Many people still think about email marketing as a massive and cheap way to advertise, just rising spam, or they just think that email marketing is directly Spam. But this is not the true, email marketing used in a right way is a powerful tool to communicate with your costumers.

So let’s throw light on some concepts:

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct and permission marketing that uses the electronic mail as way to deliver commercial or informative messages between companies and customers.

What is NOT email marketing?

Email marketing is not about bulk unsolicited messages, this is spam.  If you want to take advantage of email marketing, you must ask for your recipient’s permission and send them emails related to their interest.

So, what’s email marketing for?

Mainly, email marketing is very useful for:

• ensuring  your  clients'  loyalty
• obtaining potential new customers by publishing a newsletter that will attract readers interested on your business area.

With this post I'm going to start a new series called "e-mail analysis case studies". As the name suggests, from time to time I will analyze several aspects of real marketing emails or newsletters I receive that have interesting points or lessons to learn, in the right or in the wrong way. That means that we are going to see several good samples of good email pieces and several samples that reveal bad practices and things to avoid when sending email. I hope that you will find it interesting and hopefully all of us can learn something.

In this first post I'm going to talk about an email I received a few days ago in my GMail account. It was a marketing e-mail from HTC, the mobile device maker, which invited me to take a free test of their new online mail push service called HTCmail.

In the following picture you can see the contents of this email rendered in GMail with images enabled (sorry, the text is in Spanish, but that's not the point here):

Click image to enlarge

Not too bad. But, what happens when you not allow images to be displayed (which is the default case). Let's take a look:

Click image to enlarge

This reveals a good design done by the HTC marketing team. As you can appreciate, you still can read the whole contents perfectly, and the whole original message gets delivered to the recipient even though images are not displayed. Even the text in the header image is correctly displayed here. The "trick" in this particular case is that they have included the same text that is in the image inside the ALT tag of the <img> HTML label. In this way, when the image is not displayed this alternative text gests displayed instead in some e-mail clients like GMail (take a look at this article from Campaign Monitor for a list of email client behavior regarding the ALT tag).

However they have included the height of the header graphic in the <img> label too, which is not a good idea because it's a quite tall one. If the email client doesn't display the ALT tag, this leads to a 250 pixel-height blank area in the vast majority of the email clients in the market, and moves the main message almost below the fold, so a lot of people will not see it and maybe delete it immediately. In GMail that doesn't happen because it strips out totally the images when they are not allowed, and upon that it supports the ALT tag, that is the best of the situations for this particular content (not so good in other circumstances as we are going to see in the future).

The rest of the email is well distributed and with clean HTML (using tables not divs, a good practice in HTML email design) so that the message is displayed even in the less capable of the email clients. The only small thing to notice is that they forgot to translate the ALT tag for the sidebar image that reads "Aspectos destacados" in the Spanish graphic but is displayed as "Key features" (in English) in the no-images version. This is very usual in companies that make international marketing, and it's something that you must be careful about.

The rest of the email is apparently well displayed: it shows a few graphics and a shadowed border in the features sidebar with rounded corners too. However the small "arrows" you can see in the corners of the main content area reveal that something is not totally good here. And the dark gray "powered by" rectangle and the strange discontinued green bar in the left of the features are clues about something not working there.

Let's take a look to the original HTML contents displayed in a fully fledged Internet browser:

Click image to enlarge

As we expected there were problems with the correct displaying of the e-mail in GMail. First there is the lack of a grey background when displayed. The problem here is that they have used the "background" tag in the <body> HTML label:

<body bgcolor="#6a6a6a"...

This affects the lower part of the content and is the reason that the "powered by" graphic is quite like hanging there, with an ugly effect. In fact they were lucky here because they used a slightly lighter grey for the text that is even visible with the default white background. If they had used a white text in order to contrast more with the dark background the effect will have been that no text will be shown.

What they should have done is to have set the background in a external 1x1 table that contained the rest of the content. Generally the <body> tag and everything outside it is stripped by the email client before displaying the contents, so the background color is lost. In this case they included several embedded CSS styles in the header of the HTML page which were stripped out too and are not generally accepted or displayed by many of the email clients.
Analyzing the raw contents of the e-mail they included the whole HTML code between the <html> and </html> tags, which is not generally a good idea. They also included a text version of the email in order to render it on mobile devices (this is a good practice).

Summing up: the email structure and HTML are well designed and fairly well implemented, although they have failed in a couple of basic points that led to a not optimal behavior of the contents.

My score for this e-mail will be 7 out of 10 :-)

SMS is a good way to keep in touch with friends in western countries, but when it comes to making business e-mail is the preferred way to go according to a the study "ExactTarget 2008 Channel Preference Survey".

The survey reveals that nearly two out of three of Internet users prefers e-mail in order to write to colleagues, SMS hanging far behind.

Morgan Stewart, director of research and strategy at ExactTarget, said in a statement that "there is a clear trend within younger demographics toward communication via text messaging and social networks, but those preferred personal communication channels were not necessarily also preferred channels for marketing".

Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail.

The ExactTarget results agreed with a recent survey of Internet users in North America by Habeas and Ipsos. About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years.

Read an interesting summary of the study at eMarketer.com.

We can not ignore the role that social networks have taken as a professional marketing tool.

Social networks allow organizations to work quickly and efficiently between them. These applications make easy the interaction between professionals who share subjects of common interest. You can use the advantages of traditional communication with the communication of Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis…).

The key is the agility. Social networks allow more open relationships between the different business areas. So organizations should take advantage of these characteristics quickly to react changes in their environment.

This new reality is completely integrated into the market. Corporate communication should not ignore this model of interaction that promises a great future for business.

Do not forget this point when you offer your customers services with more added value. Think in the ability of collaboration that has been opened through social networks.

When you take a prescription drug, that's between you, your doctor and your pharmacist. No one else has a right to know.

Perhaps not for much longer.

Under legislation that quietly passed in the California Senate on May 29 (bill SB 1096) and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings.

The ostensible rationale for the data sharing is that it would help consumers by providing letters reminding people to take their medication or refill a prescription.

The reality, critics say, is that this is an effort by pharmaceutical companies to help ensure that patients stick with expensive name-brand drugs and not stray toward cheaper generic alternatives. It also could lead to privacy violations.

"Your private medical information is being transferred from one database to another", said Jerry Flanagan of Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. "Once that genie's out of the bottle, it's very hard to get it back in". The've also launched a campaign for fighting against this bill.

The creator of this Senate Bill says it has been misunderstood by the public, and particularly by journalists who failed to grasp its finer points. Contrary to some reports, he said, it wouldn't allow drug companies to send you pitches for their medicines in an attempt to get patients to switch from one brand to another.

Oh my! :-(

Read the rest of this tremendously intricate plot involving politics, drug makers, money and online privacy at David Lazarus' Consumer Confidential Blog (Los Angeles Times).

What's your opinion?

Two out of three Internet users in the US has purchased products that they have been recommended through snail mail. Email is very popular too as a purchase recommendation tool.

That is one of the conclusions that arise from a recent study by eMarketer.

Among all the direct marketing channels email is the most accepted one among users only surpased by postal traditional mail. Un a 1 to 5 valoration scale, surveyed users give email 3.7 points. The rest of marketing channels, such as phone or instant messaging, get less than 3 points in teh survey.

News sent through social networks are not very effective. Just a mere 6% of the purchases were generated through this kind of communcation.

Recently we've made a minor update to our MAILCast service that lets you use the new Office 2007 file formats for your mailing source data.

Now, you can upload files in .xlsx (Excel) or .accdb (Access) format when you need to update the source of mailing data for your channel. These formats join the classic .xls and .mdb file formats that we supported and that you can keep using if you will.

Hope this helps!

Sometimes, after you register to receive a new newsletter, you start to receive much more spam than usual. You, naturally, suspect the newsletter provider can be using your data fraudulently, selling or renting your address in an illegal way. How you can tell if this is the case?

To find out, you can use a couple of not very well known tricks that GMail, the terrific free Webmail from Google, offers to you.

If you append the name of the newsletter provider -or any other identifier that makes sense to you- to your GMail user, using a '+' sign, the effect is that you still will receive the emails sent to this new address in your normal GMail account, but you can unequivocally identify the origin of the email thanks to this appended identifier.

So, let's say that you own the myname@gmail.com address and want to subscribe to a newsletter called 'My Pet today' or something. You can subscribe using your normal address plus an identifier, for example:

myname+MyPetToday@gmail.com

After doing this you will receive all the email from this provider in your normal account, but with the new identifier appended. In this way you can filter the incoming email and classify it accordingly. What is much better: if you start to receive email in this "artificial" account which is not from "My Pet Today", you can know for sure that they are using your account for sending you not solicited email and delete it automatically. Great!

Other interesting GMail idiosyncrasy is that it does not support dots ('.') in addresses. When one or more are added to a GMail address they are stripped out before delivered. Due to this behavior, all these addresses are equivalent:

yourname@gmail.com, your.name@gmail.com, y.o.u.r.name@gmail.com

and the like :-)

You can use this "feature" to distinguish between senders that don't accept the '+' sign in your email address and therefore make the previous tip useless.

Remember too that GMail has another alternative domain, googlemail.com, that is exactly the same as gmail.com. So, you can use myname@googlemail.com as an alternative address to receive important e-mail from sources you trust, friends, and so on, keeping the classic one (@gmail.com) for other purposes.

If you use gmail's incoming filters wisely you can easily get your important mail classified, your not wanted e-mail deleted and discern who is fooling you selling or renting your email address.

Hope this helps

JM

 

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.