Once you have started to send email marketing to your customers it’s important to listen to any feedback you get from your subscribers. You should also keep tailoring your emails based on how they perform. One easy way to do this is use a click map. This is a graphic representation of where in your emails you are getting the most clicks. Many larger businesses have quarterly or biannual email reviews, this practice could easily be adopted by a small business. These email design reviews are a great way to evaluate your emails. Use these reviews to build on successful elements within your email designs. With this knowledge you might want to make popular sections larger, more in depth or…
Email Design
A fresh way to be relevant for your customers
There’s a fine line between connecting with your users based upon their email/website activity and inadvertently stalking them. The number one rule when trying to deliver relevant content to your users is “do not come across as Big Brother in an Orwellian dystopia” – people just don’t seem to like having their privacy invaded for some reason. Here are some suggestions of how, through teaming up with a company like Fresh Relevance, you can provide your users with useful and relevant content, specifically looking at email communications, in a way that should ingratiate them to you rather than get their hackles up. Getting Started with Fresh Relevance The great thing with Fresh Relevance is there is very little development required…
Motion slickness: 4 ways to animate your email
Emails don’t need to be static. Modern email applications support a variety of animation techniques and you may be surprised at how flexible the options are. Animation in web and email marketing certainly has its detractors and not without just cause. Plenty of gimmicky advertising banners and tacky in-your-face GIFs can be found online. These are examples of animation for animation’s sake and a surefire way to cheapen your brand. But it doesn’t need to be that way. With a bit of restraint and planning, animation can be harnessed to create some truly elegant, eye-catching designs and provide useful information to the customer. Let’s see what’s in the email animation toolbox. Animated GIFs Pros Cons Nearly universal support Easy to…
Do image heavy emails still have a place in email marketing?
A healthy balance of live text and images in email – it’s the general consensus in email design and development as well as being best practice. This healthy balance is seen as a must to help emails land in inboxes rather than the spam folder, and to ensure our emails reach the widest possible audience. However, over the years there has been a rapid increase in the number of email clients and devices that need to be considered in email development. With each combination of device and email client/inbox provider, email marketers are faced with set after set of rules and restrictions that need to be abided by. What’ll work in one email client won’t in another. Oh, but it’ll…
Working on spec
In this weeks blog I am going to look at working on spec. Particularly, why working on spec devalues you and the years you spent learning your particular talent. Why it devalues your existing client relationships and why it devalues any future relationship you might have with the new “client” you are working on spec for. Working on spec is working for free. Now don’t get me wrong, I think doing a client a favour, or offering some free of charge add-ons to sweeten a deal is ok. It shows the new client that this is a partnership, that you are invested in delivering service for them for the agreed remuneration and if you have to go a stage further…
How MINI have changed their emails during a rebrand
MINI have been going through a rebranding process for a while now and it seems to be a phased approach happening gradually. It’s no surprise their emails have gone through some changes as well to mirror this transition, so I’m going to be focusing on one of their emails and the transition it has gone through in design over the last six months. The Rebrand The overarching change has been the rebrand, which seems to have moved on from the previous, bold, in-your-face, young and fun vibe to something a little more grown-up. I also know that, where all of the previous emails tended to fit the same format and layout, the new ones vary in style. They have developed…
Create great pixel art emails
Simon White is the Dogs Trust’s Digital Marketing Officer. He is also the guy responsible for creating awesomeness in the email space for a good few years now and generally comes up with some of the best design concepts we’ve seen. When Simon agreed to write this blog for us we were pretty pleased, we think it might be one of the best email marketing blogs ever written! Thanks Simon! As email marketers, we know we’re a bit old-fashioned. We still code in tables, we use emoticons from last millennium and we’re still applying fixes for versions of Outlook that are over a decade old. That’s why when you think of what the future of email has to offer, it’s…