Author Archive: Cody De Vos
Meet Emma designer Elizabeth Williams
Elizabeth shares tips for customizing your email's format and making your content stand out
Elizabeth works ... and wears her thinking cap.
You’ve designed custom email templates for Emma customers. Templates frame content nicely, but what do you recommend for arranging the body of an email (its text and image fields)?
Great question. It’s best to have your content strategy determined before you get to design. Establishing a content hierarchy is so important when making complementary visual hierarchy decisions. Here are some questions to ask yourself about the content that will help to inform the design:
1. How often do you want to send?
Sending often might mean sharing just one or two stories per email. Sending a newsletter-style monthly or quarterly email requires you to give a bit more thought to how all the stories will come together — and how your design elements will support the story.
2. What do your subscribers respond to?
Do they tend to click more on image-based links or text-based links? Do they click on stories at the top of your email, or are their clicks dispersed throughout the email? Are they mostly mobile users? The answers to these questions will determine how you should lay out your content.
3. Is the amount of content you’ve chosen easily replicable?
For example, if you have four articles each month and you want an image to go with each, do you have access to great imagery that will support each article every time you mail? If not, you may need to rethink what you want to do there, or think about having an in-house designer create images that you can re-use. Or, ask the Emma design team. We love making designs that work for the resources you have access to!
4. How does your brand use imagery, and how can that imagery best support your story via email? Could you utilize custom image-based headings?
Image-based headings really add pop and personality to an email.
5. What’s your message hierarchy?
Do you have a featured article each time? Do you have a big image up top that spans the width of your stationery? This will help you determine if you’d like to use a similar story layout each time, or if you’d like to switch it up each month, based on the news at your company.
Other questions to consider: Can you reduce the amount of copy and let some images do the talking? Or better yet, can you create teaser copy that links to the full stories elsewhere? Can you use a sidebar for quick links, ad space or smaller supporting elements (as opposed to primary/secondary items in the content hierarchy)?
I find headlines, subheadings and body text hard to balance visually. When you design a stationery that’s meant to employ consistent headline and body copy (like Emma’s Agency Insider), how do you find the perfect balance?
A good headline is powerful. It needs to entice the reader, and it should be very distinguishable from the body copy. There aren’t really set-in-stone rules for this type of thing since there are many ways to achieve a good balance between headline, subhead and body copy. Here’s one test you can do: after you style your copy, scoot back from your computer and make sure the first thing you see in the text is are the headlines. If those are somewhat distinguishable from a distance, you’re on the right track. Typically, playing with bold, italics, text-based divider lines (using dashes, forward slashes or Emma’s horizontal rule tool) and color will all help to create the right balance, but always remember to self-edit.
Choose two or three styles to make each section distinct and stick with them. Don’t oversaturate your text with styling. If you use much more than two fonts, two colors (even accent colors), more than two or three font sizes, it’ll look cluttered. And just because I have your attention — no comic sans, please.
I’ve noticed that most folks stick to a clean sans-serif font, like Helvetica or Verdana. The Uppercase email (below) is a nice exception. Mixing font choices can be tricky, though. What holds this campaign together even though it employs a number of different typeface styles and colors?
Uppercase blends several fonts and colors in their email.
Also, since that particular copy is in letter format, the serif font gives it a more classic, formal feel which is in contrast to their use of a sans-serif in the sidebar for more ad-like copy; they want to get straight to business there. Within that serif text in the main well, they’ve highlighted what they consider the most important piece of information by changing the color of the type and using bold and italics when appropriate.
I like mixing sans-serif and serif fonts in headline and subhead copy. I typically prefer the headline to be in the serif font and the subhead in a sans (Georgia and Tahoma provide a nice mix), with a very obvious font size difference. Using that mixture lends a classic sophistication to any campaign, but always have your brand top of mind when making that decision.
Oh, one last thought — using a serif font within your sans text for a pull quote is also a cool way to use the mixture and give it a more editorial feel.
In last year’s New Year’s Resolution design, you chose a striking purple color to highlight several areas, including some of the header text. I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that this is also the shade of Claire’s lipstick in the design. But which came first? Did you isolate that color from the photograph? Or did you plan the color scheme, then adjust the photo?
Elizabeth's design uses a striking highlight color in the text and image.
Pulling a highlight color from a logo or photograph is a great way to bring the email together visually. But, at least initially, it sounds a little daunting to those of us without design chops. What sorts of tips and tools do you recommend?
Since Emma’s email tools are simply an extension of your brand, I think the most daunting part is making the foundational commitment to your brand. That is, choosing brand colors, denoting the primary, secondary and accent usage cases for each, the font styles you want to use, etc. Get together with your team to build a brand style guide, then find the specific color codes for the colors you’ve selected.
If you’re working with an Emma designer, we’d love to help with color selections, and we can provide the proper color codes to input when using Emma’s text editor. If you need a free, on-the-fly “color picker” check out Eye Drop for Chrome, or Colorzilla for Firefox. You can identify the HEX code for your color, then input it in the Emma text editor.
I also like free photo editing tools like Skitch, Gimp and Pixlr. With a little practice, they become pretty easy to use.
What is the Emma design team up to now?
We’re really busy — and really excited — to be working on a new template gallery for Emma customers. They’ll be able to choose from hundreds (literally, hundreds) of free readymade templates, then customize the look of their campaigns with their logo and brand colors. It’s a lot of work, and we can’t wait to unveil the designs soon.
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Lights! Camera! Email?
How to make the most of videos in your email campaigns
A while back, I decided to revisit a craft I’d always wanted to hone: video editing. And, wouldn’t you know it, ever since upgrading to my fancy new software, I’m seeing the potential to make videos all over the place. It’s like my Dad always said: “Give a man a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail.”
As a medium for your message, online video is a mighty fine-looking hammer. Internet Retailer reports that visitors who view product videos are a whopping 85% more likely to make a purchase. It’s easier than ever to create video content, and when done right, it works wonders for your company’s credibility.
In fact, video and email are two of the most effective communication tools on the web. And together they are even more powerful — case studies and split tests show that video links improve conversions by anywhere from 9% to 400%. Numbers like these don’t go unnoticed by advertisers. The Email Experience Council shares that projected budgets for online video ads will increase 22% from 2011 to 2012.
But how can you be sure that video is the right medium for your message? It doesn’t matter how exquisitely crafted your hammer is: If you use it to change a light bulb, you’re going to make quite a mess. So let’s take a look at some ways to make the most of videos. With these in mind, your video content is sure to get great results.
Video provides education
When I decided to change the oil in my car for the first time, I immediately set out in search of instructions on the web. It quickly became clear that reading instructions wasn’t enough: I needed to see it done. A few training videos later, I changed my oil without a hitch. (Sure, it still wasn’t a pretty process, but it could’ve been a lot worse.)
Sometimes, words and images alone aren’t the best way to teach others. GQ Magazine routinely employs crisp, stylish instructional videos in their email campaigns. In their quest to teach guys like me a thing or two about scarves, video content does the trick.
GQ Magazine knows that some things must be demonstrated to sink in.
Video connects us
People love watching and, maybe more importantly, sharing videos. Even those that only last seven seconds. What other medium could prompt the shared experience of millions of people worldwide so quickly?
That’s why I love this video in a recent Global Giving email. In just three minutes, they illustrate the value of donor contributions and the heart of their mission. By pairing this video with a personal email message, Global Giving shows appreciation for their donors in a way that’s more memorable than text and images alone.
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Global Giving invites donors to share in their victories.
Video entertains
What can video do that words simply can’t? Sing and dance. Sometimes it’s okay for a video to be pure entertainment. In the case of artist promos, that’s often the whole point. Indie record label Jagjaguwar — home to Bon Iver and other coffee house favorites — uses video in email to promote their roster and engage in a little online community building, too. By featuring an artist-created music video (shot by the song’s performer, Lia Ices), and inviting readers to submit their own video for this song, they build buzz for an emerging artist while tapping into a lively online videography community.
In a demographically ideal pairing, the winning video played on IFC.com, a prime destination for all aspiring filmmakers. It was the perfect marriage of old-fashioned promotion and user-generated content sharing.
Jagjaguwar gives readers the chance to share their own music video creations.
Suddenly feeling a little Spielbergian? Check out Molly’s tips for sharing video in your email campaigns, grab your video camera (or even just your smartphone) and start exploring.
Just remember: Every video click is a time commitment for your readers, and they watch the seconds go by on their screen. So show them that you value their time by keeping your videos as tight and informative as you can. And if you need any help sharing your video in your email campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
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Want to revise your email stationery or request a brand new template? Use Emma’s design form to tell us what you’d like.
Typography 101: Know your serif
Get familiar with a few typographical terms and see your font library in a whole new way
The printer wasn’t always a machine that sat in the corner of your office, beeping out cryptic warning messages and accumulating slap-shaped handprints. Even a few decades ago, most people would have thought of a printer as a person — somebody whose work consisted of manually arranging and printing text and images. Professional printers are still plying and improving upon their trade, but thanks to the advent of the personal computer, we’ve inherited a great many of their tools in digital form. The problem? When those tools arrived, they didn’t come with any knowledge of the craft. It’s as though every computer owner has been given the keys to a master carpenter’s workshop, but hasn’t yet been shown how to swing a hammer.
Luckily, you don’t have to don a hooded robe and take the Typographer’s Oath to get a better handle on the fundamentals of your favorite fonts. In fact, once you’ve learned a few terms and distinctions, you may find yourself looking at your font options in a whole new way. So if you want to be able to talk typefaces like Leon from sales can talk about wine, pull up a chair.
Today, we’ll take a look at one of the most easily distinguished characteristics of fonts: the serif. But first, in order to understand the significance of the serif, it’ll be helpful to start off with a tiny bit of history.
Typography: a very condensed history
It’s almost impossible to fathom the fact that, for the majority of its history, the written word was exactly that –handwritten (or hand-carved). Many would suggest that the questions typography addresses are as old as the first alphabet. The size, spacing, legibility and uniformity of hieroglyphic characters would have certainly been a worthy concern — after all, if your “owl” looked too much like your “scarab,” readers would surely throw down your papyrus in frustration.
In the Western world, medieval scribes fostered a rich tradition of variations in handwritten scripts before the advent of the Gutenberg press in the mid-1400′s. Generally, it’s said that this invention, with its reliance on uniform, custom carved letters, heralded the advent of typography as we know it today. The emergence of distinctive sets of letters and characters during this time is also largely responsible for some of typography’s more archaic-sounding distinctions: gothic type? Roman type? What century are we living in?
Web-safe fonts
Hundreds of years and thousands of meticulously designed typefaces later, we’re awash in a sea of font options. Just opening up the dropdown menu in Word is enough to give the average user an anxiety attack. Web- and email-based tools like Emma make the decision a little easier. Have you ever noticed that your reading experience on the web is fairly uniform, and usually pretty painless? Web designers can’t be certain which fonts your device will come equipped with, so they’ll often restrict themselves to “web-safe fonts” — fonts that can be read on any device — to ensure that their readers see their content as they intended it. This is also the case with Emma’s font selection: instead of the Narnia wardrobe of fonts typically employed in desktop word processing programs, you’ll see 15 of the most versatile, popular and readable fonts available. There’s a lot of character in these sets of characters, so let’s take a look at one way you can distinguish them.
Serifs
Look at these two N’s. Notice a difference? The Times New Roman N on the left has little finishing strokes in all of the places where an individual line terminates; the Helvetica N on the right doesn’t. Those are called serifs. Easy, right? If serifs were just called “little taily things,” no formal introduction would be required!
For many, the serif conveys an old-fashioned elegance, and that sentiment has roots in typographical history. Serifs are said by some to emulate the initial placement of a flat paintbrush on a surface to shape a letter for a stone engraving — a bit of calligraphic flourish from an era that predates the printed word. In print (and especially in newsprint) serifed fonts are said to have greater readability. Readability actually doesn’t refer to whether the individual letters can be easily distinguished — that’s legibility. Instead, readability refers to the ease with which a reader can follow along over longer sections of text. Proponents of serifed fonts often contend that the additional finishing strokes help distinguish letter shapes and assist in guiding the eye horizontally across the page.
Times New Roman may be the most commonly used serifed font in the workplace today, thanks largely to its long reign as the default font in Microsoft programs like Word and Excel. As Word goes, so go many word processing programs, including our own. Times New Roman is a taut, functional font, but among typographers, its suitability as serifed fonts’ standard bearer is hotly contested. In fact, it’s no longer in use by The Times, the London newspaper who commissioned its creation and gave it its namesake back in 1931. For web use, many point to Georgia as a suitable alternative — the lowercase letters are closer in size to the uppercase ones, so even at small point sizes, the individual letters are larger and more easily read. Perhaps this is why the Times that we’re better acquainted with here in the States – The New York Times — employs Georgia as their main typeface for web headlines and articles. For those seeking a font that evokes an even earlier time in history — say, the Italian Renaissance — you might want to consider Book Antiqua. This serifed font boasts greater calligraphic stylization in its strokes, but its thicker lines and broader letters also make it highly readable.
Sans-serif fonts
Now that we’ve identified our serif, we need only dust off our French textbooks to identify our sans-serif fonts: sans means without. You may have noticed that the text on this page is sans-serif — the lines of the letters terminate without any ornamentation. The same is probably true of the typefaces in your email inbox and on your favorite news sites: in addition to their immense popularity in the material world, sans-serif typefaces enjoy special prominence on the web, where text is likely to be compact and frequently scrolled. In the pioneer days of digital typography, the clear lines of sans-serif fonts proved well-suited to pixel-based screens. Where ornately serifed fonts could dissolve into unwieldy, blocky characters, the cleaner sans-serif fonts could survive the pixelation more or less intact. While modern high-definition screens have all but eliminated pixelation as a serious text issue, the enhanced white space offered by thin, sans-serif characters is also thought to ease the reader’s eye when scanning an illuminated screen. This may be especially true of smaller screens — the default typefaces for all major mobile devices are sans-serif.
Consciously or not, this techie association has only strengthened the infatuation with the presumed clean, spare modernism of sans-serif fonts. Although sans-serif fonts aren’t a uniquely modern invention (serif-free Greek characters predate the Roman Empire, and their introduction in print dates back to the early 1800s), there’s a ring of truth to their association with modernism. This is especially true of Helvetica, popular design’s undisputed champion of the last decade. As illuminated in Gary Hustwit’s engrossing 2007 documentary, Helvetica, this striking Swiss font has become one of the most ubiquitous emblems of contemporary life. Engineered during the 1950s in accordance with the modernist ideal — abandoning the trappings of classical ornamentation in favor of clean, spare functionality — Helvetica has emerged as the rare font with rockstar status among design lovers. Emma customer service specialist and man of style Miles Price sometimes even wears his Helvetica T-shirt to the office. If Helvetica can be likened to a rock band, though, its closest analogue is probably U2: it’s wildly popular, critically laurelled, seemingly timeless and an easy target for ridicule. In fact, a great many trend-setting designers are consciously distancing themselves from Helvetica (and its Microsoft-commissioned, Emma-friendly cousins, Tahoma, Verdana and Arial). Consequently, while the sans-serif font remains a bastion of modernity, the design world has enjoyed a renaissance of ornately serifed fonts, both in print and on the web.
And beyond
Fortunately for the art form, there are plenty of font choices available beyond serif and sans-serif options. Many typefaces belong to different families entirely. Still, most fonts within your Emma account can be considered either serif or sans-serif, as can most of the text you encounter over the course of your day.
Fascinating stuff, right? Once you know where to look, you’ll spot all kinds of places where a change in typeface changes the feeling of an entire message. One of those places may be in your own email campaigns, so if you feel like subtly altering your voice without changing your message, now you’ve got something other than your intuition to help guide your choice.
Cody’s not a Certified Font Specialist, but he found a wealth of typographical information within the Emma design team, as well as in these posts from Co.Design, I Love Typography and Alex Poole.
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Lifecycle mailings help you reach your audience at the right time
Email examples for different stages of the subscriber relationship
If you plan on catching up on your Sophocles over the holidays and you’d like to avoid spoilers, you might want to skip these next few lines: they give away the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx. Ready? What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon and on three legs in the evening? The answer: a man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult and uses a cane in old age.
Consider this: there’s a morning, noon and evening (of sorts) to your email subscriber’s relationship with you, too. And, just like our riddle’s subject, your subscribers will benefit from a little extra help in the different phases of it. That’s where lifecycle emails come in.
Lifecycle mailings are your opportunity to customize your readers’ experience from the very beginning — and to tailor consequent messages to the different stages of your relationship with them. For example, you might send a welcome email early on to offer new subscribers help getting started. Or, you might offer a unique deal or extra appreciation to active subscribers (those that regularly open, click or share your email). On the flip slide, you might want to give special attention to subscribers who have lapsed into inactivity. Lifecycle emails are a great way to show subscribers that you’re aware of the connections you’re building with them. Best of all, they really work. As MarketingSherpa reports, targeted mailings increase open rates by as much as 30% over non-targeted ones.
Emma’s trigger mailings and audience search capabilities make it easy to set up an automated lifecycle mailing program that meets your audience members wherever they are in their customer relationship. Looking for a little inspiration? Here are a few examples from companies that make lifecycle messaging a central part of their email strategy.
Welcome message series
Ebay welcomes new members in a series of emails.
You’ve got to crawl before you can walk, right? Your new subscribers are a special group: they’ve just joined your audience, they’re eager to learn more and they won’t know what to expect from your mailings. They’re also among your most engaged readers. A 2010 report from Experian Marketing Services indicated that the average open rate for welcome messages is as much as four times higher than the normal mailing.
Your welcome message is your first opportunity to tell new subscribers what they should know about you. As Molly demonstrates in this blog post, crafting great welcome emails is something of an art form. And sometimes, one welcome message may not be enough. I received a welcome email from Ebay on the day I opened my account. Then, two days later, I received a follow-up message with additional tips on getting started. There’s a lot to learn about how to use Ebay — so much so that it can be a little daunting for the uninitiated, and I appreciated the extra messaging.
Think about creating a series of welcome emails. They’ll help your new subscribers learn to navigate your service and offerings over time.
Anniversary messages
Redbox sends a note on your customer anniversary.
They grow up so fast, don’t they? After the first few months, your new subscribers aren’t so new anymore. If your messages are relevant and you’re targeting the right people, your subscribers mature into readers who don’t need as much handholding in their messages. And after their peak activity as early subscribers, your regular readers’ activity tends to level out as they make their own decisions about which messages and offers hold the most appeal to them. But even though they’re standing on their own feet now, they’ll still appreciate a specialized message every so often. In this eye-catching anniversary message, Redbox rewards their subscribers with a free rental. For your audience, it may be a free cup of coffee or just a follow-up check-in, but recognizing milestones in the relationship is a great way to let your readers know that you value them.
Re-engagement campaigns
Chico's lets you know that you've been missed.
Even if you have the most engaged of email audiences, it’s normal to have a batch of inactive subscribers, too. In fact, you may see 20 to 30 percent of an email audience lost to bounced emails and unsubscribes over the course of a year. Since a 2007 Return Path study indicated that only 22% of business professionals actually unsubscribed from emails they no longer wished to receive, that means that, at any given moment, your audience is likely to contain recipients who have moved past their prime as responsive audience members.
What to do? A targeted mailing to the unresponsive section of your audience is a great way to reconnect with lapsed subscribers. A simple audience search in Emma can help you target everyone in your audience who hasn’t opened a mailing in a set period of time (a year is a safe place to start).
This re-engagement campaign from Chico is an example of solid messaging for inactive subscribers. It acknowledges that the reader hasn’t been active in a while without sounding creepy, and it gives a strong incentive to re-engage with the brand. If you’re planning a re-engagement campaign for your own audience, remember that tone is everything — keep it sincere and conversational. “We haven’t heard from you in a while” is a much better way to connect with a lapsed subscriber than “It looks like you haven’t opened an email campaign in 12 months.” You want your audience to feel that you’re listening to them, not that you’re watching them like a hawk.
Re-engagement campaigns will win back some audience members who would otherwise have wandered off into the sunset, but it’s important to keep realistic expectations: if they haven’t responded up until this point, many of your audience members may have reached the end of their day. After giving these members a few opportunities to come back into the fold, it may be time to remove them from your list.
And, don’t despair — as one section of your audience is going gently into that good night, there’s a whole other section whose day is just beginning. Catch folks — and speak to them — where they’re at, and you’ll be on your way to a solid list of engaged subscribers.
Stepping out of the inbox
Give your email campaigns a second life with social media
Here’s an interesting question: When you set out to create your company’s newest mailing, do you think of it as an email or as a campaign? Of course, your audience will see it as an email among others in their inbox. But you’re not just creating an email — you’re creating a message that’s worth sharing. And that message (or series of messages) can go beyond the inbox. If you think of it as a coordinated effort or campaign, you’ll realize it’s worth spreading through other channels, too.
Take a closer look at your social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. I’ll bet you’ve got more combined followers than you realize. Do all of them know how to receive your email updates? Have they heard about your latest campaign?
It’s easy to expand your email’s reach beyond the inbox by enabling Emma’s Social Sharing feature, which allows subscribers to share your email with their social networks, and it’s about to be easier for you to post your email to your social networks, with the release of our new Social Posting tool this winter. With a few clicks, you’ll be able to send a mailing to your subscribers and simultaneously post it to Facebook and Twitter. It’s an easy step that makes a big difference. In anticipation, let’s take a look at a few companies who’ve made an art out of extending the reach of their email campaigns via their social channels:
GOOP
GOOP shares a link to their emails on Facebook, generating lots of fan dialogue.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle-oriented email newsletter, GOOP, won’t turn you into an Academy Award-winning actor/singer/cookbook author, but it might make you feel like you’re having a weekly teatime chat with one. GOOP carries on lively conversations with its audience via its Facebook page, and when the latest issue hits the inbox, you can count on a timely post with a concise, appealing teaser.
GeekChic Daily
GeekChicDaily plays hard to get with a Facebook teaser.
Like GOOP, geek culture email newsletter GeekChicDaily thrives on email engagement. But GeekChicDaily takes an interesting approach to extending its email newsletter’s online lifespan through social media: It tells, but doesn’t show. Take a look at this Facebook post. If you’re hooked by the promise of news from the Jim Henson Company (and really, what self-respecting geek wouldn’t be?), then you’ll have to sign up to get the word.
Brite Revolution
Brite Revolution manages to work the sizzle & the steak into one tweet.
If you monitor your emails’ response activity over time, you’ve probably noticed a trend: an early spike in activity (usually in the hours immediately after the send-off), followed by a steady decline in new activity over the course of the first 24 hours. However, as the folks at Brite Revolution know, last Friday’s email content will still be fresh on Tuesday for those who didn’t receive it in their inbox. They’ve packed a lot into this tweet: In addition to linking to both their newsletter and their signup form, they’ve set the expectation for how often they email — and communicated a clear benefit for joining. Not bad for 131 characters!
As email and social media become increasingly intertwined, it’s important to remember that they evolved to answer different but complementary needs. As you join the conversation with your followers on social networks, remember that your email campaigns are a unique opportunity to share sophisticated, content-rich updates. And Facebook and Twitter’s link-friendly environments mean that email updates may prove remarkably well-suited for your social media audience.
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See what we’ve got in the works this winter at Emma. It’s a Featurepalooza!
Liven up your email with animated GIFs
The '90s web animation staple isn't just for dancing babies - it’s perfect for spicing up your email campaigns
There's nothing stopping you from featuring this jaunty fellow in your email campaigns. Click on the image to view the animation.
If you ever want to get a little perspective on how far web design has come since the ’90s, pay a visit to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and pull up Best Buy’s home page from December of 1996. Yikes, right? Was there really a time when a well-heeled electronics megastore used an animation of a turtleneck-wearing, gift-giving pig on its homepage during the holiday season?
The Wayback Machine doesn’t lie; back when the Internet was undergoing its awkward adolescence and everyone was infatuated with moving pictures, the animated GIF was king. It was a time of dancing babies, twinkling lights and bouncing smiley faces, all playing on endless loops. Not coincidentally, it was also a time of web-induced headaches. As the technology and language of Internet styling evolved, the bulky, simplistic animated GIF gave way to more sophisticated Flash- and Shockwave-based animations. Like the 8-track and the VHS tape, the once-revolutionary animated GIF became the butt of jokes (like this one, sneakily tucked away on our site).
Still, every format has its champions. Just as some filmmakers find inspiration in VHS camcorders and some diehard music geeks still make mixtapes, there are artists and designers who welcome the challenge presented by the animated GIF’s endless animation loop, limited color palette and potentially restrictive file size. When the stunning GIF-based artwork of collaborators Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg caught my eye earlier this year, I began to wonder if the email marketing world was due for a GIF animation revolution. If it is, it’s hard to imagine a better medium.
The Internet has evolved a great deal since the age of the four-frame animated firework. However, as our own Taylor Schena outlined in an earlier blog post, the countless display variations between email clients has kept email design frozen in a time before Javascript, Flash or CSS. Fortunately, animated GIFs’ early web prominence means that, unlike Flash and most other animation styles, they’re almost universally recognized (and correctly rendered) in the inbox.
If you’ve been wondering how to jolt a little life into your email campaigns, a moving element may be just the thing. But before you lay your newest email campaign on the slab for re-animation, there are a few things you should be aware of.
Not everyone will see your animations. When I say that GIFs are almost universally recognized, I mean that they’re recognized by every major email client except for Outlook 2007. Holding true to its reputation as the bane of every HTML designer’s existence, Outlook 2007 will only display the first frame of an animated GIF. While this is hardly a deal breaker, it does mean that the first frame of your animation should communicate your intended message clearly for Outlook users. So if you were planning a fancy reveal in the animation’s final frames, you may want to think through your animation carefully to make sure the takeaway isn’t lost on Outlook users.
Your animated GIF should be more Popeye than Pixar. Since every frame in an animated GIF can introduce a new or altered image, these files can get very large, very fast. If your image file size is too large, it could affect both your email’s deliverability and the quality of the display, especially on mobile devices (only a couple of Beck and Burg’s designs would be truly email-friendly). Limit your color palette and stick to basic movements with a limited frame rate, and your GIF will travel and present itself well.
Be bold, but don’t go crazy. Hipster clothier Urban Outfitters has a long history of incorporating animated GIFs into their campaigns in a way that’s both sophisticated and, sometimes, charmingly retro. When the design comes together well, like this spring campaign spotlighted by Email Marketing Voodoo, it makes for a fun, eye-catching email, and it’s an excellent use of the format’s limitations. When it goes too far, as many think this divisive psychedelic campaign did back in 2009, readers’ first reaction may be to get away from it any way that they can.
Make your animated GIF updates before you upload your files to Emma. Emma email campaigns will treat your animated GIFs like any other image file, with one exception: you’ll need to have your GIF file ready exactly as you’d like it to appear before you upload it to your account. Once it’s in your Emma account, you won’t be able to resize the image or rename the file.
If you’re ready to experiment with animation in your email, but aren’t quite sure where to start, Style Campaign has a terrific guide to creating animated GIFs in Photoshop.
Have you had any interesting adventures (or misadventures) with animation in the inbox? Share your story in the comments section.
Turning clients on to opt-in email marketing
For Emma agencies, educating clients on the importance of permission standards and list hygiene is critical. But that doesn't mean it has to be stressful.
Send great emails to people who want to receive them. That’s the phrase that rings in my head when I ponder how an agency speaking with a prospect might summarize the goal of permission-based email marketing. Pretty simple, right? The “great emails” part is easy to communicate, especially if they’ve seen samples of your work, or worked with you on other ventures. So now we come to the “people” part. Who are these people? Where did they come from?
This is where the conversation with a prospective client will turn to permission, and it’s one of the most important conversations you’ll have. Fortunately, our permission policy is pretty straightforward: To receive your emails, people on your list…
MUST BE:
+ Someone who is a customer, member or subscriber of your business or organization
+ Someone who has specifically asked to receive your emails by opting in or signing up in some way or
+ Someone who has bought a product or service from you in the past 18 months.
Emma’s permissions policy is in place to minimize the risk to our customers’ sending reputation, and to maximize the effectiveness of your email strategy. But the reasons for these standards may not be immediately apparent to a client who’s considering renting or purchasing a list, or attempting to send to an audience full of email addresses that they haven’t contacted in years. So when you’re getting to know a new client’s email list, it’s important to communicate the value of a healthy, permission-based list. Here are a few points to focus on:
A healthy audience means a healthy sending reputation: In the United States, anti-spam legislation doesn’t go as far toward limiting unsolicited messages as most email service providers (like us) do. It’s not illegal to send unsolicited emails as long as you label them as ads, include your business address and offer a way to opt out of your list. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea: Email traffic is privately monitored, policed and regulated well beyond the limits of CAN-SPAM regulations. Most email clients and servers have their own rigorous standards to protect their users’ inboxes from spam overload. And while your client may not realize it, their business builds upon their reputation with servers and spam blacklists with every mailing. Email campaigns to well-maintained, opt-in lists tend to yield high delivery, open and click-through rates, all of which look like little gold stars next to a company’s name. On the other hand, mailings to rented, purchased or outdated lists are pretty easy to spot. They consistently yield low delivery and open rates, and high rates of opt-outs and spam complaints. Servers and spam filters take notice — a company with a history of poor mailings will have a notably harder time reaching their audience’s inbox. In fact, they often have a hard time reclaiming their good name even after they’ve seen the error of their ways and changed their practices.
Our own reputation as the “carrier” of your clients’ messages also comes into play. To maintain our exceptional delivery rates, we work vigilantly to ensure that all the emails we send are in line with our policy, so sickly-looking response rates are often a sign that we need to step in to diagnose the cause. In situations where we need to find out more about an email delivery issue, we always start by learning more about the email list. In most cases, the source of the problem lies with the manner in which the email addresses were gathered.
Smart list practices yield a higher return on investment: In the early days, a good deal of conversation around email marketing revolved around accumulating the biggest email address list possible. Growing your audience is still an essential piece of any smart marketer’s strategy, but in recent years, email marketing specialists have increased their focus on engagement over simple accumulation. A good subscriber’s initial points of engagement came before they saw their first email — they bought a product or service, or they asked to hear from you. There’s a connection to build upon. An audience that hasn’t made this connection, or made it so long ago that they’ve likely forgotten about it, won’t be as responsive to your message.
A good email list is naturally grown: There aren’t any shortcuts when it comes to building a healthy, responsive email list. But there are plenty of great ways to attract the right people to join your audience. Find the places where your intended audience makes contact with you, and make sure there’s an opportunity to sign up waiting for them there. For some businesses, this may be a fishbowl for business cards at the cash register. For others, it may be on your company’s homepage. If your client is a heavy emailer, have they considered including a signup link in their signature? As you grow your audience, find ways to enable them to help you find new subscribers. Tweet links to your email campaigns and post them on Facebook. Encourage subscribers to share your emails with friends. Give them options to choose to receive the content that they’re most interested in. There’s nothing like watching your email audience grow healthy and strong. If your client can get excited about that prospect, they’re already well on their way to finding the people who want to hear from them the most.
Add an Emma signup screen to your Facebook page
New updates to Facebook make it easier than ever to collect email subscribers
Stroller Strides' Facebook page hosts a lovely Emma signup screen
But, are you also posting an email signup form on your Facebook page to capture new subscribers?
For a long time, Facebook’s tricky, ever-changing code standards made it difficult to get an email signup form to “stick” on your company’s page. Facebook recently made some changes, and now it’s much easier to post a signup form on your company page — and you can use the Emma signup form found right in your account.
We’ve put together step-by-step instructions in our Help Guide, and here’s the rundown: After installing a Facebook app called “Static HTML,” you can build an HTML-friendly section of your Facebook page. Luckily, the code will stay put even as the rest of the application shifts and changes.
Our friends at Stroller Strides are doing it, and they’re giving their Facebook followers the opportunity to self-select the kinds of email messages they’d like to receive. It’s a terrific way for Stroller Strides to gain more subscribers and for fans to receive the type of content they’re interested in.
If you have any questions along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our support team. And if you come across effective signup forms on Facebook, please share them with us here.
Email inspiration at your fingertips
New online service Emailium brings emails from thousands of companies together in a fully searchable database
Emailium helps you find your favorite shade of blue.
Why do we do this? Because we like to have our boots on the ground, so to speak. We love to encounter new and different email tactics and strategies, and to engage them in the same way a dedicated follower would. Every so often, you come across an email campaign so inspiring, you almost want to write the company a thank-you note. And yet, when the time comes to prepare a presentation with email examples, or to seek out new ideas for fresh content, we must scour our archives, knowing that, even though we’re drawing from libraries of hundreds – thousands – of email campaigns, we’re only sampling a tiny slice of the email marketing landscape.
This is where Emailium, a brand new, fully searchable database of the email campaigns of thousands of companies, comes in. The brainchild of entrepreneur and seasoned email marketer James Paden, Emailium collects the accumulated email campaign history of hundreds of companies and presents them in intuitive, organized and searchable galleries. One example: We tried out a new shade of “Emma Blue” in the background of our July newsletter. We liked it, but let’s imagine we wanted to take a look at some other color schemes that might work well. If I wanted to scour my collected “email example” folders for a potential match, I might have to set up camp in the office over the weekend. But with Emailium, I can search the database for other email campaigns containing that color’s hex code (#3E7E97, if you’re curious). Within moments, hundreds of email campaigns containing this color appear in a neatly thumbnailed, paged library.
The range of companies represented is impressive, with luxury shoe brands arriving alongside electronics shops, hockey equipment manufacturers and Broadway theater companies. You can refine your searches as much as you need, so if you only want to see examples of campaigns with “Halloween” in the subject line from retail companies, you can filter your search by subject line content and by industry (the industry filter, while still in beta, seems to function well).
Emailium isn’t just for design inspiration, though. It’s a good way to get a closer look at any featured company’s email campaign strategy, from their sending frequency to their subject lines to their special offers. So if there’s a company that you or your client is particularly interested in — because you admire their brand or because you share an industry — you can follow their history in their email archive. Don’t see the company you’re looking for? With just a few clicks, you can submit a request to have it added to the roster, and Emailium will email you when it’s been added.
For email marketers who work closely with their clients on design, copy and mailing strategy, Emailium is a massive time saver. It’s free to try out a few searches, and with a paid subscription, you can export emails to share, save your most common searches and tag your favorite emails for later reference. If you spend a lot of time in the email marketing trenches (or digging trenches through your own inbox in search of inspiration), you’ll probably wonder how you ever got along without it.
You have been invited to join the group: Facebook Studio
With a new social space and series for advertisers, Facebook sure has been acting friendly to advertisers. What does it mean for your agency?
Saying that it’s been a busy few weeks over at Facebook almost feels like saying it’s been a loud few weeks at the dog pound – do they ever have quiet ones? Last month, Facebook announced a suite of new tools geared specifically towards marketers, and as someone who works closely with Emma’s agency partners, this announcement really grabbed my attention. Even though Facebook has climbed to the #3 position in online ad revenue (just behind Google and Yahoo), they’ve largely done so without any overtures of friendship to the advertising world. But now they’re inviting marketers to get involved — in a specially moderated online community and a series of live interactive sessions — and it might just change how you think about positioning your agency online.
“Create a new group:” An online community for advertisers
First, we got Facebook Studio. Launched just over a month ago, it’s a communal space for advertisers to share their best work and draw inspiration and insight from the work of others. Barely one month later, it’s grown into a lively marketplace of ideas whose currency is popularity — agencies can share the Facebook-oriented creative work they’re most proud of, and the most-liked campaigns move from the “Gallery” area into the “Spotlight,” where they enjoy prominent placement and full multimedia treatment. For those agencies still lingering in the shallow area of Facebook’s marketing tool pool, there’s the “Learning Lab,” a collection of educational resources geared towards social marketing beginners and journeymen. Although each campaign boasts its own comments section (in a startlingly MySpace-like arrangement, no less), Facebook Studio requires no login to access — you can browse their offerings any time at www.facebook-studio.com.
“RSVP to this event:” Facebook interactive sessions for marketers
In conjunction with Facebook Studio’s release, Facebook announced a series of interactive sessions titled, conveniently enough, Facebook Studio Live. The very first Facebook Studio Live event was held in Toronto in March to a crowd of roughly 80 participants, and last week saw the very first stateside Studio Live event in New York City. Playing to a smallish crowd of roughly 200 marketers, it was by all accounts a tightly focused session that centered around creating quality content for social media. Reviews were generally positive for their first New York Studio Live session. Ad Age writer Kunur Patella liked the event, which gave advertisers an opportunity to hear from Facebook higher-ups like Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Sales, and Paul Adams, Facebook product manager. But, as Christopher Heine of ClickZ reports, there’s still a healthy thread of skepticism to be found in the feedback. While it’s generally agreed that Facebook opening its doors to agencies and inviting them to join the conversation will yield some great opportunities, some are concerned about the intellectual property implications of a Facebook-moderated online community.
Mark Zuckerberg would like to be your friend. Accept?
So what do we think? Well, it’s a little early to say, really. Facebook Studio is a pleasantly uncluttered and easily navigable experience that we’d heartily recommend to any agency partner who wants to learn from the best, and the conversations that are a part of virtually every page seem, for the most part, lively and informed. For now, though, its roster comes mostly from the international hubs like New York, San Francisco, London and Paris, and most of the spotlighted campaigns come from powerhouse brands like HBO and Skittles. Just as “the Facebook” started in the Ivy Leagues, though, there’s room for this network to kick into high gear when it expands into smaller, regional markets. And its growing list of agencies with approved submissions is becoming increasingly dotted with “Kansas City” and “Lexington” entries.
In light of Facebook’s past transgressions, one is always inclined to look for their “angle” in any new offering. Fortunately, in this case, they’ve not only hidden their angle in plain sight, but they’re also broadcasting it to the advertising world. Facebook clearly wants to grow their advertising dollar revenue in some major ways, and by bringing themselves closer to advertising agencies, they can build a worldwide network of marketers who will gladly do a good deal of legwork for them. While it remains to be seen just how Facebook’s new overtures to advertising agencies will play out in the long run, their newfound sense of camaraderie with marketers brings with it a host of case studies and resources that will no doubt be a huge help to agencies in any stage of the social marketing game — from small, regional firms who need a video tutorial on how Facebook “pages” work to heavy hitters on the coasts who have the capacity to build sophisticated mobile apps to tie into their social strategy. It’s hard to say if a Facebook Studio presence for agencies will ever become as important as a Facebook presence for brands, but since any Facebook-marketer partnership is based on mutual self interest, the opportunity for growth seems limitless.
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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