|
Hi Pablo,
We’ve got an animated Gif that we sold as an advertising banner in our newsletter, but our client has told us that the banner appears as ‘static’ when it is an animated gif.
¿Is there any problem with MAILCast?
This is a very usual query that I receive in our support system at Krasis. As it is very common I thought it would be a great idea to share it here as it was a FAQ (Frequently Asked Question).
Well, there isn’t any problem with MAILCast but with Outlook 2007, which shows animated GIFs as static GIFs. Remember: Outlook 2007 will only show the first frame of your animated GIF.
So, what can be done?
- Don’t use animated GIFs - uh, uuuh, clever! :-D (Also don’t use flash)
- If any animation is needed, upload it to a website and link it from the email.
- Whether the gif is banner, be sure that the first frame shows enough info to Outlook’s users.
And remember, do not abuse of images.
After my two posts about image formats and image dimensions for email, I’ve thought that you may be interested in a simple and free software to resize images. Not all the organizations need, can afford or know how to use a professional image editing software as Photoshop or Fireworks, so VSO Image resize will become a great tool for them.
It is a simple, usable, small but powerful tool to resize a picture or a complete folder with its batch mode. And it may be ran integrated with Internet Explorer.
Features:
• Convert between different graphic formats
• Configurable compression/resolution ratio
• Support file formats: Jpeg, gif, bmp, tiff etc
• Support Digital Camera RAW formats: Canon .CR2, Nikon .NEF , .MRW Minolta
• Handle single picture or batch mode
• Customizable templates for renaming files
• You can add your own watermark file
• Reduce size photos perfect for web publishing/share photos by email
• Integrate in windows explorer or works as a stand-alone application
• Fast processing
• Import directly from your memory cards
• Save history of destination folder
• Variable options and settings for advanced users
• Multilingual support
• Optimized for Windows 2000 / XP / Vista
Download link: VSO Image resize
I found it at Kabytes.
About a month ago I wrote a post about buying lists in the Internet and why this was a bad idea.
 Today I received a question from one of our customers about renting a list and the convenience of doing this.
Rented lists are different from selling lists in that, in the first case, you don't get access to the data in the list but the provider sends your email on your behalf to its own list of recipients. You must trust a lot the provider or otherwise you can not be sure that the list has a good quality and the recipients have given permission for receiving this kind of e-mails.
Companies that grow lists for renting generally get their recipients from vertical portals or from some specific websites. Probably this people give permission to these portals to send them e-mail from them or their customers and partners, but think about the consequences of the owners of the list sending an e-mail on your behalf: The recipients will not know you and probably get annoyed and click the “report spam” button. And most important: they didn’t give you explicit permission to send them any e-mail.
Sounds this familiar to you? Yes, it's the definition of spam: unsolicited e-mail.
Does this mean that this against the law? Not necessarily, but the point here, as always, is not only if it’s against the law (that’s supposed to be), but if it is against your own interests.
You will probably pay a good bunch of bucks for using the list, and you are surely getting a real low response for the emailing, and therefore a small ROI from the investment. And worse, your brand could be damaged if people think you’re a spammer. You don’t have a clue if the list is heavily used and consequently people in the list are angry about receiving your e-mail.
So the conclusion in (again) that you must not rent lists for emailing.
If you really need to grow your subscriptions’ list fast you can try to advertise in a vertical portal newsletter, co-brand it or make co-registration. But renting or buying a list is always a bad thing to do.
As always, I recommend that you grow your own in-house permission list (some tips here and here). It’s slow and painful, but it’s the only way to get results. In e-mail marketing always think in quality, not in quantity (more is less), and don’t forget that the most important asset you have is your brand and reputation, so don’t get a chance to drive it to a dead end.
In case you don’t want to hear my advice please review this interesting article by Jeanne Jennings: “Renting E-Mail Lists: What to Ask Before the Send”, and the ten rules of thumb for rented lists of Marketing Sherpa.
In my previous post, I wrote you about image formats recommended for web and e-mail and the recommended sizes for a faster download. Allright, but image dimensions will also affect to your file size, so take care abut it.
You won’t need a 3000px width and 2mb image in your web (yes, I know that your new camera can take even bigger images, but believe me, you won’t need it!!!) A 200px width is enough for a small picture enclosed in your article.
Always change the dimensions with an image editing software as Photoshop, Fireworks, Photopaint or the Gimp (this one is Open Source and free!), but don’t change it in your html editor (as Dreamweaver) because you will be changing just the representation size, not the file size.
In this image you can see some sizes in pixels over a real size grid to use as a guideline:
Bonus: Tools to measure images in your browser
Frequently, unexperienced customers or prospects ask us about the possibility of sending mailing containing big attachments.
 This is the kind of task that seems trivial when sending just a couple of e-mails, but that immediately reveals as a not-such-a-sensible-idea when viewed from the point of view of someone that sends thousands of e-mails.
First of all let's consider how long it will take to send out such a campaign. For example, we need to send 5,000 e-mails with a 5 MB attached .doc file. Let's do the numbers.
Attachments are encoded using Base64 (for sending binaries as text). This in average leads to an increase of 37% in the size of the attachment, so considering a total size of 5 MB (we consider content size as irrelevant here), the size when the email is sent will be:
5 x 1.37 = 6.85 MB
Now, we have 5,000 e-mails to send, so the total size of the information we need to transfer is:
5,000 x 6.85 MB = 34,250 MB --> 34.25 GB
This is equivalent to transferring 49 CD-ROMs through the wire!! (and we're not considering some extra synchronization traffic that is needed for the sake of simplicity).
If our server is placed in an advanced datacenter and has, for example, a 6 Mbps symmetric connection to the Internet (which is very good and is quite expensive), which is equivalent to 750 KB/sec (or 0,75 MB/sec), this implies a sending time of:
34,250 MB / 0.75 MB/sec = 45,666.67 seconds --> 12 hours, 41 minutes, 7 seconds
A regular 5.000 e-mailing will take around 4 minutes or less. Bufff!
Other important thing to consider is deliverability to the destination servers. If you send an e-mail with a big attachment to, let's say, a couple of accounts at hotmail.com, you probably will not have any problems. But, how many recipients can you have in your list with a hotmail e-mail account? 20%, 30%?. Probably more. Say hotmail, say yahoo, say one of your big customers in a B2B list. The point is that when a server sees a lot of big e-mails coming from the same IP, they usually block the sender because she is eating up a lot of their bandwidth. A lot of ISPs don’t have bandwidth enough to support getting a large number of emails with big attachments. So you probably will get a lot of deliverability problems if you do this.
Some recipients will have limited account storage, even in these times of almost unlimited account space. A lot of corporate servers limit the size of the incoming e-mails for their employees, so you get a chance or not getting them delivered and receive a lot of soft bounces (with more bandwidth usage in your server, by the way).
Even if you get to your recipient's inbox, if they don't know you well, you probably will get a lot of spam complaints or very low open rates for fear of getting a computer virus. Besides this, nobody likes to receive big e-mail attachments without being warned in advance.
There is an added benefit or not sending attachments: you can put files in your web server and add a direct link in your email to these files. This way you avoid the problems stated above and, as a plus, you get detailed information about which recipients clicked on it, getting very useful data that you cannot obtain from attached files.
We can allow you to send attached files in MAILCast, but we don't recommend it. Drop us a line to get a quote if you need this kind of service :-)
 Very often we attach too many files in our emails without asking us if it was really necessary. In many occasions, the same information could be included in the message body or some other way shared by sender and receiver by clicking on a link inserted in the statement.
Although the possibility to attach a document in the email means a great advantage as a vehicle of information, also have a distinct disadvantage: their poor vision in a PDA, introducing virus into computers, making the e-mail as spam in server destination…
If it is really necessary to add an attachment, it is desirable to warn the recipient in the subject or in the body of the message about what is sent, so he decides whether or not opens the email
When using images in our email or web, we must take care about its size to ensure a fast download, even with the slowest connection speed.
But remember: don’t create emails which consist in just one image with all the information. Always insert text in your emails. Why? For two reasons: to avoid be considered as SPAM and to give some information to your recipient before downloading images, so, test your email without images to ensure that your message is comprenhensible and readable.
There are many image formats available, but only a few will work properly on web and email. They differ in some important properties, and you should learn how to use them in the best way to optimize your web or email size and weight, and get a higher download speed.
The first you must know is that there are two kinds of image compression, lossy and lossless.
Lossy compression means once you decompress the compressed data, you will not get the exact same image as the original (you lose information when compressing). However, this will only be visible at a closer look. Lossy compression is good for web and email because images use small amount of memory.
Lossless image: When you decompress a lossless image, you will get exactly the same image as the original. This compression uses greater amount of memory, so at times it may not be good for web, but for print.
Common image formats for web and email
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
The extension for this format is .jpg (or sometimes .jpeg). This image type is lossy, and you
can control the compression level in image editors.
It is good for saving images with millions of colors, like photographs, drawings with shades, gradients, etc.
GIF
This format is a bitmap, which means it's a grid made of tiny pixel squares. Data about every pixel is saved (so it's lossless), and you can save up to 256 colors. Pixels may also be transparent. GIF may contain more than one frame, so it can be animated.
Since image programs can control the exact number or colors stored in a particular image, it is a good format for saving images with less colors, like charts, small graphics (bullets, buttons), images containing text and other important details, flat-color drawings etc.
PNG
This format was created to become a new and improved GIF, because GIF was
patented, and thus not free nowadays. PNG has greater color-depth than GIF, it can
store partial transparency, and can achieve greater compression. It gets the best from JPG and the best from GIF. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 and less versions doesn’t support PNG transparency and a small hack is needed.
It's better to save images in this format when it's both needed to preserve transparency and large amount of colors, or partial transparency. Since it's a lossless format, these images are often not small enough for displaying on the web.
Image file sizes for web and e-mail
Which file size is recommended for images in web or email? Well, there’s not a specific rule but I recommend this as guideline:
|
Excellent |
Acceptable |
Not recommended |
Optimize your image |
|
Less than 15Kb |
15 – 25 Kb |
25 – 100Kb |
100Kb + |
Anyway. Before choosing which image format we need, whe should set properly image dimensions in pixels to get an optimized image size. I’ll talk about it in the next article.
Recently the Communications Technologies National Institute (INTECO) has presented a study about Internet usage in connected homes in Spain.
This study reveals that the most used Internet service is e-mail, despite spam and other annoyances. It almost doubles P2P downloads, and on-line gaming.
Curious enough, Internet search has decreased 2.2% in the last 12 months. Participation in forums increases, and e-commerce and on-line payment maintain the same level.
For me it's very interesting to see how Skype, Videoconference and other means of get poeple connected have not been massively adopted.
And this study comes to confirm a fact we already knwo: e-mail continues to be the Killer-app of the Internet :-)
Read the full study (Spanish)
As you already know most of the current e-mail clients (either webmail or desktop) will disable the images in your e-mail by default. Unless your recipients decide to show images or to add you to their white list, images will not show in the screen.
This is a challenge for e-mail marketing design, because you must take this into account and create designs that work well even if images are not shown.
A quick way to test your creativity when images are turned off is to use a couple of web developer tools. In fact they are very similar, but you must choose one or the other depending on what is your browser of choice (Firefox or IE). This tools are very powerful and a must-have for every web developer. They both have a lot of features that I'm not going to describe now, but take my word for it and give them a try. I'll stick to the couple of things that will help you to test your designs.
If you're using Internet Explorer there is a tool called IE Developer Toolbar that you can download from here. When installed you it will show a small arrow icon in IE's toolbar:
If you click on it a small aditional window will appear at the bottom of IE's window with a lot of options. Search for the "Images" menu as shown:
If you disable images you will have an immediate feel of how your design will be shown in an email client with images turned off. You can even modify your HTML directly in the tool's window and see changes in real time.
A very similar tool is available for Firefox, and it is even easier to use. It's called "Web Developer" and you can download and install it from here. Once installed you get a wide toolbar just above the current webpage with a plethora of menus and buttons aimed at the web developer. The equivalent feature in this tool is located under the "Images" menu:
This has been just a quick tip on how to test your designs without images, but if you have HTML/CSS working knowledge and give both tools a try, as soon as you start to scratch the surface you will find fantastic features that will easy your work a lot.
A recent study by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa (read in Marketing Charts) reveals how the meaning of the term “spam” has lately changed for users, in a way with high impact for us as marketers.
The survey sought to determine consumers’ perceptions of what spam is, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked.
The main conclusion is that now spam means “unwanted e-mail”, in contrast with the traditional “unsolicited commercial e-mail”.
That’s a huge difference for us. This means that, now more than ever, your content must be relevant. You must engage with your recipients or will have a big chance to be blacklisted by the most important ISPs, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.
The reason is that, according to the study, people misunderstand the implications of hitting the “Report spam” button omnipresent in all mayor webmail apps. Take a look at these figures and start to tremble:
-
43% of consumers, miss advertiser-supplied unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP’s “report spam” button to unsubscribe from an advertiser’s list - regardless of whether the email fits the consumer’s definition of spam.
-
21% use the “report spam” button to unsubscribe from email that they specifically do not consider spam.
“What this survey uncovered is a major disconnect in consumers’ understanding and use of the ‘report spam’ button, as well as consumers’ definition of spam from ‘I didn’t sign up for it’ to ‘I don’t like it’—all of which signal that the current system of email spam filtering is a broken process” said Matt Wise, president and chief executive officer of Q Interactive.
Q Interactive suggests that ISPs’ “report spam” button be replaced with those that more clearly indicate consumers’ intentions, such as an “unsubscribe” button and an “undesired” button.
And that means a lot more of effort for marketers too: much more targeted and relevant content. It has been the better way to go in the past and, naturally, it has become the only way to go now.
Read the full review at Maketing Charts.
|
|
|