Include Tab/Collapse Scroll in email newsletter

Hi Sweety,

While this functionality is kind of possible in email, it's really important to understand that email is complicated and therefore features like this are also complicated (see https://nation.marketo.com/community/champion/blog/2019/05/30/5-email-myths-you-need-to-dispell?sr=search&searchId=b019a9ad-d8eb-4813-bae7-ba3d6023993e&searchIndex=0‌). Email Monks have some good examples of ways they've been able to achieve this (see emailmonks.com/explore-accordion.html) but these features will only function effectively on some email clients - so it'd be really beneficial to understand how different email clients are represented in your database before investing too much in developing functionality that may only work for 20% of them.

I would argue instead that you're likely to be better of investing the time it would take to develop, implement and test this functionality instead into designing a newsletter that resolves a lot of your length issues in a way that benefits all of your readers - there's a big difference between long in terms of pixel height and long in terms of word count/content sections. If your newsletter is overly long because of the volume of content, finding ways to shorten the copy, link out of the email for more info, change the priority on different sections and give some areas less real estate in the email, give things more room so they feel less crammed, etc, can make a big difference to the performance of the email. Really Good Emails is a great resource to see how lots of companies are doing long emails in a way that's actually highly effective). 

Hope that's helpful and maybe some food for thought

P.S., for future reference, you're better to set posts like this as a question rather than a discussion as you're more likely to generate a response from community, and are able to mark answers as correct to help others with similar questions.

As a voice of reason, even when my favorite brands send me an email that is really long I don't think I've ever read it top to bottom. There's usually a thing-or-two that I'll tune into and skip over the rest. In these cases in my experience there could have been more thought put into either:

a) doing some specific targeting (dynamic content) to get me just the content that I'm interested in -- this is probably the best way to pare down a long newsletter in my opinion, or

b) just add less to your newsletter -- it's generally not a case of more-is-more with customer facing communications. The best brands send direct email that relates specifically to the products/interests I've engaged with and focus really tightly on converting that interest via a call-to-action into some kind of conversion. 

You could think about checking your email reporting for your newsletter and see if your open and click-thru rates are going up in proportion with the amount of content (unlikely) or maybe try a more limited run of the newsletter and see how that goes -- do you get more clicks and conversions or not? Maybe look for things that actually do get clicks and focus on those areas a bit more in the newsletter and let some of the "extra" stuff kinda fall to the side or be more like follow-up material that's not wrapped up in a super-long newsletter. 

I completely agree with Grace and Sanford here about the accordion stuff for email, you've really gotta be careful these days b/c there are businesses out there that are selling things that don't really work as well as you'd expect them to or that aren't as "clear" about disclosing the limitations of their offerings ... let's be real here, who can honestly send out a Marketing email these days that excludes Outlook in any capacity? 

*Practical Footnote: Be careful with "hiding" content behind accordions and slides, while you might think it's better to jam a bunch of information into a small bit of real estate, you'l also want to carefully test this and make sure that folks are actually finding this stuff and reading it. I've seen conversion rates tank (for LPs) b/c of this exact thing -- nobody clicks (or presumably reads) the content on the 2nd and 3rd slides of a carousel or accordion. As a rule of thumb if the content is not "good enough" to occupy an unhidden piece of real estate in your newsletter, it's probably not important enough to include in the first place (in this specific setting, maybe a 2nd non-newsletter email would make a better fit). 

One final thing to consider here is what I've always heard called "putting lip stick on a pig" -- generally, it still doesn't make you want to kiss the pig. In a way, these kind of "flashy" technological solutions are a bit of lip stick and a super long email that's not carefully curated for your audience is the pig. Not sure if this is the case with your newsletter, but I've seen it too often in my inbox and working with different clients over the last few years. In these cases, no amount of technology (lip stick) is going to solve the basic problem of content overload or saturation. The solution in these cases in more process and refined content than technology and magic -- spend the same amount of time considering the content for your newsletter that you'd spend on getting some accordion magic to work and I'd bet you'd have better results (and also save some money on the lip stick).