Have you been sending the same template to your recipients for over a year now? Is your subscriber list getting smaller, at a standstill, or not growing at the rate you would like? Are your call-to-actions not getting any action? Maybe your design has something to do with it. The arrangement of content and the overall aesthetic appeal play a major role in capturing the interest of your recipients. Have another look at your design, or even better, have a professional look and provide you with feedback. Click here for some reasons why it might be time for a design overhaul (brought to you straight from the April edition of Factory Direct).

In honor of today’s date, I wanted to inject some foolishness into our blog in the form of a few industry-related jokes. After searching for a few minutes, I quickly learned that the caliber of humor revolving around the world of email and the internet doesn’t exactly reach “LOL” status. Some of them were downright awful. For instance: “How do long-distance runners send email?” Give up? “On the sprinter-net!” Either you just laughed out loud or you’re having second thoughts about reading further. Either way, I welcome you to enjoy the best of what I could find.

Wrong Email Address

A husband and wife were taking a vacation to Miami to “thaw out” from the cold weather in North Dakota. Due to the increase in air travel, the couple was forced to take separate flights on separate days.

The husband flew first. When the plane landed and he got checked in, he decided to send his wife an email. He didn’t notice that he made a spelling error on the email address, so it got sent to a widow that had just come back from her husband’s funeral.

The widow checked her email because she expected to hear from friends and family. Right after she read the first email she fainted. Her son ran into the room, saw his mom, then read the screen. The email read:

To my dearest wife,

I have arrived and got checked in. Everything is ready for your arrival tomorrow evening at 4:30. Can’t wait to see you, and we have some great neighbors.

Sincerely,
Your devoted husband

P.S. It sure is hot down here!

Best “Out of the Office” Automatic Email Replies

1. I am currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you when I return. If I fail to get the position, please be prepared for my mood.

2. Sorry to have missed you, but I’m at the doctor’s having my brain and heart removed so I can be promoted to our management team.

3. I will be unable to delete all the emails you send me until I return from vacation. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.

4. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.

5. Hi, I’m thinking about what you’ve just sent me. Please wait by your computer for my response.

6. I’ve run away to join a different circus.

7. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t have received anything at all.

And one more for those who like the ridiculous ones:

Q: Why don’t you stamp emails?
A: Because your foot would go right through the computer screen!

Happy April Fool’s Day from Blue Sky Factory!

…with your clients and prospects this holiday season. What better way to wish your clients, partners, and propects a happy holiday season than with an email greeting card? Okay… maybe a giant gift basket filled with chocolate truffels, spreadable cheeses, and exotic fruits is slightly better. We can’t compete with Harry & David, but we can offer six holiday-specific email greeting cards at no cost! All you have to do is sign up for a Publicaster account and start sending. Or if you are already a Blue Sky Factory client, talk to your account manager about how you can download your free holiday templates today. Wishing you and yours the best this holiday season from all of us at Blue Sky Factory.

Much like the world of website design, email design faces aesthetic challenges when designing for a mass audience. Unfortunately, there is not a universal email client that renders html one specific way. Life would be much easier for us if there were. For those who are unfamiliar with the term “email client”, it’s a computer or web-based application that receives, sends, organizes and renders your email. Click here to read more about the worst-offenders when it comes to email design.

To receive more useful information, updated, and tips on email marketing, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Factory Direct!

Working with agencies, we often receive beautiful layouts with clever marketing that could win design awards in print and other online mediums. However, we are frequently the bearers of bad news when we have to tell them that their layouts are lousy for email marketing. For tips on how to stay creative and still get through to your audience, click here.

Did you miss our latest issue of Factory Direct? Click here to subscribe!

Over the last 5 years, the world of website design has experienced a progressive shift in the way HTML is built. Table-based layouts are slowly becoming a dying art. Now, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) layouts are far superior. They are lightweight, load fast, and are incredibly easy to build, thus reducing production time considerably. The shift is a good thing. Unfortunately, this shift has been dramatically hindered in the world of email design.

Email browsers still prefer tables. There is no way around that. You can send a CSS email to your list, but you better have a “View this email in your web browser” link at the top because it could get ugly. Chances are Gmail, Hotmail, and yes, even Outlook are going to eat your design for breakfast. Specifically, these email browsers scan your code and remove “style” or “link” elements anywhere on the page. This in turn kills any chance of your strictly CSS-based layout of displaying how you intended. So how do you get away with incorporating CSS while still keeping your layout intact?

Get inline.

Maximizing layout integrity across multiple email browsers while still being able to use some of the great advantages of CSS design is not unachievable, you just have to get a little sneaky. Inline style embedding is a method of incorporating CSS mark-up into your table cells. The table cell then takes on the parameters of the style that you set. Take a look the graphic below for an example.

This method works in almost every email browser. Plus, your layout is still going to be table-based. So if for some reason the style attributes don’t work, your content will fall nicely into the table cell it’s sitting in, causing a subtle break instead of a dramatic one. Inline styles will save you a lot of headaches when designing with tables and save you time as well.

While inline styles are a great work-around, they are still not perfect. Even when using inline style, some of the more advanced properties of CSS will not work in email. It’s best to stick with the basics. Background color, padding, margin, and font properties are among the select classes that are widely acceptable. Another drawback to the inline technique is that it has to be repeated for every table cell. Plan to get very familiar with your copy/paste key commands.

You’ve probably used inline CSS without even knowing it. It’s not strictly limited to table cells. You can use it in your “div” and “span” tags too. I tend to use it in web design when I know a particular style will only occur once. That way you don’t clutter up your external style sheet.

In email design, inline styles are an easy thing to do and an excellent practice to ensure your email is rendered properly across various email clients. Eventually, CSS will have the freedom in email as it does on the web. Until that great day, this is a nice work-around to keep you happy.

If you have any questions or comments about using inline styles in email designs, feel free to contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com.

According to a recent article in Marketing Sherpa, 69% of Outlook users employ some type of email preview before opening it. They discovered that many heavy emailers (themselves included) do not take this feature under consideration when designing an email. Basically, the first 3 lines of text in your email are displayed in Outlook’s auto-preview as well as many portable electronic devices that read email.

The trick is to make those first 3 lines compelling copy. Try to avoid putting administration text first like: “Click here to view this email with images” or your issue date and issue number. Also, try and make this text as intriguing as possible. It will be competing with other email to get read, so consider standing out with CAPITAL LETTERS or text symbols to catch the eye:-)

Try viewing some of your own designs in auto-preview and see how compelled you are to open them. Here is a link to good and bad samples to help model your next design.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/epreview/study.html

Today I received this amazing vacation offer in my inbox: 5 days in The Riviera Maya, all-expenses-paid, a swank deluxe room over-looking the gulf with a hot tub on the balcony… all for a price that looks almost criminal. So where do I sign up? Who do I call? What do I need to do to get on a plane and start living 5 days of the good life in Mexico?

The answer is “I’m not sure”. Why? because there isn’t a phone number, an email address or ‘click here’ button to tell me what to do in the email. There was finally a small text link at the very bottom prompting me to click for more info, that I had previous overlooked. With no clear and concise call-to-action, response rates will always suffer. So in this case, I’m lost and this email is a total waste of a send to the database.

The most important element of a promotional email is the call-to-action. It should be prominent and eye-catching. The email should be designed in a way that should tell the user exactly what he or she needs to do. This can sometimes be as simple as ‘click here for more info’ or as complicated as ‘read this paragraph and click on one of the options below’. Remember, you have limited time to convert this potential customer into a producing customer. Try and make the messaging and the design as easy as possible for them to experience, with a bold call-to-action that speaks literally.

Happy emailing.

Taking a purely aesthetic approach to viewing html email is something I’ve been doing for years. Much like with a webpage, it usually takes me all of a split-second to visually diagnose a potential “unwanted” in my inbox and quickly mark it for deletion. I prefer my eyes to any imperfect spam filtering application.

According to a recent study published in the journal of Behaviour and Information Technology, Canadian researchers found that it takes a mere 20th of a second to visually diagnose a webpage. In one blink of the eye, volunteers in the study were able to give positive or negative ratings on several web pages. Their results were shockingly close to opinions made after much longer examinations of the same pages.

This study can relatively be applied to email. After all, an html email is basically a mini webpage in your inbox. A well-designed email will reinforce its message. Researchers suggest a “halo effect” is created by this visual impression. If people feel positive about the design, they are going feel positive about the content of the email. They go hand-in-hand.

There are a few key design items that I look for after opening an html email. Here is a breakdown of my quick diagnosis.

The Logo
A logo speaks volumes about a company. It is the core branding feature that defines a company’s image. If the logo looks sloppy or thrown together, chances are that the company is as well. If the html email doesn’t contain a logo, it’s probably not worth reading. It should be clean and well positioned at the top of the page.

The Layout
This can vary greatly and I’m not one to put a uniform on a layout. But the general arrangement should be as follows. The most important content on top (logo, header graphic, headline), followed by the body (main copy), and ending with the footer (company address, unsubscribe feature, disclaimers). These page elements should “flow” working together to deliver the email’s content.

The Colors
Everyone has their favorite colors, so I’m not going to say what should and should not be used. I tend to stay away from fluorescents and colors that don’t match the subject matter. For example, I’m not going to take legal advice from an orange and yellow email, but I may check out a vacation package with those same colors.

The Content
The body of the email should be easy to read and positioned neatly under the headlines. Often I see body copy jumping around graphics and typed in a font that I need a decoder to read. And for me, the body copy shouldn’t be too long. I don’t want to read a small novel in my inbox. Maybe an enticing paragraph or two and let me click through to the company’s website to read the rest of the story.

In conclusion, you don’t have to be a creative director or a web designer to know what a good email looks like. Just be trusting of that initial design perception. Nine times out of ten it will set the tone for the rest of the content.