Email Marketing Tips & Best Practices | eConnect Email 3.0 | Email Marketing Revolutionized » Design For Email

Email Marketing – Displaying Photos of Contest Winners

johnny — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:00:41 +0000

One interesting facet of email marketing is holding contests—this isn’t exactly a novel idea anymore, but it can add interest and involve your customers. But if you decide to run a contest, beware of how you post the winners! Some sites have opted for using a mix of email marketing and other media such as Facebook and Twitter. If you decide to post pictures of your contest winners in your emails, beware of the pictures you choose to use. Don’t use pictures that make your winners look bad. They probably won’t appreciate it, and it won’t exactly make you look like you have a respectable customer base. And if you don’t have their picture, request it from them—don’t post a default image. It’s better to request pictures up front from your contestants and let them know that you’ll be putting them in your email. You’re more likely to get decent pictures that way. If you decide not to go with pictures, a clever logo or design can be just as creative. Remember, your customers have used your business and are participating, so do them a favor and present them in the best possible light.

Designing for Outlook 2010 – the good and the bad.

johnny — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:00:35 +0000

Do you use e-mail marketing at work or in your own business? If you do, here’s the good news: Outlook 2010 Beta is now ready for use in your Inbox Preview reports within eConnect Email. While some email marketers weren’t happy with the fact that outlook 2010 is using the Microsoft Word 2010 rendering engine in nearly the same way that it did in 2007, there have been some improvements to 2010 that will help you in your email marketing.
The reason for uproar over the 2007 version with Word was that many preferred to view in a browser. This uproar at least got the attention of the folks at outlook, and the small concession that resulted was the little message/link “view in web browser” that allows the viewer to open up a web browser. This just ensures additional rendering options available for your recipient, which is a wonderful thing if you use e-mail marketing.

To ensure that the link will be visible to your recipient, use the following steps:

1. If you’re already using a

This is the first paragraph

This is the second paragraph

This is the third paragraph

You can decide on the amount of spacing you want between your paragraph. For this sample we set it to 16px. Once you have done that, Gmail will start showing your paragraph correctly.

We have tested this with other email clients to ensure that adding margin height does not cause any issue and the good news is, it doesn’t. Below are the list of email clients we tested on:-

Gmail (Older version)
Live Hotmail
Yahoo! Mail
Outlook 2000
Outlook 2002/XP
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007
Lotus Notes 6.5
Lotus Notes 7
Lotus Notes 8
Apple Mail 2.1
Mobile Me
Apple Mail 3
Gmail
Yahoo! Mail Classic
Thunderbird 2.0
Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 2

If you have a better way of handling this issue or if you know of any other issues on Gmail and have found ways to resolve it, please share them with us.

Common Pitfalls With Using Images In Your Campaigns

jat — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:26:25 +0000

One of the most common reasons our customers get in touch with our support team has got to do with problems in using images in their campaigns. In this blog, I highlight some of the common pitfalls (and questions) about using images and show how you can avoid them.

What is a good file name to use?

To ensure all your images can be viewed correctly across different email clients and web-based email clients, you must be careful of how you name your image files. All files should be named without any empty spaces or non-ASCII characters. This means “my image.gif” is out, and “my_image.gif” or “my-image.gif” should be used instead.

In eConnect Email, we now automatically replace all spaces with underscores “_” in your image filename when you upload via the built-in file manager, so you don’t have to worry about spaces in your filenames anymore. However, you should still take note to avoid using non-ASCII characters (such as accented characters like “á” and “ë”) in your filenames to ensure compatibility across platforms.

Always remember to check your campaigns before sending them out. Make use of the built-in test sending function in eConnect Email to email yourselves to see how your campaigns render in different email clients. After all, it’s free and you can send as many times as you want, until you are satisfied with the results.

What about the supported image formats?
Do not use other image formats other than GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPG (developed by Joint Photographic Experts Group). PNG might work on your browser but it is not supported on email clients so never use PNG format for your newsletters.

What is the acceptable file size for my image?
This really depends on the number of images you have in your newsletter. If you are only using one image in your newsletter, you might get away with 25KB in file size. But if you have more images, you must remember that all of them contribute to the overall size of your newsletter, and this could pose a problem. As much as possible, keep the number of images used to a minimum, and make sure each image is optimized to the lowest file size possible (without sacrificing too much on the quality of the image, of course.)

What’s a good rule of thumb? If your image contains a line drawing (such as in the case of illustrations) or text or big blocks of single colors, the best format to use is the GIF format. Images using the GIF format can be saved in a maximum of 256 colors but the best compromise would be 128 colors where you will get reasonably low file size with good image quality. If the image contains only one solid color for the image file, 64 colors would be good enough. You may not see much difference in file size between 128 and 64 colors but since every kilobyte counts, your newsletter will be less bloated and your subscribers will thank you for it.

Saved in GIF format. File size: 2.78 KB

Saved in JPG format. File size: 17.1 KB

For photographs and images with gradient effects, you should save them in JPG format. Using this format, images are compressed in terms of percentages. The recommended compression percentage is 60%, but feel free to experiment with compression percentages as far as 80%, because your mileage may vary depending on the actual content of your image.

Saved in JPG format with 60% compression. File size 20.2 KB

Saved in GIF format with 128 colors. File size 29 KB

Finally, this is the tricky part for most of you. If you have a photograph with text on top of it, what is the best format to use? I would recommend using JPG format and experiment with the compression percentage. Do note that lower compression percentages will usually cause bubble-like artifacts to appear around the text, so do opt for the lowest compression percentage that you can go before these artifacts start showing up.

If you are planing to use animation, the only format you can use is the GIF format. Do not try to create an animation in Flash (.swf – even though Flash animation gives you smaller file size comparing to GIF format animation) and embed them in your newsletter. It will most likely get blocked and will not reach your intended recipients. Finally, unless you are sending your newsletter for printing, always work on a 72 dpi resolutions and not 150 dpi or higher. If you are sending your newsletter for printing, consider creating a web version of your newsletter just dedicated for this instead, and still use only lower resolution images for your actual newsletter.

Video In Your Email?

jat — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:53:07 +0000

Ok, let’s get this sorted quickly. The answer is simply no. Online video has been the new kid on the marketing block for quite some time, with companies big and small jumping in with some form of video marketing.

Recently, Goodmail, a third-party reputation services provider (RSP), was talking about allowing email marketers to deliver their email with embedded video, for a price. Sounds like a cool idea but I don’t know if that is going to work, unless they can convince not only the email clients and web-based email developers, but also the anti-virus, anti-spam and a load of other security developers to accept these embedded codes in email. For now, it looks more like a dream to me, but hey, with the WWW, you never know.

But back to me saying “No video”. That doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with your newsletters. I’ve seen newsletters that have included a screenshot of a video that is linked to the actual video, so when recipients click on the screenshot, it will open up their browser and load the video. Smart move!

You could go further by animating a few frames from the actual video and saving it as a GIF animation (watch your file size though). This would give your recipients a brief (and I really mean brief) preview of the video. But it’s enough to do the job.

Save Hours Of Email Code Debugging With These Five Steps

jat — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:00:50 +0000

On occasion, we review email code for a few clients. This review isn’t an audit. It’s an answer to a client’s plea for help. Sometimes a client will approach us for help because they can’t figure out how to fix an image that refuses to sit in the right place or how to correct some little glitch in the text format.

Having dealt with such problems for a while, we’ve learned some tricks and tips. We’d like to share those with you. So, here are some simple steps to follow to fix broken email code.

First Step: MsoNormal

Using Microsoft Word is one of the easiest ways to mess up a perfectly coded email. You can lose hours and hours of work simply by copying and pasting your text into Word. The great thing is, Word is the simplest mistake to catch and fix. Open the source of the email (using WYSIWYG or some other editor), and run a search for “mso-”. Nearly every special CSS attribute that Microsoft Word creates begins with “mso-”.

This problem can be avoided quite easily. Simply paste any text you’re copying from Word in Notepad. Then you can copy the text from Notepad into the editor you use. That way you’ll make sure there you don’t have any lingering Word classes.

Second Step: Floats, Background Images, and Boxes

“float” is a very common CSS attribute. Generally, it is found on “

” tags. Unfortunately, in emails, these aren’t actually a good idea. Web developers use floats all the time. And if you’re a web developer, you might find yourself wanting to sneak float into emails. The truth is, float can ruin any good template. It isn’t supported in email creation.

Background images may look cool, but they’re dreadful to work with. In fact, they simply don’t work in email. Just avoid them, and you won’t have trouble.

Then again, “

” tags are partially supported and very unreliable, rendering totally different in just about every email client. There are even a few email clients (such as Lotus Notes) that totally remove them. Some email clients even strip them out!

Third Step: Margin

Margin may seem like a simple thing, but it can cause a huge headache! At times it works great. Other times it quits working quite unexplainably. So, want to avoid problems? Take the margin out of your email and leave it out. If an element requires a margin set it at “margin-top:0px”. If you do that, the first paragraph tag will sit at the top of the table, and so on. You won’t lose any cushioning room by removing the margins, since they’re made to overlap in the first place. For spacing, especially vertical, use tables.

Fourth Step: Why does the color disappear?

Color can be a strange attribute that comes and goes. Sometimes you’ll see the nice bright red headings. Sometimes you’ll be back to the boring black that you tried to get rid of. Don’t panic if this happens. There’s a solution.

First try to adjust the placement of the color attribute in your inline style. Try moving it backward or forward one attribute. To make doubly sure that it appears, add the style to a