Four Keys from This Episode:

If your email does not render properly, 80% of your subscribers will delete it, and then 30% of those subscribers will actually unsubscribe

Accessibility of your email is a huge issue. There are 285 million people who are visually impaired and may have difficulty reading your email

Cause for Awareness helps non-profits improve their marketing

Click to tweet: Email on Acid with John Thies See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/13/

Doug Morneau: Welcome back to another episode. I am super excited to have John Thies. He is the CEO and co-founder of Email on Acid, a service provider that gives email marketers a preview of how their emails are displayed in the most popular email clients and mobile devices. His career passion is helping marketers send the perfect email. John also serves as the CEO of Cause for Awareness, a recently formed not-for-profit that empowers nonprofit organizations with digital marketing resources. When he's not either on the golf course or snowboarding in the fresh Colorado powder, he resides in Denver, Colorado with his wife and son. Welcome to the show today.

John Thies: Thank you, Doug I appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Doug Morneau: Happy to have you on. Is there anything that I missed that you would like to share?

John Thies: No, I think you did a great job with that. Thank you.

Doug Morneau: We talked a little bit before we got on-air and there's a couple topic we want to cover. Obviously, we want to talk a bit about the technology and the company that you've got, and then we'll talk about some of the not-for-profits, and the accessibility that you think is an opportunity in the marketplace. Do you want to give us a thumbnail sketch of what Email on Acid, aside from a super cool name, what the technology is and how it helps people?

John Thies: Yeah, so let me just start, like we are in Colorado, but I am not on acid right now, so just to get that cleared up out of the way. What we do is, again, we show you what your email looks like on every email client, mobile device, because they all display emails different, and so ... One statistic that I know marketers love to know is that if your email does not render properly, 80% of your subscribers will delete it, and then 30% of those subscribers will actually unsubscribe, which can have a big impact on your subscriber list and what you guys are doing, because if you've done it right and you've organically built that list, that can have a pretty significant impact. What we do is we'll show you what it looks like, but really kind of how we started was diving into why it displays that it does, and we have this technology where every month we'll send, I don't know, like 400 or 500 emails to every email client to see what it is that they support and they don't support from a code base.

Doug Morneau: That's cool.

John Thies: What we'll do is then with our code analysis, so if it doesn't look right or render properly, you can run that and we'll point out, "Hey, margins aren't supported in Outlook.com unless you use a capital M." Weirdest thing, but those are the types of things that we find that we can give you insight into so that you don't pull your hair out trying to figure out why Outlook is rendering something the way that it does.

Doug Morneau: Well, and I think that a lot of smaller businesses probably don't even know that this exists, that they're likely just sending out an email. I was doing some research for a book that we're publishing coming out in the fall around email marketing, and it talked, and one of the statistics that scared me around rendering was the high number of mobile users who get your email, and if it doesn't display right they don't unsubscribe or delete it; they mark it as spam.

John Thies: Oh, wow.