Over the last few years, the email industry has been increasingly focused on accessibility. That’s a good thing, especially considering that such a large percentage of the world’s population suffers from some sort of disability, whether it’s permanent or temporary. For example, the World Health Organization counts around 1.3 billion people...
The Nielsen Norman defines User Experience (UX) as “encompassing all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products”. They sum it up with this kernel of wisdom: “the first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss...
"It’s just not pony enough.”
Marketing Manager
My Little Pony
The quote above was the full extent of creative feedback to an email my creative team and I developed for Hasbro’s My Little Pony group back in the early aughts.
Paul Airy is the author of "A Type of Email: A handbook for working with HTML typography in email" and will be presenting a Post-Conference Workshop in HTML Typography in Email (Advanced) at this year's Email Innovations Summit.
Email automation is not the panacea for email marketing that many articles seem to suggest.
The story goes “buy a leading edge automation platform” and your email marketing is no longer spam and strategy is improved double quick.
I’ve never seen this to be true and have certainly spoken to too many email marketers who have found out it’s not true - the hard way.
Email strategy is not created by buying some cool tech.
Jessica Best will be presenting "Getting Jiggy with Animation & Video for Email Marketing" at this year's Email Innovations Summit, April 19-21st in Las Vegas.
The Big Lebowski
Google recently announced that they will be supporting media queries within their Gmail platform which is great news for the email community. I was ecstatic when I heard the news and I can only imagine the cheers (and tears) of joy when other email developers around the world were notified as well. Although this update has not been released just yet, Google has hinted that it will be in place by the end of 2016.
There were great minds, quality content, and inspiring discussions at the Email Innovations Summit in Las Vegas (May 17–19, 2016). Big kudos to Bill McCloskey and the Only Influencers community for creating a new space where trends, challenges, and opportunities in the email marketing world can openly be discussed.
OI Survey Results: Do you use links in email copy and how do you style them.
Selling chocolate eggs to the general public at Easter isn’t exactly selling ice to the Eskimos. However, for the businesses who don’t have this delicious advantage, there are other ways of creating effective and fun campaigns to leverage this annual marketing opportunity. Fresh Relevance has collected a few great examples of chocolate-free brands who’ve been creative with their marketing in the last few years.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill
Subject lines… the easiest thing to write, the hardest thing to get right. There is just no single best practice, rule or tactic that works every time.
If my six different inboxes are any indication, retailers and businesses of any type don’t use Halloween as the awesome opportunity it is. I received all of two Halloween inspired emails, which is rather pathetic. It’s a playful, fun, and joyously spooky time of year – why would retailers shy away from such a great opportunity? Are they worried they’ll offend? Seriously?
Welcome to the soft-launch of the Autumn season, hard launching September 23rd. Also known to yanks as Fall, it’s not simply a change of seasons, it marks the beginning of many things - The beginning of the end as Winter approaches. (This feeling is especially strong in Chicagoans.) For pagans and ghouls, the launch into the Samhain/Halloween/Harvest season and a spookfest for any reason. For others, likely who happen to be (suddlenly overjoyed) parents, it’s back to school for the kids (hoorah!). Then, there’s the Email Marketer. Back to School marks another sales season which makes us happy and provides an opportunity to send MORE EMAIL!
A Collection of the Best Email Design Style Guides and HTML/CSS Coding Guides
I'm looking for inspiration to up all of our lifecycle triggered emails this spring, as well as inspire our teams to try something new. Which Pinterest email marketing boards do you follow or curate?
One of the Influencers was interested in sharpening their HTML skills and was looking for some formal training on Responsive Coding for email. Here are some of the suggestion:
"The reaction to, and response of, an email message has the same power to conjure up an emotional response as does the spoken word, and the response or behavior we influence is the action, or lack-there-of, seen in our customers. But how do you know what to say to create this emotional reaction, specifically in your email marketing communications?"
After a consumer opts into receiving your emails, I assume they’ll be somewhat active. During the initial weeks they’ll open, click, browse your website, and maybe even convert. However, it probably won’t take long for them to lose interest. They’ll delete without pause or filter into a subfolder for a rainy day. They may come back briefly when a compelling event motivates them to find your most recent offer or a reactivation campaign lures them in once again, but the pattern will repeat itself. They’ll get bored and disengage all over again.
An often overlooked aspect of Email Design Practices is designing for failure: images failing to render on the client's browser. Using some basic email design techniques, you can insure that your customers experience the best possible visual email in their inbox. Below are a series of tutorals and resources to teach you these basic technigues: Some of the techniques you will learn include using Web Text, using stylized Alt Tags, coding background colors, and creating pixel art.
A collection of some of the best April Fools Email campaigns from 2014
How to resolve AdBlock issue?