Five reasons to try interactive email

Posted by Adrian Young

User interaction with an email used to mean one thing – a click – while the real fun was left for the landing page. Thanks to some recent breakthroughs, that no longer needs to be the case. It’s now possible to offer sophisticated user interaction within the email itself such as menus, carousels, triggered animations, browsable product categories, quizzes and even games. You can’t run a script in an email so how does it work? The magic happens thanks to a CSS trick known as the checkbox hack. Don’t be put off by the word hack – the principle is actually quite straightforward and the code is neat. It goes like this: You place a checkbox, like the one you’d…

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Motion slickness: 4 ways to animate your email

Posted by Adrian Young

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…

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GDPR – the email marketing red herring

Posted by Mike Parry

Have I got your attention? I’m going to say something else controversial, GDPR is not about email marketing! GDPR doesn’t cover email and the ICO doesn’t care how many times you email your data, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, once a day, once a week or once in a blue moon. It simply isn’t relevant. They don’t care when the last time a name on your email list opened an email, it isn’t in their remit. That’s right, GDPR is not about email marketing! It does reference the currently-under-review PECR but more as a make sure you also follow these regulations, which you should have been doing for years now. Now don’t get me wrong, anyone undertaking…

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Prefer your customers stay? Try a preference centre.

Posted by Mel Jewell

Preference Centres If GDPR is any indication, we live in a time in email marketing where consumers want to feel more in control, and what better way than to tailor-make what information you send them per their specifications. This is where preference centres are ideal – rather than simply opting out from all communications, you can let them hand pick what they want, to both eliminate the feeling of receiving unwanted emails and hopefully inspire greater loyalty with your brand. To give you some idea of the benefits, these are the results from two of our different preference centres: Client Total Preferences Selected Total Unsubscribed Preferences (%) A 43,787 364,073 10.74 B 20,258 299,740 6.33 As you can see, you…

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Pictureless perfect: how to build emails which look good when images are blocked

Posted by Adrian Young

Image blocking has always been a challenge for email marketers. Some email clients hide images by default, leaving your beautifully crafted newsletter as little more than a few stray alt tags scattered around in white space. So how do you make sure your emails look presentable when stripped of their images? Let’s rule out some ideas which don’t work before we look at those that do. Embedded images Adding images to a web page doesn’t necessarily mean linking to an external file. It’s possible to use a data URI instead and paste the image data right there in your HTML document. There are drag-and-drop online converters which can generate the data for you. Just feed them an image and they’ll…

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The top 6 features of great email in 2018

Posted by Josh Green

Web fonts It has been possible to use web fonts for a while in email but brands have really only just started to use them from the end of 2017. This technology provides a massive improvement in terms of the overall look and feel for most brands. The ability to use custom fonts right within the email is a huge step forward both for email designers and also for the companies trying to show their branding correctly. One major additional advantage of web fonts in email is of course the opportunity of being able to include much more content of the email in actual html text. This improves the accessibility of an email not to mention the deliverability and overall…

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Expanding our development horizons

Posted by Mel Jewell

As with most emailing platforms today, automation has become a crucial element for timely, smarter marketing capabilities. Our platform has its own powerful automation suite in the form of workflows which can allow you to do all manner of clever things with your marketing from sending a series of triggered emails based upon user behaviour to notifying yourself when an event happens, e.g. someone clicks on an important link. This is all good and well, but what if you have development requirements to connect to all this using another application? Well, thankfully our system is now set up on the rather handy Zapier (which if you are unfamiliar with is basically an online suite of third party apps, e.g. Salesforce,…

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Dynamic coding for smarter and more efficient templates

Posted by Mel Jewell

Dynamic code in templates can save a lot of time for a lot of different scenarios. Not only will you not have to go through your data with a fine toothcomb to fix things to fit your template requirements, you may also only have to make one template rather than multiple ones, saving significantly on development time and resources. Here are just some of the solutions our platform can offer to really help save time and effort when it comes to perfecting your templates: Personalisation using titles, first names and last names One very common issue you may find, is you want to use personalisation in your email, be it a salutation or in the subject line, but you have…

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Making emails more useful part 2 – content marketing

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Previously I looked at making emails more useful for your subscribers in order to improve engagement through relevance and targeting. But you can become even more useful through content marketing. Sending helpful, informative, or entertaining information can help retain customers and increase customer lifetime value, which helps your bottom line. B2B companies have been using content marketing in emails for a while, this blog is an example as a summary will end up in our email newsletter. B2C emails have some catching up to do and should look to move away from the common layout of blocks of products available to buy. Paradoxically, despite a plethora of tracking tools and modelling algorithms, customer lifetime value is increasingly difficult to nail…

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