Over the holiday season, I used my mobile phone more often than usual for a variety of tasks: checking email and Facebook, shopping online, browsing the internet. Being stuck in a car for 10 hours and away from your office for over a week necessitates some creativity when it comes to staying connected. Because I was stuck using my mobile device almost exclusively for these tasks, I became more aware... [Read more]
By: Litmus Ever get so frustrated with coding HTML email that you start seeing red? In the past couple weeks we’ve heard from a handful of red-eyed users reporting Gmail tests that are seeing black by showing up in inboxes with a black background (when that wasn’t your intended result!) After digging into some testing, I realized that this issue isn’t limited to Gmail—in fact it affects a... [Read more]
As an email marketer, you’re probably well-versed in strategizing your content across a variety of platforms, and you mobilize your resources to do the most with what you have. But are your emails mobilized? In this case, we mean optimized for mobile. Get it? Mobilized! Defined as: streamlined or otherwise mobile-friendly version of your email content. Mobile is here to stay, and it’s growing... [Read more]
By: HubSpot The whole point of A/B testing is to put your feelings aside, and let data tell you if the layout, content, and design of your web page or marketing element is optimized to meet your goals. But what happens when the way you proctor the test messes up that data, leading you toward misleading results and inaccurate analysis? Just as it’s important to know the best practices of landing... [Read more]
By: CampaignMonitor I know what you’re thinking – just as we’re coming to grips with optimizing our email newsletters for mobile, suddenly we have tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire to make things interesting again. So here’s the good and the bad news. The good: if you’ve already created a responsive design for the iPhone, then adapting this for the iPad and similar... [Read more]
People love to play online. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that it gives you so many opportunities to interact with people and with the companies you’re following. Email has traditionally been less interactive than websites or social media, but the current trend in email marketing is to enable interaction with the subscriber. That way, you can capitalize on the surfer mentality (give me something... [Read more]
By: HubSpot And The Winner Is… (Drumroll, Please) If you guessed the second set of calls-to-action (CTA), you’re absolutely right…but it was probably a lucky guess. The truth is, the only real way to know which CTA is going to have a better click-through rate on your website is to A/B test it. Here at HubSpot, we used the first call-to-action button on our product pages for years... [Read more]
6 things you can do to make your email look awesome! Wish your emails looked better? You don’t need to be a designer to have beautifully designed emails – you just need to start improving your emails bit by bit. This blog post is aimed at helping you get started by sharing some very simple and easy to implement design tips. 1. Pick your colours wisely So you’ve got a logo and maybe a corporate... [Read more]
Your call to action is arguably the most important element of your email marketing messages. Because it provides the link between passive reading and active clicking, it supersedes even the supremacy of the subject line. But many businesses fail to treat it with the respect it deserves. Subject lines tend to get all the attention because they provide the first point of contact and the incentive to... [Read more]
It’s been predicted that five million Kindle Fire tablets will sell in the next six weeks. At just $199, it should at least make a dent in iPad sales. Here’s my quick first impressions. 1. 600px wide Kindle Fire uses a custom build of Android. Just like other Android devices, it doesn’t scale content to the width of the screen. This means in portrait mode emails are lopped off at... [Read more]
By: MediaPost Before the JPG, there was the GIF. Created in 1987, GIFs were introduced to provide a color image format, transparent backgrounds and simple animation by storing multiple images in a single file. GIFs have long been a secret weapon in email design due to the lack of support for rich media files like flash and video in email readers. Now, the old GIF is new again. This year, New York... [Read more]
A recent study by SmileyCat Web Design showed that only a minority of major retailer email templates which are being sent out in 2011 adhere to the recommended width of 600 pixels or less which facilitates their display on a broad variety of tablets and smartphones. It seems that many of the largest American retailers have not quite caught on with the fact that we are now firmly ensconced in the mobile... [Read more]
It’s probably the number one rookie mistake in advertising and marketing copy writing. It can tank an otherwise exceptional sales offer to the exact right audience. It’s guaranteed to bore readers and listeners to death, and it’s a downright sin in direct response. What is this ill? It is writing or talking about – or to – ourselves rather than our potential and current customers. In... [Read more]
By: CampaignMonitor We recently come across a strange email client rendering issue in Mail on the iPhone and iPad – hairline borders are appearing in HTML email designs with table layouts. These borders are sometimes barely visible, but often they can be fairly pronounced, especially at certain zoom levels (see picture). What makes this bug so hair-pullingly tricky is that the borders appear... [Read more]
Trick-or-Tweet! What are you doing for your Halloween email campaigns? Are you looking for innovative ideas and tantalizing templates? Lots of great resources are available to provide creative and free templates and ideas for your Halloween marketing. We’ll highlight 5 of our favourite Halloween sources for you. Benchmark has a treat in store with their free 30-day trial of Halloween templates... [Read more]
I was on an email forum recently when a guy asked, “Does anybody know if you can use animated Gifs in emails and if so how do you do it? I know that you cannot send flash, or it’s not recommended”. If you’re just getting started with animated Gifs in email, here are the basics: 1. Can I use animated Gifs in email? Yes. Animated Gifs play in all email clients, except for... [Read more]
By: Adotas.com GRAPHICMAIL – On any given day, lots of emails can sail into your inbox, and you’ll probably be purging many of them indiscriminately. With email inboxes more crowded than ever, at least half of the battle of successful email marketing is in finding ways to stand out from the crowd Email users often view the lineup of messages in their inboxes via preview panes only. This means... [Read more]
With email inboxes more crowded than ever before, simply arriving successfully is half the battle. Assuming you routinely have good deliverability, the second half of that battle is standing out in a crowd. The majority of email users (more than 70% by some estimates) view the lineup of email messages in their inboxes via preview panes, so only a snapshot of each message is visible either to the... [Read more]
By: HubSpot Do your landing page offers generate a high conversion rate but few actual leads? Chances are, it’s not a content quality problem you have on your hands … it’s a content promotion problem. Likely, what’s happening is that you’re not getting your offer out there in front of enough people you want to capture as leads. And if you’re not generating any... [Read more]
By: CampaignMonitor Since our last update to our ‘Image Blocking in Email Clients‘ guide in 2007, its come to our attention that a lot has changed. In fact, email clients are more aggressively blocking images by default than before, with a 2009 report stating that only 48% of email recipients see images automatically. This means that if an email campaign relies heavily on images, it’s... [Read more]
