In-Depth

Smart Email Marketing for the Holiday Season

With the back-to-school rush behind us, the email marketer’s attention now turns to the fast-approaching holiday season. We consulted Responsys’ yearly Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season for some great suggestions on how to maximize your email marketing efforts as we head into prime retailing months. In this blog post, we’ll share some of the highlights that apply to businesses both large and small.

Start Early

Consumers start their holiday shopping early. According to the National Retail Federation, 40% of consumers begin gift shopping before Halloween (October 31), another 40% begin in November, and the remaining 20% in December. As a result, many of the top retailers start their email campaigns early to capitalize on these shoppers.

Black Friday is often recognized as the “official” start of the holiday shopping season, but data from Responsys shows that increasing numbers of retailers are kicking off the season on Thanksgiving Day itself:

This move to Thanksgiving Day is driven, in part, by the rise of mobile email.

Focus on Mobile

Ubiquitous mobile devices (smartphones, iPads, etc.) mean that more people are checking their email more often. The holiday season affords mobile device users plenty of opportunities to kill time checking email. For example:

  • Airport-related or other delays while traveling on the day before Thanksgiving (the busiest travel day of the year)
  • Watching a football game on Thanksgiving with the remote control in one hand and phone in the other
  • Standing in line at the register on Black Friday

Since odds are your email will be read on a mobile device, take the time to make sure it looks good on the small screen. Email templates that come with Direct Mail are designed to look great no matter what device they are read on, but take advantage of our Design Test and Send to iPhone features to make sure your content (and subject lines) work great on mobile.

Pre-Holiday Messaging

Getting an early start to holiday marketing does not mean barraging your customers with calls to buy right away. Since we’re still on the leading edge of the holiday season, use this time to send email campaigns that will set you up for success during peak buying time. Here are some ideas:

  • Offer loyalty or other incentive programs that will increase the chance of repeat sales later. Consider something as simple as offering discounts to fans of your Facebook page.
  • Request reviews of your products. Large numbers of positive reviews for your product will drive later sales.
  • Survey customers in order to gather valuable data for targeted campaigns later on.
  • Encourage opt-ins for other marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Messaging the same customers over multiple channels can help drive sales.
  • Announce a website relaunch or a new feature.

Use the above mentioned ideas during this preseason time to set up a successful buying season down the road.

Conclusion

Responsys’ 2012 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season is full of great information and suggestions for email marketers. Smart retailers are learning to match consumers move to shopping earlier in the year with early email campaigns. The exponential growth of iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices is signaling to email marketers the importance of making sure their designs look great on a small screen. Lastly, appropriate messaging during the holiday preseason can pay off big during the final two months of the year. Take advantage of this knowledge, these tips, and Direct Mail to make the most of your email marketing this holiday season!

by Jonathan in In-Depth

Top Template Tips to Try!

Great-looking email designs help your business project a professional, polished image and can win you the confidence of your subscribers. With its intuitive editor and great selection of templates, Direct Mail can help you get up and running with a great looking email in no time. In this blog post, we want to share a few tips to help you get your designs looking just the way you want.

Adding, Moving, and Deleting Sections

Many of our templates come with sections that you can duplicate, move, or remove. Use this flexibility to lengthen or shorten the newsletter to fit your content—instead of forcing your content to fit the newsletter. You can identify these flexible sections by hovering your mouse over various sections of the template and looking for the following toolbar to appear:

Here’s what each of those icons mean, from left-to-right:

  • Delete. Deletes the section
  • Duplicate. Makes a copy of the section
  • Move Up. Moves the section up one slot
  • Move Down. Moves the section down one slot

In the following example, I’ve taken the “Sidebar (Right)” template and duplicated the Headline One section to make a Headline Two section:

Use the “Duplicate” button to expand your template.

Use these flexible sections to adjust the template to fit your content. You might also be interested in these helpful tips to keep your email content fresh.

Working With Images

Text Descriptions

Nowadays, nearly all email clients default to not loading images contained in the message body. The recipient can choose to load them if they want, but most do not. That being the case, it’s important to make sure your email looks good (and is understandable) even when the images aren’t loaded. One great way to do that is to make sure that you provide text descriptions for any image you add. For example, here’s a newsletter with an image of a car at the race track:

To add a text description, just click it and fill out the field labeled “Description”:

That’s it! Now when your message is sent, the recipients will see a helpful text description instead of a big, blank box:

As a bonus, text descriptions are a huge help to sight-impaired readers, as most computers and smartphones can read those descriptions aloud.

Composite Images

As you already know, it’s easy to add images to your email. Just drag and drop them into the message body (or copy and paste). Some templates, however, provide special placeholders called composite images. Composite images automatically apply great looking effects like drop shadows, borders, and overlays to any photo or image you drop on them. You can identify composite images by hovering your mouse over them and watching as the image darkens, like this image from the Air Mail template:

To add your own image, just drop a photo into the placeholder position, like this photo of a company outing:

Looks good, but we can’t see anyone’s face! Click the image to pop up an editing panel. Drag the Size slider to the right to zoom in the photo. Drag the image itself to get the faces centered just right (the cursor will turn to a hand icon to let you know you can pan the image). Much better:

Use the zoom and pan controls to get your photos looking just right!

Composite images are an easy way to add a professional touch to your messages. Use the zoom and pan controls to get your photos looking just right!

Conclusion

A great-looking email design will help boost your open and click numbers, as well as project a professional image to your readers. Try using Direct Mail’s streamlined templates, flexible sections, and image tools to get your emails looking just the way you want, and stay tuned to our blog for more great tips. Thanks for reading!

by Jonathan in Features, In-Depth

Avoiding the Pitfalls of HTML Email Design

If you’ve ever attempted to code up HTML email by hand, you know that it can be a painful task. This blog post provides a better understanding of some of the limitations of HTML email, as well as tips on how you can avoid potential problems . I’ll also point out how Direct Mail’s built-in editor can help makes things easier.

How Email Clients Mangle your Message

When an email client receives your email, the first step it takes is to “clean up” the message to remove (1) potentially harmful content, (2) content that could be used to track the recipient, and, (3) in the case of web-based email clients, content that would cause the email to interfere with other objects on the web page. I’ll address each one of these in detail below.

Harmful Content

Javascript and other HTML elements that are not used to render the email are stripped to prevent untrusted and/or unknown code from being executed when the email is opened. This includes, but is not limited to: <script>, <iframe>, <object>, <embed>, <applet>, and <param> elements. Some email clients will even strip out unrecognized elements just to be safe. If you use Direct Mail to import your message from a web page, it will remove these elements for you by default. If your webpage requires Javascript in order to render or function properly, it will not work (or at least will require some editing in order to work) as the message body of an email.

Normally, email cannot contain embedded video (since it would require the use of the aforementioned untrusted elements). However, Direct Mail provides an easy solution to embed video thumbnails with links right into your message.

Trackable Content

Your HTML email may depend on assets that live outside of your HTML email on a web server. They could be hosted images or stylesheets. Email clients generally break these links and, in the case of images, prompt the user to choose whether they want to display them. This is to prevent your email client from loading web content without your permission, especially since loading web content from an external source is how most email tracking systems gather their data. To make sure your email still looks good even without images loaded, we recommend filling in the ALT attribute for every image. You can do this in Direct Mail by clicking on an image and filling out the “Description” field.

Filling out the Description field will automatically set the ALT attribute on your image.

Interfering Content

Web-based email clients have to account for cases where your CSS selectors conflict with the ones they use to style their site. Some email clients will rip out your styles altogether to avoid problems, but newer web-based email clients work around this problem by prefixing their own selectors with a unique string, thus avoiding a conflict. The best way to avoid problems with styles is to is to inline your CSS. Direct Mail can inline your CSS for you when you send. That way you can keep your markup and CSS separate during the design phase.

An additional concern when designing for web-based email clients is CSS styles related to layout and positioning. Most HTML designers are used to being able to position elements in their designs with properties like: position, display, left, right, top, bottom…but for a web-based client, this could mean your content ends up positioned over the user interface of the email client. To prevent this, most email clients will strip out position-related properties from the email. From the perspective of HTML designing, this provides very severe limitations and is the reason why HTML emails are still largely composed of tables.

The folks over at Campaign Monitor have put together a comprehensive list of which CSS selectors and properties are supported by which clients.

The Final Hurdle: Layout Engines

Every email client employs a layout engine to render your HTML email into a window. Unfortunately, not all layout engines implement HTML standards the same way. Furthermore, different layout engines adopt new standards at different rates, making very difficult to write your code in a one-size-fits-all approach. One result of this is that if you’re editing your email in Direct Mail (which uses the WebKit layout engine), it may look very different when rendered in a Trident-based browser, such as Internet Explorer.

There are 5 layout engines that will  be used to render close to all of your emails:

  • Trident – Internet Explorer – Outlook 2003, Outlook Express
  • Webkit – Safari, Chrome, Apple Mail, iOS Mail, Android Mail, Postbox, Outlook 2011 for Mac, Sparrow, Nokia
  • Gecko – Firefox, Thunderbird, PostBox, SeaMonkey, Eudora
  • Presto – Opera, Nintendo, Opera Mail
  • Microsoft Word – Outlook 2007/2010

If your recipient is reading your email in a web-based client (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL Mail), then the layout engine will depend on the browser they’re using. In Version 3.2, we’ve added design testing to your tool belt, giving you the ability to preview your message in dozens of clients with just one click. The design test will show you a pixel-accurate screenshot of what your email looks like when viewed on various platforms, as well as how many of your recipients are using that particular client.

The Rise of Mobile

The volume of email being opened on mobile devices has increased dramatically over the past few years. This trend will only continue as more people adopt smartphones and tablet devices.

Your email may look amazing on a desktop, but on a phone it might have too much text crammed together to be easily digested. Make sure that your calls to action are not too small for the reader to engage with.

One great thing about mobile email is that the popular mobile email clients (iPhone, iPad, Android) are much more up-to-date on the latest HTML and CSS standards, and don’t mangle your HTML and CSS nearly as much as their desktop- or web-based counterparts. Note, however, that the above mentioned mangling still applies to web-based email clients viewed on a mobile device (i.e. viewing Gmail on your iPhone). One thing to be aware of is that many mobile devices include a feature that automatically boosts the size of text for readability. If your design does not account for this, you might end up with a broken layout.

All of the templates that come with Direct Mail are mobile-ready and will look great on any device. In addition, we are working on a special set of templates designed exclusively for mobile devices. Look for announcements on that soon!

Conclusion

We hope this post has helped shed some light on what to be aware of when designing your HTML templates. Features in Direct Mail like video thumbnails, CSS inlining, and mobile-ready templates can help you overcome some of these difficulties, and we can’t wait to show you what we’re working on next to make this process even easier. Stay tuned!

by Jonathan in In-Depth

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