too much. As we can't use scripts in email we are not able to include already existing tab code or collapse scroll. Can someone suggest us alternative method to decrease the scrolling or better display of newsletter? #Tab #CollapseScroll

What we have tried is here in the email:

Read more Read Less collapse using js:https://codepen.io/royketelaar/pen/avWxve 

Read more Read Less collapse using css & HTML also not working

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hi Sweety,

While this functionality is kind of possible in email, it's really important to understand that email is complicated and therefore features like this are also complicated (see https://nation.marketo.com/community/champion/blog/2019/05/30/5-email-myths-you-need-to-dispell?sr=s...‌). Email Monks have some good examples of ways they've been able to achieve this (see https://emailmonks.com/explore-accordion.html) but these features will only function effectively on some email clients - so it'd be really beneficial to understand how different email clients are represented in your database before investing too much in developing functionality that may only work for 20% of them.

I would argue instead that you're likely to be better of investing the time it would take to develop, implement and test this functionality instead into designing a newsletter that resolves a lot of your length issues in a way that benefits all of your readers - there's a big difference between long in terms of pixel height and long in terms of word count/content sections. If your newsletter is overly long because of the volume of content, finding ways to shorten the copy, link out of the email for more info, change the priority on different sections and give some areas less real estate in the email, give things more room so they feel less crammed, etc, can make a big difference to the performance of the email. Really Good Emails is a great resource to see how lots of companies are doing long emails in a way that's actually highly effective). 

Hope that's helpful and maybe some food for thought

P.S., for future reference, you're better to set posts like this as a question rather than a discussion as you're more likely to generate a response from community, and are able to mark answers as correct to help others with similar questions.

[sweety_singh]

Hi Grace,

Thank You for your response. We have focused majorly on the email to to be rendered in outlook and lotus notes. As you suggested about really good emails we are using those templates. Along with that we are even aware of mailbakery.com but none of them solves our problem. It would be helpful if you suggest us some way to display long contents in small areas.

P.S. : As we are new to marketo we did try posting this question as a question rather than discussion but we not able to get response so kept in discussion as it is urgent requirement.

[SanfordWhiteman]

As we are new to marketo we did try posting this question as a question rather than discussion but we not able to get response so kept in discussion as it is urgent requirement.

Questions are more likely to get answers, not less... a discussion makes your need appear less urgent, not more!

In any case, Grace has answered the question to the fullest of our ability in 2019. There's no magic bullet: accordion effects are simply not part of Outlook's world, and your time would be better spent ensuring that messages look good with images disabled (remember, that's the default in Outlook).

For Notes, within the Notes app itself, there's explicit support for collapsible sections. Maybe you can pass the right markup in for those Notes users over SMTP, but you'd have to be very careful with fallbacks.

[Grace_Brebner3]

Yep, what Sandy said. 

To this point:

It would be helpful if you suggest us some way to display long contents in small areas.

All of my initial suggestions could assist you with this. Given the limitations of email and particularly the inherent challenges of Outlook - I'd first start with being concise with your in-email copy, and then linking out of the email to your website for more information (this is also typically the easiest to implement). Accordions are cool if you can make them work, but if other areas of your email are fundamentally not best practice... there's a limit to the impact they'd have - to steal Sandy's phrasing: there's no magic bullet.

Beyond that, it's hard for us to give more specific advice without actually seeing what it is that you're currently doing - currently we don't have a point of reference for specific details that you could change. The community can only provide specific advice if it has specific information - if that's the advice you're looking for, we'd encourage you to provide screenshots and be very explicit about exactly what problems you are trying to solve and what customer behaviour you're aiming to encourage. 

[Dave_Roberts]

As a voice of reason, even when my favorite brands send me an email that is really long I don't think I've ever read it top to bottom. There's usually a thing-or-two that I'll tune into and skip over the rest. In these cases in my experience there could have been more thought put into either:

a) doing some specific targeting (dynamic content) to get me just the content that I'm interested in -- this is probably the best way to pare down a long newsletter in my opinion, or

b) just add less to your newsletter -- it's generally not a case of more-is-more with customer facing communications. The best brands send direct email that relates specifically to the products/interests I've engaged with and focus really tightly on converting that interest via a call-to-action into some kind of conversion. 

You could think about checking your email reporting for your newsletter and see if your open and click-thru rates are going up in proportion with the amount of content (unlikely) or maybe try a more limited run of the newsletter and see how that goes -- do you get more clicks and conversions or not? Maybe look for things that actually do get clicks and focus on those areas a bit more in the newsletter and let some of the "extra" stuff kinda fall to the side or be more like follow-up material that's not wrapped up in a super-long newsletter. 

I completely agree with Grace and Sanford here about the accordion stuff for email, you've really gotta be careful these days b/c there are businesses out there that are selling things that don't really work as well as you'd expect them to or that aren't as "clear" about disclosing the limitations of their offerings ... let's be real here, who can honestly send out a Marketing email these days that excludes Outlook in any capacity? 

*Practical Footnote: Be careful with "hiding" content behind accordions and slides, while you might think it's better to jam a bunch of information into a small bit of real estate, you'l also want to carefully test this and make sure that folks are actually finding this stuff and reading it. I've seen conversion rates tank (for LPs) b/c of this exact thing -- nobody clicks (or presumably reads) the content on the 2nd and 3rd slides of a carousel or accordion. As a rule of thumb if the content is not "good enough" to occupy an unhidden piece of real estate in your newsletter, it's probably not important enough to include in the first place (in this specific setting, maybe a 2nd non-newsletter email would make a better fit). 

One final thing to consider here is what I've always heard called "putting lip stick on a pig" -- generally, it still doesn't make you want to kiss the pig. In a way, these kind of "flashy" technological solutions are a bit of lip stick and a super long email that's not carefully curated for your audience is the pig. Not sure if this is the case with your newsletter, but I've seen it too often in my inbox and working with different clients over the last few years. In these cases, no amount of technology (lip stick) is going to solve the basic problem of content overload or saturation. The solution in these cases in more process and refined content than technology and magic -- spend the same amount of time considering the content for your newsletter that you'd spend on getting some accordion magic to work and I'd bet you'd have better results (and also save some money on the lip stick).