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The 12 Ways of Christmas (Online Marketing Remix)

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Christmas TreesRetailers, marketers and children around the world are gearing up for a big holiday season. Make sure your email and online marketing stand out — and get results — this holiday season.

1. Get Started Early
I remember one year we shopped for Christmas dinner on Christmas day. Nothing wrong with roast chicken and frozen brussels sprouts, but let’s just say it wasn’t the best holiday feast ever.

2. Be Analytic
Review last year’s holiday marketing. What worked? What didn’t work? Take a look at what your competitors did. What do you wish you had thought of? What should they have been doing better? Speak to your sales teams and staff and gather feedback. Then use all of that analysis to hone your strategy and tactics.

3. Be Holiday-Centric
If you’re selling products, spotlight gift sections of your website. “Holiday gifts,” gifts “for him” or “for her,” gifts under $20, gift baskets… are all the types of specials or email navigation links that will get customers thinking, clicking and hopefully buying. If your email is for a B2B audience, then rebuild your newsletter with a winter or holiday theme, and focus content on holiday planning or taking time off from work.

4. Get Creative
By any measure, there is too much marketing and too much madness around the holiday season. Creative design, copywriting and offers can help you stand out among competing emails, promotions and noise. And don’t forget it’s Chanukah and Kwanzaa time too. See our post on “Holiday Email Planning and Ideas.”

5. Be Different
You want to stand out from your competition, the holiday rush and, even, your own emails. So find a new angle, a new take on the familiar, or try something intriguing, different. Make sure your holiday marketing has its own identity. If you’re sending holiday emails (and you should be) their identity should be distinct from your standard email template design while adhering to brand guidelines of course. Clicks trump consistency over the holidays. Tis the season for bottom line, not branding. Alternately, if you’re a B2B or professional services firm, downplay the Christmas spirit and tune up the thanks. Non-promotional emails will stand out from the commercial clutter and win over the Santa-saturated.

6. Don’t Forget the Details
Retailers always have a last day for shipping for Christmas delivery and other vital infrormation, so be sure to include shipping info in your email. As shop, ship or other dates or inventory changes, be sure to add that to your communications.

7. Share the Joy
Make sure your emails are forward-able and social-friendly so that you get email traction and all those Facebook likes and Twitter mentions.

8. Socialize
Tis the season for social media, so draw attention to your social media and build community/relationships this holiday season. You can create holiday themes for your social sharing icons (think about how Google celebrates important dates by altering their logo), give your icons Santa caps, or create a holiday theme tab for your Facebook landing page.

9. Make Mobile Mistletoe
46% of US smartphone and tablet users pan to make holiday purchases via mobile devices this year (eMarketer). Build mobile friendly emails, sites, microsites. If your site has a shopping app, then now is a good time to highlight that type of application.

10. Segment Like Santa
Santa doesn’t bring everyone the same present. You shouldn’t either. If you can segment your list and send relevant offers, what better time than the holidays. That may mean a different email for men then women, a different email for your newbies than frequent flyers, a different approach for inactives. The more segmented your list, approach and content, the more relevant the communication.

11. Personalize
Personalize emails so that recipients see themselves, by name, or what they bought last year, something to spark interaction and action.

12. Don’t Overdo It
Remember that holiday dinner when you ate and drank way too much? Not so great, right. Ditto online marketing. There’s a deluge of Santas, Christmas trees and gift wraps about to hit our inboxes, so be nimble, be present, but don’t overwhelm your users.

. . .

Two turtle doves.
And a partridge in a pear tree.

Christmas is coming soon. If you haven’t started implementing your holiday marketing planning, it’s not too late, but now would be a great time to start. That will give you more time to think about what to wear for Christmas dinner or the perfect present your mother-in-law. Don’t wait until you hear the sound of sleigh bells.

. . .

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4 Tips for Email Marketing Design

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Email Marketing DesignDue to email software turning off images by default and the rise of non-graphically rich mobile email usage, many email marketers are minimizing their email design to provide a more “lowest common denominator” approach to their marketing messages.

Even though designers may no longer be creating the graphically rich designs they did in the past, design is still important in email marketing!

What good email designers must understand is that quality design has to work in conjunction with the display and technical limitations of the current email landscape. Designers should strive to make their email campaign aesthetically pleasing while keeping functionality in mind.

Here are a few helpful design tips to help you achieve that goal:

1. Minimize the big, bold, beautiful banner header
The days of including a big image header should be a thing of the past. Keep your email header design minimal, and have it take up as little height as possible. This tactic will give the audience a taste of your creative juice and satisfy the thirstiest of creative expectations, but still allow your content and offer be visible in the preview pane or stay above the fold in your email inbox.

2. Forget about trying to emulate the website
The email should have touches of the website look and feel, but because it’s another medium with another set of guidelines you should treat it as its own entity.  And as much as you may want it, the full website navigation should not be a part of your email design. Just highlight the navigation necessary to fulfill the marketing offer.

3. Use graphics sparingly
Graphics should only be used to support the message copy. Call to action buttons (CTA’s) should be bulletproof buttons or HTML code/text as much as possible. This will ensure they display when images are turned off. You can include those beautiful photos and graphics to support the text-based buttons. And in some cases, you can use inline CSS to create unique effects that provide an aesthetically pleasing design.

4. Lowest common denominator is key
With the emergence of mobile email marketing you now have more parameters to consider in your design and layout. Choosing fonts and font sizes has become much more important and can lead to some serious frustration if not implemented correctly. Large, legible and well spaced out buttons and text links should be common practice. Strategic placement of your links and CTA’s can also be a critical component that could be the difference between a successful or unsuccessful campaign.

Email designers are constantly charged with staying current with the ever-changing technical requirements of email marketing that  directly impacts email design.  Following these tips can help you flex your creative muscle and keep your creative within the current guidelines to create successful campaigns. And after all, isn’t that the purpose of great design?

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Book Review: HTML5 For Web Designers

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

HTML5 for Web DesignersHTML5 is the latest update in a long line of changes to the markup language of the web and a lot of people are excited about it for good reason. With the promise of a more semantic way of structuring your code, the ability to embed browser-native video, and a number of enhancements to web forms there is a lot for web designers to start learning. The problem with using HTML5 is that it is heavily reliant on browser support for its features and that support is a slow rollout. There is a lot to learn but if not all of it is going to be ready for us to use then what is the best way to jump into it?

That’s where Jeremy Keith’s book HTML 5 for Web Designers come in.

In this first volume of A Book Apart’s excellent series of short and highly readable web design books, Jeremy Keith — a web developer with the British consultancy firm Clearleft — walks you through the most relevant HTML5 features; ones that web designers can start experimenting with and implementing into their sites today. What I enjoyed most about this book is how Keith approaches the subject by contextualizing it within the history of HTML. The first chapter briefly explains the progression of how we’ve evolved to where we are now by presenting previous iterations like the ill-fated XHTML 2 and the way that the W3C and WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) have simultaneously been tackling the evolution of HTML. This intro nicely sets up the need for HTML5 and what problems it is looking to solve.

Throughout the book Keith stresses that, like with past iterations of HTML, there won’t be a single point when we can say that it is ready to use but at the same time – since it is an evolution of what we are already using – we can begin incorporating some of the new elements into our code so that forward-thinking browsers can start taking advantage of it.

Some of the HTML5 features that Keith explains in this book are:

  • Canvas, a new element for dynamically-generated graphics
  • The new browser-native video and audio players
  • New and redefined elements like a, cite and small and ones that are officially being made obsolete like frame and frameset, font, center and others
  • Various updates to web forms that move common Javascript-based features into the markup itself
  • New inline elements like mark, time, section and header that allow for a more semantic markup language

HTML5 For Web Designers is a great introduction to this new evolution of the web. While it works as a reference book with various examples of code to explain the new features it is most importantly written in a way that makes it a pleasurable read for laymen and designers like myself whose eyes glaze over when having to read a technical web development manual. Plus, if you’re an e-book fan, you can purchase the book in multiple formats for only $8.99 to read on your Kindle, Nook or iPad.

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4 Ways to Prepare for Mobile Evolution

Monday, February 14th, 2011

5 Smart Phones: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, WindowsMobile has seen significant growth over the past few years, but recent numbers point to it becoming an even more relevant segment of the online population. Smartphone penetration is up to 28% according to Nielsen (as of November 2010) and will rise to 35% in early 2011. By the end of this year, smartphone adoption will be at nearly 50%, which is about 150-160 million mobile subscribers.

With the rise in smartphone penetration, we’re also seeing those subscribers using mobile devices on a more frequent basis. The time spent with mobile devices has risen faster than any other medium, up 28.2% in 2010.

Smartphone users are downloading and using mobile apps. iPhone users download an average 8.8 apps per month, Android users download 8.7 and WebOS users 5.7.

Mobile devices are also being used to multitask. 86% of smart phone owners use it while watching TV. Users will send text messages, browse the Internet, access social networks and use mobile apps while the TV is on. And a quarter of them say they are browsing or accessing content related to what they are watching.

Email usage via mobile devices has experienced significant growth, driven largely by increased smart phone adoption. In November 2010, 70.1 million mobile users (30 percent of all mobile subscribers) accessed email on their mobile, an increase of 36 percent from the previous year.

With all this growth in mobile usage, it looks like 2011 will be a big year for mobile marketing. So what should you do to prepare?

1. Make sure all your web properties are mobile friendly.
Your site, landing pages, blogs and any other web content should be optimized for mobile device browsing. You may need to update animations (Flash doesn’t display on iPhones and iPads), videos and overall layout to offer a better experience to mobile visitors.

2. Prepare your emails for mobile display.
Email marketers need to prepare for the differences in mobile email display. Significant changes will be required to your subject lines, content, and design. Follow the Email Transmit InfoCenter Blog for best practices on mobile email marketing and mobile email design.

3. Consider using mobile apps as part of your marketing mix.
Smart phone users are downloading apps in record numbers and branded apps are a great way to help you get across your marketing message.

4. Realize that smartphone users are multitasking.
Make sure you include a digital call-to-action (visit your site, visit your Facebook page, view a YouTube video, etc.) when marketing or advertising in traditional channels.

Marketers that can prepare their messaging for mobile platforms will have an advantage over their competition. If you need help preparing your web and email content for smartphone users, contact Mass Transmit to discuss your needs.

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Strategy and Consumer Lessons from the Email Evolution Conference 2011 (EEC Takeaway #2)

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Here are some of the strategy and customer trends, stats and industry tidbits we learned at this year’s Email Evolution Conference in Miami, January 31 – February 2, 2011. (Twitter hashtag #eec11).

Email is Going Interactive

There was a lot of talk about the future of email, much of it focused on more interactive, dynamic email content.

  • Online marketing is going more one-to-one and more multichannel—at the same time. More on the “Convergence Clash” in this recent post on the InfoCenter.
  • Email, while the lingua franca of the Internet, is not very interactive. Facebook and social media have given customers different, broader expectations.
  • Email is becoming more like a website—interactive, content updates, dynamic.
  • What’s coming to your email client? Video email, geo-targeting, and interactive elements within the email. You won’t have to leave the email; you take action, comment or reply inside the email.
  • HTML5, java and other technologies are improving the customer experience and enabling video and interactivity.
  • Hotmail recently rolled out  Active Views platform. Yahoo is doing the same thing, allowing dynamic content w/ user permission.
  • When you open a dynamic content email, the server pulls content from a server, so that the email is updated w/ new content. (You can’t change the subject line, but you can update/replace the body elements).


Email is Part Art, Part Science

Go with what works. For some that means rigorous testing and poring over tracking results. For others the key to success is more artistic inspiration. I guess the solution is: both. Create emails like an artist, test them like a seasoned lab technician.

  • Travelocity: Always test unique and creative ideas to determine what’s best for your business.
  • Stephen Epple: Let the data drive your email triggers and plans, not your personal opinions or those of upper management.

Customer Focus is More Valuable Than Ever Before

With a plethora of social media, customer choices, channels and noise, customer service becomes a huge differentiator for marketers.

  • As Gary Vee puts it, “Doing the right thing for the customer can never be wrong.”
  • As channels and marketing objectives become more complex, it’s important to have customer data accessible. So even if there are multiple databases, as is often the case with big companies or entities that are a single company to the customer but many internal companies (like FedEx), sales and marketing folks need a single view of the customer, all in one place.
  • And the customer is going to want an integrated, easy experience. As the Aprimo team advises, figure out how customers are interacting with your brand across channels and where you would like them to be.

Ready, Set, Email

We’ll continue to post more lessons and followups from the EEC conference. Look for a tech and tactics wrap up at the end of the week, and more about mobile and iPhone email design and coding soon.

In the meantime, if you attended and have any key takeaways, please share them with us. If you didn’t attend and you have questions, please ask us.

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10 iPad Apps for Designers

Friday, September 24th, 2010

The iPad may be the greatest device for consuming content ever but how useful is it for those who create content as well? Specifically for designers like myself. Let’s not kid anyone. This is not going to replace your desktop or laptop machine (yet) but there are definitely a good amount of apps out there that you’ll find either useful, interesting or inspiring.

I’ve only had my own iPad for a couple of weeks now but here are 10 apps that, as a designer, I’ve really been enjoying.

1. iMockups
$9.99
iMockups is an app geared towards throwing together quick, low-fidelity wireframes for websites and mobile apps. It gives you a great, simple tool palette to let you easily add items like photos, greek text, buttons, breadcrumbs, navigation, etc. Plus if you are collaborating with other people there are some great markup options like post-it notes, arrows and big red Xs. There is also a whole section of items just for designing iPhone and iPad apps.

Even for print designers I could see this app being used to throw together some quick and dirty page layouts while you’re riding the train or sitting on the couch. You can export your projects or individual pages to various formats and email it to yourself or save it to your iPhoto library.

2. Sketchbook Pro
$7.99
Sketchbook ProThere are a lot of drawing and painting apps out there in the App Store. Everyone is probably already familiar with Brushes from their iPhone app, which gained popularity when people started doing some pretty astounding illustrations with it like this cover for The New Yorker last year. Sketchbook Pro is pretty comparable to Brushes and they each have their own advantages and disadvantages but what I like about Sketchbook Pro is that it is focuses a little more on sketching rather than painting. The interface is actually a bit complicated and takes some getting used to but with a variety of pencil and brush tools and a little patience you can create some pretty nice little drawings. Great for sketching on the go if your sketchbook isn’t handy. Plus you can import images from your photo library to draw on top of and export your finished drawing into a variety of formats including a layered PSD file.

The iPad is not pressure-sensitive like a Wacom Cintiq but you can pick up a stylus like this one that might at least make the drawing process feel more natural and less like finger painting.

Of course you can also just go with the free Adobe Ideas app that will let you draw out up some quick ideas with little fuss.

3. Getty Images
FREE
GettyPhoto searches can be one of the most time consuming parts of a design project. Why not do it while sitting on the couch?

Getty‘s new iPad app let’s you search their image library, access your Getty account and add photos to lightboxes. It’s a nice looking app with an interface that is derived from the main site but updated for the touch screen enviornment. You’ll find that it’s a pretty comfortable way to spend a few hours trying to find the perfect stock photo.

4. Fontbook
$4.99
Another part of the design process that sometimes you just want to do while lying down is browse through fonts. With Fontbook you can load your whole font library via iTunes or Dropbox (though to be clear you’re not actually installing them on the iPad to use with other applications) and preview them in a nice display that really shows off the character of each typeface.

5. Moodboard
FREE or $6.99 for the Pro version
Moodboard allows you to create an arrangement of photos, text and colors that you can use while in the ideation stage of a new project. Import photos from your iPhoto library or grab something from Google Image Search. Crop, rotate, set them in little picture frames and arrange them in layers on one of the backgrounds provided. You can also create a 5-swatch color palette to display alongside the photos. It’s surprisingly enjoyable because the app makes good use of the iPad’s two-finger controls by letting you easily scale and rotate the items.

Upgrading to the paid version basically allows you to do more of everything: more moodboards, more colors, more backgrounds, etc.

As a fan of the online image bookmarking services like Image Spark, this will fill the hole that is needed for pooling together inspirational found images for now.

6. Flipboard
FREE
If you’ve got an iPad and are even a little into social media you probably already know about Flipboard, one of the most striking apps on the market. It aggregates feeds from Twitter, Facebook and other sources and displays them in a beautiful magazine-style format. I find that the aestheticly pleasing presentation makes for the perfect one-stop shop for perusing my usual sources for visual inspiration. Of the many pre-made channel options that you can add to your board are feeds from yay! everyday, Cool Hunting, Behance, Print Magazine and Drawn! Since you can add a section for any of your Twitter lists I’ve created one for all the Design resources I follow like Webdesigner Depot, Design Newz, Design.org and others.

7. Dropbox
FREE
You probably already know about Dropbox so if you’ve already got a free account go ahead and connect to it with your iPad. Very simply this app lets you access a variety of file types on your iPad from your other computers via a shared Dropbox folder.

8. Palettes
FREE or $5.99 for the Pro version
Palettes let’s you create and modify color palettes and (with the paid version) email them to yourself for use in various creative applications. I found the interface to be a little complicated and unintuitive at first but there’s a lot you can do with it once you figure it out. One of the neatest features is that you can import a photo from your iPhoto library and it will create a color palette based on that photo.

9. iFontmaker
$6.99

As far as fonts go, Fontbook may be more useful on an ongoing basis but this one makes good use of the iPad’s touchscreen and for some people may be a good selling point alone in getting an iPad. iFontmaker is a font editor that let’s you create your own hand-made font and export it as a TTF file. A lot of people, like me, have been meaning to try making a font out of their own handwriting for a while and this is an easy and fun way to do it.

10. Guardian Eyewitness
FREE
To tell you the truth, this one is probably my favorite of all of these apps. Every day, Guardian.co.uk uploads a new photograph that has appeared on their news site and gives you a little description about the subject as well as really interesting “Pro Tips” that display specific info about how the photograph was taken. Each and every one is breathtaking when viewed on the iPad’s screen, making this a great app to go to for some daily inspiration.

What other apps have you tried? What are your favorites? Even better: What apps do you want to see someday? Feel free to comment below.

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All Email Clients Are Not Created Equal

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all email clients are not created equal, that they are endowed by their provider with certain un-agreeable quirks, that among these are inconsistent rendering, un-deliverability, and annoying guidelines that MUST be followed for translating that sexy design into an equally appealing email message you just have to deliver to your audience.”

The basics: There are two distinct types of email client.

1. Web-based: Simply means access to email via web interface (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, etc.)
2. Desktop/Mobile Application: Email software installed on a desktop, laptop, or smart phone which retrieves email for you over POP or IMAP protocols.

With Web-based email clients, your HTML email is rendered by your web browser (Internet Explore, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.). Which means quality assurance and testing can generally be performed within a web browser and the results will be close to what you can expect to see within the specific email client. Of course, each client has it’s own quirks, such as Yahoo Mail’s dislike for displaying a background-color associated with the body tag, or Hotmail’s dislike for padded elements, but these are all issues that can be avoided. These “quirks” are safeguards to prevent an HTML email affecting the web-based email application’s interface as the application’s interface itself is built on HTML/CSS as well.

For desktop/mobile applications, consistency becomes much more difficult. These email applications tend to make up their own rules. The application can employ an installed browser’s HTML rendering engine, another application’s rendering engine, or provide its own. Prior to Outlook 2007 being released, Outlook used the Internet Explorer rendering engine which helped in achieving rendering consistency across browsers and other clients. However, when Microsoft decided to rely upon the MS Word rendering engine for Outlook 2007, that progress was defeated. Word’s HTML rendering has no support for background images, limited CSS support, and fails to render adequately a variety of coded email designs. The “bad news” is that some version of Outlook (including older versions) is utilized by 43% of all users, which means for email marketers it’s now imperative that we support this client in the best way we can.

Check back for next weeks’ article on suggested solutions for email rendering and learn what you can do to achieve successful results by coding your emails to accommodate email client inconsistencies.

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