AOL & AIM Get A New Look & A New Reading Pane

AOL has undergone a rebranding in accordance with its independence from Time-Warner. As the company begins a new journey it has adopted new branding in addition to the new and improved postmaster site about which we reported earlier in the day.. As a matter of fact AOL has a brand new look and feel which extends to several of their web email presences: aol.com & aim.com. The new email clients, according to a post on the AOL Mail Blog will have fewer ads (or a more balanced number of them) and feature a reading pane (preview pane) for the webmail clients.

Implications

Mailers should have long been accustomed to placing their branding and calls to action near the top of their messages and as far over to the left as possible (to take into account desktop email clients with preview panes that default to the right like Outlook 2007). The new reading pane for AIM & AOL.com don't present any specific challenges that marketers haven't faced before but it does reinforce the need for marketers to be aware of how many pre-headers they are using in their messages.

Since the preview pane is adjustable by the user, and had it been any smaller than this default setting, the 3 lines of pre-headers plus the spacing above the very first line of the preheaders would've pushed the logo well below the fold. Are you willing to bank your success on 3 lines of text? A picture is worth a thousand words so let's not hamstring our own creative departments by getting overzealous with our pre-header copy. Be aware of the preview pane and the prime real estate it affords us.

Remember, when in doubt test, test, test and test some more!

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations
& Industry Communications