As my birthday rolled around this year, I was anticipating an inbox full of emails extending birthday discounts, deals, perks, & more. Surprisingly, I only received one such email and the offer was nothing extraordinary. What’s a birthday girl to do? I was left puzzled as to why such a small number of businesses took advantage of this golden opportunity.

My friend Nick has a birthday around the same time. I asked him if he had received any birthday wishes from companies that he has email relationships with. Nick sent me the email below as an example of a birthday email that he was excited to receive. Golf Galaxy had collected enough information from Nick during the sign up process, or update process, that they were able to send him a birthday greeting and personalize it using his first name. By addressing Nick and sending the email on his actual birthday, they made an immediate connection with him. The fact that Nick said he would use this discount also means that Golf Galaxy is sending relevant offers.

There are a few things that Golf Galaxy could have done differently creatively. They should have used snippet text, moved the call to action above the fold, etc. However, the general look and feel of the email is clean and clear and it gets the message across (if you download all of the images and scroll down!) Aside from a few design changes, Golf Galaxy is doing a great job using the information that they have on their customers and sending them timely, relevant offers.

Remember, when collecting opt-in information, ask your customers for personal information for marketing efforts such as birthday offers. It is also a great idea to allow your customers to update their own information at any time. This way you can collect that birthday later on if you missed it during the initial opt-in. Connecting and engaging with customers will always help you increase your sales. Knowing how to do this with special offers and incentives using data you already have will only increase your email marketing ROI.

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!

You spend a lot of time and energy putting together the best creative, the best message, the best call-to-action that you can muster.  But as you carefully craft your message, consider this worst-case scenario: when your recipient gets the email, their images are turned off.  If you take a few extra steps in the design process, you can still get your message across, even if they can’t see your lovely images.

To the right you will see an example of an email I recently received from DSW.  The email went to my junk folder, so by default the images were turned off.  Unfortunately there isn’t much to see in this case.  It is apparent that the email is composed entirely of images, many of which are most likely visually stunning and click-provoking, but without actually seeing them, I have no way of knowing what’s going on here.  I could go out of my way to turn on the images or view the email in my browser, but I could just as easily click “Delete” and go about my business.

Now here is an example of an email I received from Art.com.  Images are still turned off, and Art.com has chosen to remedy this situation by using alt tags.  Alt tags are HTML tags that should be added to all images in every email.  These are what will show when images are turned off (or if they are not working at all.)  With alt tags I can see the purpose of every image in the email, including the links to click through to the site.  These alt tags are written to even include coupon codes!

Art.com also did another great thing: they added snippet text at the top with the call-to-action.  Since this occurs at the very top of the email, it is guaranteed to be seen regardless of preview pane orientation or image issues.  Their snippet even includes links, just in case I want to click from there.  This email might benefit from a greater mix of text and images just be sure the message gets across, but since their audience is looking for images of the art this probably works for them. 

The next time you are designing an email, consider the possibility that not everyone will see your images.  It can mean the difference between a passing (and confused) glance before deleting and clicking through to your site!

When your email hits the inbox, does it stand out from the crowd? Is your email creative rendering correctly across all email clients? Are you up-to-date on all of the latest best practices of email design?

Join us for our “Design for the Inbox” webinar to learn how to design emails that make a real impact.

This webinar is for you if:

• You want to maximize readability and visual interest
• You are interested in increasing your email return on investment
• You are new to email marketing design, or want a refresher on best practices

Click here to register!

Details:

Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Time: 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM EST

Presenter: Melanie Sims

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

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.

Across the industry, desginers are going back to the basics regarding their email creative. These simple guidelines will not only help your email render well across the various email clients, but will also make your email stand out above the rest. Click here to view our 2007 Email Design Guidelines, as featured in this month’s issue of Factory Direct.

Get your copy of the printer-friendly PDF verison of this guide here:

2007EmailDesignGuidelines.pdf

Don’t miss out on another issue of our monthly e-newsletter, Factory Direct! Click here to subscribe.

We have read many articles and heard many people state this over and over again: Place your important information “above the fold.” Or in the case of email, in the preview pane.

Here are three small changes and that could make a big difference in your clicks, conversions, opens and even deliverability.

1) Place your call to action in the top part of your email. Make sure that your recipients can click on the call action link without scrolling down. You can include a link again at the bottom for good measure, but by adding it to the top you may garner a better click rate and possibly a high conversion.

2) Add a link to view the email in a browser. If an email client scrambles your HTML or the client has their images blocked, this will allow them to still view your email. You can use Publicaster to do this without hosting a version of your email on your website.

3) Ask recipients to add your from address to their address book. A small line of plain text at the top of the email asking to be white-listed can help ensure that your future emails get to the inbox.

These steps are easy to implement and should improve your email marketing results.

Are you using images in your emails as links to your “Unsubscribe” and “Forward to a Friend” pages? If so, you run the risk of recipients not being able to view these links if they have their HTML images turned off. As more and more people begin to limit what appears in their emails, it’s important to have a back-up plan so that everyone is able to clearly see how to unsubscribe from your emails.

Solution? Use the option to include an HTML footer in the Account Preferences section of Publicaster. This will appear at the bottom of every HTML email, and will be visible even when HTML images are turned off.

Example for the HTML footer:
To unsubscribe from future emails from XYZ, [~Optout~]click here[~EndOptout~].
To forward this email from XYZ to a friend, [~Forward~]click here[~EndForward~].

Another best practice is to include a link to view the email in a separate web browser at the top of your HTML emails. By clicking on the “View in Browser” link, the recipient will be able to view all the HTML images they may have missed in the email.

To do this, include this snippet like this at the top of your HTML email:
If you are having difficulties viewing the images in this email, [~ViewInBrowser~]click here[~EndViewInBrowser~].

This post was derived from my recent speaking engagement at Click Z’s Specific: Email Marketing conference in NYC. I gave a talk titled “Cutting Through the Clutter Creatively” which focused on why marketers should be strategic when considering the creative variables that make up their email marketing campaigns.

More than ever the inbox is a challenging place to capture the attention of your recipients. Some of the stats that I referenced at my talk include the Nielsen Norman research whichs states that the average recipient of marketing or promotional email has an attention span of your email of five seconds or less. And those monthly newsletters we all work so hard on producing typically only capture the attention of users for 40-50 seconds max. This information reinforces the fact that creative elements can sometimes make or break your email marketing efforts.

The key creative variables in email that marketers must embrace are the following:

From: Build the trust of your recipients by making your identity obvious. Be consistent with your From line, make sure its branded with your company name or an individual from your organization.

Subject Line: Jupiter Research found that 35% of email users open email based on what is contained within the subject line. Be sure to include your company name or brand name within the subject line, as recent research shows this can have a dramatic effect on open rates.

Copy: Personalized, targeted and relevant are three words that should define the copy in your email marketing campaigns. Write clear and concise copy, putting your main message and identifiers above the fold, and make sure you use fonts and a font size that makes reading your email easy on the eye.

Imagery: Always include your company logo at the top right or somewhere on the header. This helps with establishing the brand recognition. Always have your audience in mind and use relevant imagery that is targeted towards your recipent and tailored around your message. Be sure to hyperlink all imagery to your main call to action.

Call to Action: Place your key call to action above the fold as often as possible. During your testing phase, conduct your own internal “5 second test” to a small group of individuals to make sure your call to action is clear and to the point.

During my talk I also mentioned the importance of keeping your landing page consistent with your email creative. If you do manage to get a recipient to open and then act on your email, don’t lead them astray. Targeted landing pages with consistent creative elements can go a long way in increasing your conversion rate.

Finally, we all know that one of the best attributes of the email medium is that its easy to test and tweak your initiative. Every audience is different, so learn as much as you can about your list of recipients by testing a variety of creative elements before drawing any hard conclusions on what works and what doesn’t.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of my power point presentation from Click Z Specifics, feel free to email me at greg [at] blueskyfactory [dot] com.

Happy emailing!

This is one of those topics that may be elementary to some, mystifying to others….but either way it’s an important topic for email marketers.

Seems logical that all email marketers would want to deliver a Multipart email to optimize delivery and performance, yet a surprising number of companies choose not to include the Plain Text version.

Quick Review: Multipart email format allows you to set up both an HTML and a Plain Text version of your email. The goal being to ensure that anyone who can’t see HTML will still receive a Plain Text version.

With Multipart format, however, if you don’t provide a plain text version of your email when you set it up, and a recipient can’t get an HTML version (ie., Blackberry, Treo….) then they won’t see anything but a blank email….not something companies want to have happen.

The alternative is to choose to send an HTML Only version, rather than a Multipart version. With an HTML Only set-up, those users who can’t receive HTML format emails will instead receive the HTML version stripped of all HTML formatting. In essence they will see a modified Plain Text version consisting only of the pure text left over from the HTML version before it was stripped down….

It’s not the best option to choose, but in most cases it’s better than sending a blank email.

What’s the lesson here?

The best choice is Multipart format, but if adding a Plain Text version isn’t in your plans, then consider sending an HTML Only format to increase your odds for success!