The force is strong with this one

I think this re-engagement email lovefilm.com sent me recently is worth sharing, I'm not sure whether the template is one of many and I just received a Yoda one because most of my DVD rentals would have been in the sci-fi bracket but it definitely made me want to consider signing back up again! (I'd quite like Bruce Willis to berate me into signing back up again if most of my rentals had been dodgy 80s action movies for example)

Pretty much the entirety of the email is in Yoda speak ('Miss you we do. Yes, hmmm', 'Sensed a weakness in the force since you left, we have. Rejoin us you must and 2 months for 1 will you get.') and the only real flaw I can find in it is that there are some text sections that use an image when they could have easily done it with a little table and some real text. The call to action prompts me to 'rejoin the alliance' rather than sign back up as well.

Other than that, I love this email:

Check, check and double check again

No matter how sure you are that your campaign is perfect, it always pays to check and double check (and even triple check) all the details before sending.

Check out this email marketing fail from the 'George' section of ASDA.

Let's play spot the obvious mistake:



Thanks to my better half for pointing the email out to me in the first place and forwarding it on.

'spotlight' emails, increase your open rates

I know this blog is aimed more at the technical aspects of designing for email, but I figured it can't hurt to occasionally blather on about other bits and pieces I've learnt along the way. A technique introduced to me by a colleague some time ago, that I was completely oblivious to (naturally, as a designer.. and not a marketeer) was sending out a special 'spotlight' email, concentrating entirely on one subject (usually a lead article) from a recent newsletter where the recipient definitely didn't read the email (at least, the recipient didn't register in our reports as an open OR a click)

Taking these non-opening non-clicking recipients and sending out an email near guaranteed to get them salivating seemed to increase clicks from those non-clickers by at least 25% if not more. As mentioned before, all newsletter content would be stripped out and the email would 90% focus on the lead article and would mention briefly in passing the other content with the remaining 10%.

Just something to bear in mind, a potential tactic to follow up a newsletter with. Always helps selling the idea to a client if you can increase opens and clicks.. doubly so if it culminates in another lead or two :)

edit: rather fittingly, @Econsultancy has tweeted tonight about email marketers ignoring unresponsive customers. So I guess with that in mind, this blog post should really fall under the category of 're-engaging unresponsive customers' - well worth having a read of the Econsultancy blog!

Background images in Outlook 2007

I'm sure you're all well aware that Outlook 2007 has issues wherever background images are concerned. For an age now, we email designers have been having to ignore the itch to create templates that make use of any kind of background image and have instead had to fall back on dirty nasty background colours to match the surrounding areas.

Well my friends, no longer do we have to suffer the tyranny of Outlook 2007(and 2010)!

Some very clever bod (@ThiesBW) has worked it out.

You can read more on the Campaign Monitor forum and there's also mention of it on their blog.

This is a pretty big game changer, there looks to be a few bits to work out yet (and what specifically stops it from working) but in the grand scheme of things.. it's pretty damn awesome overall.

edit: I've tried this using Constant Contact, so far no joy, it seems Constant Contact strips out all the relevant code. I'll give it a go using a differemt, better, system tomorrow.. !

Images and padding

Another of my bugbears with email design is seeing images amongst text, aligned right for example and not having any thoughts about padding around the image. Whether or not the designer intended there to be padding and my email client has been blissfully unaware, I don't know. One way or the other, slapping an image in amidst text can be a real pain in the rear end when you don't have the kind of control over an image as you would on a traditional website.

There are a few ways around this, the easiest is to crop the image with the padding built in, usually to the left and bottom (if aligned right) or to the right and bottom (if aligned left), just insert the image and align as required. Job done. It's guaranteed to work in every email client that can display images.

Failing that, if you want to keep the image cropped to the very edges, try placing the image in a container of sorts (either a table or a div), apply your padding with inline styles and then align that to the left or right.

Off the top of my head, I know that simply applying a margin inline on an image won't work in the red-headed bastard step child that is Outlook 2007 (and I've seen people try to add padding, how does that work exactly?!) so it's probably worth ignoring, even if every other email client out there does support it.