The Apple iPad was announced on the 27th Janurary by Apple supremo Steve Jobs. It will go sale in March. It has similar functionality to the iPod Touch; the most notable difference being the much larger screen. It is designed to fill the gap between smart phones and laptops. It’s primary applications include watching TV, reading ebooks, and browsing the Internet.

How does this relate to email marketing you might be asking? Well, the iPad is not really designed to be used in a business context. A lot of emails sent from email marketing campaigns are sent to people at work, who often have many more important emails to sift through and thus your email will often be ignored or assumed to be unsolicited spam email.

Image Source Apple Inc. Copyright © 2010

The iPad is different. It is designed to be used in a leisure context. Recipients will be much more relaxed when reading emails. They won’t be reading work emails and so will not have nearly as many other emails competing for their attention and certainly will not have to “action” anything from them as they would in a work environment. All of this means they will be much more willing to give an email the benefit of the doubt and surrender their attention to it.

The display capabilities of the iPad only help in this regard. The preview pane in a typical Outlook setup is tiny and people can only see the top of the email, which frequently contains a header with the company logo and no real information, which will obviously not help in conveying your message. Desktop email clients as well as some webmail clients, such as Google Mail also disable images within emails. This helps to destroy your brand image and makes it look as though you don’t care about how your emails look. Unless you work on Scrapheap challenge, is this an image you want to display?

Contrast all of this to the iPad. Images are displayed by default. The preview pane is much larger. This means that not only will recipients be able to, at a glance, see most of your email, but it will displayed in its full glory. There are also fewer distractions on the email client itself; Outlook has tons of sidebars, folders and options that not only take up valuable space but compete for attention with emails.

Another advantage from a technical point of view is that the iPad email client uses the same rendering engine as the Safari web browser. This means that if something displays fine in Safari, it will appear almost exactly the same in an iPad email. And Safari will display things almost exactly the same as Firefox, Chrome and, if you’re careful, the later versions of Internet Explorer. Most email clients, desktop and web-based are notorious for not displaying emails even remotely similarly to web browsers and don’t support common web standards, meaning that comprimises are often made in the design of email templates, hacks are employed to get round display bugs and the whole process takes longer than it could do.

One last point: since Safari supports HTML 5, so does the iPad email client. One of the main features of HTML 5 is the ability to embed images directly in the page. If the iPad takes off this could lead to a boom in video email marketing. It could soon be a very interesting time for Email Marketing.

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