Online Marketing Business Blog

Be Wary Of How You Label Your "Unsubscribe" Link

File this under the "good-to-know" section for your email marketing developments.

Apparently, certain popular spam filters such as Spam Assassin consider the term "opt-out" to be spammy. Coupled with common design practices such as including two unsubscribe links (one at the header and the other at the footer of the email), this could be a double-whammy to your email design.

How about "unsubscribe"? Well, I've actually tried it again with Spam Assassin and it seemed to help. Unfortunately, I got word that "unsubscribe" may get flagged by other spam filters. I can hear the "OMGs!!!" right now...

The alternative is using other words like "remove" or phrases such as "take me off this list" and "I do not wish to receive anymore emails". Don't get overly creative. Be short, sharp and to the point. The more ambiguous it gets, the more likely someone's going to hit the "report spam" button. If its not a properly constructed or recognizable phrase, yup, there may be a tendency for the phrase to get caught by the spam filters as well.

Incidentally, the phrase "click here" is considered spammy by many spam filters as well. (Let's hear another round of "OMGs!!!")

7 Ideas For Creating More Effective And Creative Email Newsletters

Sick of your run-of-the-mill, standard newsletter templates? Even if your client's offerings aren't of the "WOW" variety, your designs can still offer a little something extra that makes it more enjoyable to read. Think "magazine" as opposed to "newspaper". Adding some fun into your email newsletter designs will help increase your recurring click-open rate. If your client's recipients like it, they're likely to be eagerly anticipating the next release.

Note that the ideas below are not limited to the designer laying out the email newsletter, but to the entire email marketing team.

Image Based Emails - Optimizing For Images-Off

The old saying "A picture speaks a thousand words" holds true for many marketeers. Even as we understand the limitations of email clients and HTML email in general, your clients will constantly have the need for creating visually arresting email designs. Furthermore, due to the unique nature of certain industries, you really can't run away from images playing a big part in your email campaign.

Image Source is one of the leading providers of quality stock images. Since their nature of business is solely reliant on images, it is impossible to not include any of their "products" for their email campaigns.

Tip For The Day: Style Your ALT Tags

We've stressed many times the importance of ALT tags in HTML email. Unfortunately for us designers (and those good folks who place a strong emphasis on usability and accessibility), here's another thing to note on your ALT tags: Remember to style your ALT tags when necessary. They may be illegible on a background color

16 "Blink-Ready" Newsletter Templates

Newsletter templates, with its somewhat complex layout structure, can sometimes be a pain to design and code. Coupled with the inconsistencies in email client display, troubleshooting your templates could take hours to days.

To help Blink Campaign users get started asap, we've compiled a set of 16 simple newsletter templates which are ready to use with Blink Campaign. Our custom tokens have been included, and all you have to do is slap your client's logo on, or start tweaking some of the colors and font styles.

We hope these set of templates will be a useful starting block as well as a simple reference guide on how Blink Template tokens can be used in dynamic email newsletter template designs.

Download the set of 16 email newsletter templates (ZIP file, 583kb)

Getting Creative With Images Blocking

Most email clients, both online and offline, block images by default. The age old practise of web accessibility becomes ever more important in instances such as HTML email design.

Usage of ALT tags should be mandatory. But I don't just mean putting in ALT tags just to explain what's behind the image. Go one up and get your recipients to download the images and entice them to update their preferences in their email client so that future images from your campaign will be automatically downloaded. Gmail offers a similar function:

HTML Email and Lotus Notes

In a perfect world, all email clients would render our designs the way we intended it to be. Seeing as how browser compatibility for the web is still some way off, email client standardization would be eons away from reaching display nirvana.

Together with Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes is a very difficult email client to comply your designs with. Furthermore, there is a general lack of concrete and reliable information on how Lotus Notes renders HTML.

IBM has claimed that as of 2006, Lotus Notes continues to be on 125 million seats - Wikipedia

A general rule of thumb is: for B2C campaigns, or personal email addresses, you can generally ignore Lotus Notes support. However, be aware that many large corporations continue to use Lotus Notes, and its impossible to tell which ones are still on the platform.

HTML Email Do's and Don'ts

Don't use forms

Hotmail ignores forms in HTML email to ensure that messages do not contain malicious scripts. Other webmail services (Gmail and Yahoo) and email clients support the use of forms.

If you intend on sending HTML emails with a form and amongst your recipients are also people with a Hotmail email address, than I would recommend not using a form. Instead use a link to refer to a form on a HTML page.

Don't use javascript

JavaScript in HTML email is never a good idea because of all the dangerous scripting (for example XSS attacks) that can be executed. For this reason most webmail and email clients disable JavaScript by removing or ignoring it.

For example, this code:

<a href="javascript://" onclick="window.open('http://www.website.com/cd.html','','width=500,height=400')">View tracklisting</a>

would be rewritten to:

<a href="http://intranet.active8.com.sg/pages/createpage.action#">View tracklisting</a>

The solution is to refer to the tracklisting without JavaScript.

<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/discount/cd.html">

Don't use DHTML

Dynamic HTML uses a combination of Javascript, HTML and CSS. It is not recommended to use DHTML because JavaScript is disabled by most webmail clients and email clients.

CSS and HTML Email

I love CSS. I really do. I've totally forgotten how to develop a webpage using tables. So this really stumped me when I had to go back and do a newsletter design for a particular client. Its been eons ago since I've last created an email newsletter, let alone coding using tables and spacer images.

Because of the huge variation of support across each email environment, there really isn't any one design approach that will guarantee consistency. Instead, you should take a couple of things into account.

All text and links must have a style

You have to specify the font, font color and the font size for all the text and links in every table cell (create your design with tables). If you don't specify a style, then most webmail clients will use their own style sheets. This could result in displaying different fonts, font colors and sizes and could also mess up your design.

Hotmail and Yahoo display Arial as the default font if you don't specify a font. Gmail uses Verdana. Hotmail uses a 11px as the default font size, Yahoo uses 12px and Gmail uses 16px.

Creating, Designing and Coding HTML Templates

Traditional marketing has already started to becomes less effective and accountable since the advent of the internet. Businesses are constantly seeking ways to engage customers on a personal level and provide them with information that is in line with their goals as consumers and in turn, gather information on what sells. HTML emails allow us to do things that traditional email doesn't. Besides having a more pleasing and desirable design, at the same time reinforcing your client's brand, HTML email also allows you to track opens, click throughs and forwards. Communicating with your customers and providing them with information that they ask for is a great way to drive traffic to your client's site and ultimately generate business leads for you and your client.

Email Marketing: The Usual Suspects

Its not just about newsletters or promotional eDMs. To many people, email marketing is synonymous with sales. However, email communication is in essence, far more sophisticated. Using the correct form of email communication can contribute to your client's bottom line in many other advantageous ways.

Uploading Templates Into Blink Campaign

Hands up all those who've been having problems uploading templates into Blink Campaign. Honestly, I've had problems doing so myself. And cuss I did.

First, I'll give you the quick fix to getting your templates up into Blink Campaign.

All HTML templates have to be fully XHTML compliant. Yes, that seems to be the issue that we've noticed most of the time from feedback from our support staff.

W3C offers a quick and simple way to validate your HTML file (either online or upload your own file). Look for the errors highlighted and correct them. We've got a link to the editor in Blink Campaign as well when you're uploading your template, just so you don't forget.