It’s time to change your association emails and make them more voice-friendly. Why now? Millions of Americans now own smart speakers, and they use those virtual assistants to check their email with voice commands.
Several years ago, Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant, giving it the skill to read, reply to, archive, or delete emails.
Alexa will read the sender’s name, subject line, and text. It can read emojis but will ignore images and certain HTML attributes.
Alexa will ignore your images (and the alt text you use to describe them), the same way readers won’t see that information in emails viewed without images. So, if you still put key information inside images, stop. Use images to enhance your message but put important information in message text.
Choose emojis carefully, or avoid them altogether. Before using them, consider emojis whose names will be startling when read out loud and out of context, especially in the subject line and preview text.
Use proper semantic elements in your email, especially for text. Don’t just rely on text. Use headings (h) and paragraphs (p) appropriately.
(What are semantic elements? They’re attributes used in HTML code to give meaning to content on the web which better enables computers and people to work incooperation.)