With Apple’s watch coming out overseas, new details are emerging about how well it handles email (or doesn’t).
The following are some important points that we’ll need to keep in mind when we send out that next campaign or design that next email template.
1. Text only emails
Because of its inherently tiny screen, the Apple watch usually just reads the ‘text version’ of your email campaign. Some images can come through though, remotely hosted images don’t usually work and embedded images only show after the email’s content, which makes it pretty unusable. Embedded images can also have issues in other email clients. Those email messages that don’t have a plain text version will not usually render so focusing on giving your email a good text version now becomes a lot more important.
2. Links are disabled
Because the watch doesn’t have a browser, outgoing web links inside the email have been disabled. The exceptions are address and phone number links which open in other applications. Phone orders and physical store visits are more of a focus.
3. No ‘open’ or ‘click’ tracking
Open’s tracking relies on loading a tiny image and tracking that image load, but since watch doesn’t load images the tracking doesn’t work. The same is evident in the link tracking because the outgoing links are disabled and cannot be clicked.
For more detailed breakdown on the above points check out Justine Jordan post here.
