We’re often approached by potential clients who want us to help them run ad hoc, one-off email campaigns. Whilst we get very good results from an individual campaign like these, the outcome can never be as good as if the emails form part of a longer term email strategy.
If you are reading this, the likelihood is that you are an experienced email marketer and would never consider pasting your entire database into the ‘Bcc’ field in order to send an email campaign. In fact, you are probably thinking that no one serious about email would – so why write about it? You’d be surprised…
The term ‘online community’ is widely used these days to cover all those who engage with a brand via social media channels. Interactions here are rarely more than casual conversation, and are generally between participants and the page administrator rather than between followers. But there’s another sort of online community that predates social media, and could potentially offer much deeper levels of engagement. It’s the sort of online community that gets things done. And not just small things. Online communities have, for example, created all of today’s major open source web platforms.
In a recent Guardian article, Katherine Whitehorn argued strongly that first names should be just for friends and that she didn’t want everyone from Starbucks to cold callers addressing her by her first name. The article stimulated hundreds of comments and talking points on news shows and got me thinking about whether we as email marketers could be accused of being over-familiar with our customers.
When deadlines are tight, jobs get rushed. Best practice goes out the window, mistakes happen. But when time is short, it’s even more important to get things right first time. To help you achieve just that, here are five key things NOT to do when briefing your agency – plus advice on alternative approaches.
Posted on Tuesday March 26th, 2013 by Paul Latham
If you have international clients, you probably stopped sending them brochures and letters a long time ago, and switched to email as a low cost, low hassle and trackable medium. But the flat cost of sending an email worldwide means it’s a great way of finding new export customers. But before you get started, there are some issues to consider.
One of the great things about email as a marketing channel is that the results can be measured in almost real-time. Other more traditional channels such as TV and print don't give you this. You don't know if someone is sat in front of their TV watching your new advert or reading your advertisement in the paper. You can do research afterwards to try and judge the success of your campaign but there are no tangible figures.
You’re sending a campaign to a large section of your database and your directors have asked to be on the list to receive a copy. You know there’s nothing to worry about. You’re sure you’ve tested everything. Your boss has signed off the copy and the design. So why does your finger still hover over the submit button?
We recently released our latest update to Reports and one of the key features added was the ability for you to manage your own users via My Accounts - everything from resetting lost passwords to creating new users. You can also control the users ability to download data, remove replies and other important tasks.
Posted on Tuesday February 19th, 2013 by Jenni Malley
There’s no doubt that an e-newsletter can be a fantastic business tool, if done well. The problem is that far too many company newsletters don’t do anything for the business concerned, because no-one reads them.
Here are some simple DOs and DON’Ts to help you create the perfect newsletter - one that actively promotes your business and doesn’t become just one more piece of inbox clutter.
Posted on Wednesday February 13th, 2013 by Simon Hill
Last week I attended the Email Evolution Conference in Miami. It is one of the leading email conferences and it brings together hundreds of people who are passionate about email and who are collectively shaping the future of email marketing. Not only that but it was based at the Fontainebleau Hotel in sunny Miami. What more excuse did I need to escape a wet and snowy Manchester ?
Posted on Friday February 22nd, 2013 by Paul Latham
The term ‘content marketing’ has to be one of the most frequently-used marketing terms of recent years - but what does it really mean? The best definition I’ve come across is from the Content Marketing Institute:
“... creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience, with the object of driving profitable customer action”.
About a year ago, as we were preparing to release the new version of Reports, we reported on why we choose to use Flash for this, and also looked into which versions of Flash Player our users had.
Now that 2013 is well and truly upon us we thought it would be a good chance to look at how the landscape has changed.
Posted on Thursday February 28th, 2013 by Paul Latham
February brought us three calendar events in a row: Chinese New Year, Pancake Day, and Valentines’ Day– and online retailers had a field day. It wasn’t just the usual suspects. Even Screwfix got in on the act, with a Valentine’s campaign featuring a half price offer on a gleaming circular saw and a ‘forward to your loved ones’ link.
We like this example from Red Hot World Buffet for valentines’ day:
You might have noticed UTF-8 special characters (★ ✈ ♥ ) being used more and more often in email subject lines, as companies strive to increase email open rates and subsequent click through rates (CTRs). Below is an example of two emails I received yesterday. This gives you an idea of how the subject line characters look in your inbox:
Want to find out what people think? No problem. Today’s online survey tools are quick to set up, cheap to run, and simple to analyse. But beware. Just because you can ask a question, doesn’t mean you should. A few surveys we’ve come across recently have reminded us of the pitfalls.
Which sectors use email marketing most effectively – and what can we learn from them? There’s a huge variation in the way companies use email as a marketing tool. Many B2C retailers – in particular some of the big fashion brands – have embraced it, making it a core sales channel. In the B2B sector, results are perhaps more mixed. So are there lessons B2B can learn from B2C? Absolutely. The approach to marketing might be different, but the same tactics get results in both sectors:
One of the most interesting stats of 2012 in Return Path's intelligence report was that 70% of email reported as spam is legitimate. This means at some point the recipient opted in to receive the email in some way.
The "report as spam" option is prominent in most webmail clients so for the recipient it is easier to mark the message as spam rather than search through the message for an unsubscribe link. Even if you make the unsubscribe very prominent and put a link at the top and bottom of your email, some recipients are very wary of clicking an unsubscribe link in an email because they believe it shows you are a valid recipient and may cause more spam.
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and to get bored with the same routine. We will carry on doing things the same way regardless, until someone else questions our actions or gives us the drive to change. However at this time of year we are usually in the mood for change and a new start.
So why should you update your email template if your current one works fine, why bother? Sometimes you can find it looks old and dated very quickly as fashions change and keeping the coding correct can be a tricky job. But it can help to keep your prospects on their toes as something new lands in their inbox.
Under pressure from enthusiastic businesses, Google quickly followed its public launch in September 2011 with the roll out of new business pages. But did that early enthusiasm translate into ongoing action – or has Google Plus still to take off?
Google tell us there are 400 million Google Plus users, of which 100 million use the service once a month. Using Google Plus once a month can’t really be said to make someone an ‘active’ user in any meaningful sense. It’s also quite likely many of these users are only there for free video chat.
As we head into 2013, the pace of change in digital marketing shows no sign of slowing. Here’s a quick look at some of the top digital media trends for 2013:
Focus on Mobile
With the explosion in the use of mobile devices, people will need to pay ever more attention to optimising digital material for mobile use. If your content can’t be easily read on the full range of mobile devices, it’s time to act.
ROI
What’s Christmas like in your office? Has it changed much in recent years?
Glancing at our ‘to do’ lists, we’ve been reminiscing about Christmas in the early days of Extravision. Then, December could be a quiet time, giving us a few weeks to wind down, clear out our desks, get round to all those jobs we’d been meaning to do and enjoy the odd unrushed mince pie. Things have moved on.
Email marketing is a cost effective, quick and powerful marketing channel. But as with all types of marketing there are plenty of traps for the unwary. Here are our top ten email marketing mistakes to avoid if you want to get your message across to your target audience.
It is that time of year again when Christmas is in people's minds. Lights are being switched on in the streets, shops are setting up their Christmas displays and here at Extravision we have started to fulfil some of the many Christmas e-card campaigns we run at this time of year.
Posted on Tuesday November 6th, 2012 by Jenni Malley
Once an invitation-only site, Pinterest is now open to all. It’s a simple concept. You create pinboards and organise them into categories. On these boards you ‘pin’ images from your own website or from elsewhere on the web, adding a brief comment to each. Other people can follow all your boards, or choose specific ones. Followers can write comments on your images, and repin images on their own boards where their followers can see them. Every image captured with Pinterest’s ‘repinning’ tool comes with a link back to the original source.
There is nothing worse then taking time out of your work day to attend an event that no longer exists, where the speakers have changed and are no longer of any interest to you or worst of all being the only delegate in the room! It’s happened to all of us and we’ve all made awkward apologies and excuses about ‘last minute meetings’ we had to get to before flying out the door quicker than free tickets to see Caitlin Moran!
Posted on Thursday October 18th, 2012 by Jenni Malley
At Extravision, as well as seeing the campaigns we produce for our managed service clients, I am also a recipient of the info [at] extravision [dot] com address and so see the prospecting email campaigns that come in from people trying to sell to us.
Posted on Thursday October 11th, 2012 by Paul Latham
It seems as though a day doesn’t pass without me receiving another invite to a ‘unique’, ‘not your average’, ‘brand new’ networking event - any day, anytime, somewhere in the city you will find a networking event. Recently I even read about one that takes place on a Sunday.
The email said ‘Paul – get out of bed and get Networking’. If it involved a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a full English, a copy of the Observer and highlights from the weekend's football I may be tempted.
Some companies sense of style seems to come and go, while others become a byword for elegant and well-designed products.
If you go to buy an Aston Martin, you know you'll always be getting sumptuous leather seats and a refined driving experience. You wouldn't expect to need to use anything as old fashioned as an actual key to unlock the doors or start the car either - these are the hall marks of normal cars and Aston Martin sell a bigger experience than just the car.
The same is true of popular consumer companies too.
Posted on Tuesday October 30th, 2012 by Antony Malone
We now have the launch from the EE network (Everything Everywhere the company that owns Orange and T-Mobile) of their 4G services in 11 cities from 30th October 2012. These cities include Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Sheffield and Southampton. A further six cities are expected to come online before the end of the 2012 (Derby, Hull, Nottingham, Newcastle and Southampton). It should also be available on the other networks from mid-2013 after Vodafone and O2 finally catch up.
Everyone has their own opinions about email marketing, particularly what works best when it comes to choosing an appropriate time to send out campaigns. Traditionally the rules have been:
Well I think these myths are well on their way out because unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years then you’ll know that the world of email has gone mobile.
Do you have a smart inbox? The likely hood is that if your email is with Gmail, Hotmail (now Outlook.com), Yahoo! or AOL then yes.
How do they work?
Well Gmail’s priority inbox measures how users interact with emails from different senders and whether or not they should be considered a priority. Usually emails from friends and colleagues are flagged at top of the inbox.
In the final part of our series on the main features of Reports, I'd like to very quickly talk about ways you can retrieve your campaign data from the system. If you have already logged in to the new Extravision Reports you will have probably already explored around the campaign section, and found the Download tab.
Microsoft recently announced that its webmail service Hotmail is due to be replaced by the brand new Outlook.com and according to the BBC the move will help tackle the problem of ‘cluttered’ inboxes.
But on simply hearing the name ‘Outlook’ I’m filled with dread at the thought of an inbox brimming with unwanted irrelevant email intertwined with important actions from the boss that you have to carefully filter through and find! It’s fairly controversial to rename a personal consumer based email service, to something that has negative connotations with business users – but ultimately it’s a name we are all familiar with and trust.
Following on from my previous post about designing emails for mobile devices, we have put together this informative infographic that contains all the main points you need to consider in your design.
It’s a little sleepy August isn’t it? The schools are shut and your commute to work is a lot more bearable than usual. If you look at the stats for your email marketing campaigns you can see that the number of autoreplies is through the roof.
So if you are sat there in a deserted office you need to take advantage of the quieter time rather than taking your foot off the gas. In 2-3 weeks’ when people return to work en masse we will be into the busiest period of the year for many businesses.
Its mid-week, you fancy going out for tea but you’re not sure where to go. You quickly scan your inbox to find an email from the restaurant offering the best deal. There’ll be £10 off here or a buy-one-get-one-free there, lots to choose from. Easy, simply print off your voucher/save it to your smart phone, head to the restaurant, present it to your waiter/waitress – get your meal and enjoy!
Not a new concept by any means, but I was at an event last week where somebody said “Have we become trained to only look for special offer emails?” and it really stuck in my mind.
Posted on Wednesday August 29th, 2012 by Simon Hill
This post was originally posted on the DMA Email Marketing Blog
Disposable email addresses, sometimes referred to as anti-spam addresses, are email addresses that people use for a period of time and then disappear causing emails sent to that address to either bounce or get automatically filtered to the trash. No email address lasts forever but these types of addresses can have very short life spans.
Interpreting the results of your email campaigns can be a tricky job and new clients often ask us 'what are good results?' This is closely followed by 'can you provide me with some benchmark stats?'
Thanks to the DMA, email industry benchmarks are available but to be successful at email marketing you should always look deeper than your reporting statistics. There is a lot to interpret but simply comparing your results against industry standards will not provide you with the answers you are looking for. The key to examining your campaign is to look outside the report statistics and at other vital elements of your email.
We've already talked about the overall idea behind the new Reports as well as the ways you can compare different campaigns. But once you've identified a particular campaign that did really well, you'll obviously want to understand what drove that engagement so you can replicate it next time.
This time I'll be showing you just some of the ways you can look deeper into an individual campaign by talking about our new campaign overview screen.
One of the key metrics in any email marketing campaign is deliverability - are you actually getting your message to your intended audiences inbox ? If your message isn't getting that far, then even the most exciting and engaging message wont be acted upon. We've now expanded the information available in reports to help you understand this important point.
In April 2012, according to stats produced by Litmus, the number of mobile opens in a month exceeded the number of desktop opens for the first time ever, emphasising how important it is to consider mobile devices when creating your campaigns. If possible, start by designing for both desktop and mobile devices rather than designing for desktop and then trying to adapt it for mobile. If you know mobile devices are used by a high percentage of people that read your email then it might be better to design for mobile first, rather than trying to squeeze your desktop creative onto the small screen. This is effectively what Yahoo! did with the latest version of Yahoo! Mail. They realised a high percentage of their users were using a tablet to read their email so they designed the new mail application for the tablet and then ported it over to the desktop afterwards.
We don’t believe in generic email templates.
We could easily offer a series of standard email templates for you to pick from, but we believe that if you’re serious about email marketing you shouldn’t settle for second best.
With the rollout of our new Extravision Reports, we've already mentioned our overview screens and how to compare campaigns, and shown you how to begin drilling down into your statistics. One of the biggest changes we've made is how you interact with your engaged customers. Read on to discover the most important features of the CRM widget.
Last month Hotmail (for some strange reason) started to replace symbols like ©, ® and ™ with 19px X 19px (emoji) GIF image.
Alarm bells always start ringing when a potential client comes to me saying, "I’ve bought a million email addresses for £600 – can I use Extravision to send a campaign?"
For one I can’t believe there are data brokers out there who are willing to rip people off by selling such a large amount of data at such a ridiculous price. Secondly I can’t believe people buy into these deals and don’t realise that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
In the first of a series of posts about features of our latest Reports release, I wanted to start out by talking about the login screen and the main company overview screen. I'll be posting further articles shortly covering some areas in more detail.
I know a login screen sounds a bit boring, but we've actually made a number of improvements to make your life easier, while still keeping the familar flow from the previous release. And that's just the start...
Last time I spoke about the new features of the company dashboard, like a list of your recent campaigns and the important data about them. But one thing we hear people asking a lot for was 'How well am I doing ? Am I getting more click throughs ?' The first feature we'll look at today shows how you can now answer these sort of questions, and then we'll also look at how the new Reports makes downloading the data entered into forms easier.
We wrote our very first blog over 2 years ago and since then we’ve written an astonishing 100 articles in total!
I doubt you’ve read all 100, and congratulations if you have… but in brief we mostly like to share our email marketing top tips, give our opinion on industry news and let you have a little sneak peek as to what goes on behind the scenes at Extravision.
Last month I attending the technology for marketing show, TFM&A in London and one of the keynote speeches was by Jon Myer of Yahoo. He talked about how they innovate at Yahoo and what they see as the challenges they face. He used a very interesting graph from Gartner research that shows new technologies and when they can be expected to be widely accepted.
You might think that the idea of email and social network surveillance is some sort of April fool's joke, but believe it or not it’s actually true.
This Big Brother style proposal is not the first time there has been an effort to introduce communications montioring. In 2009 an unsuccessful attempt was made by the government to try and collect communication data - when costs were estimated at £2 billion to implement the project the plans were droppped. So what does this new threat of potential government surveillance mean?
Planning on beating the stamp price hike by buying your stamps in bulk? Or trying to work out where the extra money for postal costs will come from?
Then forget about awkward trip to the post office and switch to email instead!
This post was originally posted on the DMA Email Marketing Blog
I think most marketers have heard about email authentication and the use of Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). If your using an email service provider then its likely that they will handle the authentication for you and you don’t need to worry. But why do emails need to be authenticated ?
As you may know, we're in the process of launching our new reporting tool and at the moment it's in beta for our existing customers.
But what does 'in beta' mean exactly ? Find out by reading on...
In our personal lives we make constant choices between luxury and no frills products. I buy a lot of own brand products but there are certain things I will not compromise on like baked beans, tomato ketchup and washing powder.
In general we follow the rule ‘you get what you pay for’. It seems in the marketing industry though there is one area where people are always prepared to cut corners: email marketing.
I keep seeing the question, "is social media killing email?". And I think it’s about time I addressed the issue.
The answer is no. In reality social media is enhancing and supporting the growth of email. In 2011 email marketing platforms and services grew by an estimated 15.5% in the UK, and have grown consistently over the past 8 years – see Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Platforms Buyers Guide 2012.
Posted on Friday March 16th, 2012 by Antony Malone
If you didn’t already know, Outlook 2007 and 2010 use Microsoft Word for rendering all html emails. This handles the html in different ways and also brings in some unwanted properties from Word such as print boundaries.
Tempted to use the London Olympic Games as a hook for your upcoming email marketing campaigns? I recommend treading very carefully indeed. Make sure your email doesn’t breach the strict Olympic Games branding guidelines to avoid any potential marketing mishaps.
Everyone in the industry thought it was odd when the popular high street chain Game announced that it would no longer stock or take preorders for popular games.
Read on to see what this tells us about the rise of digital content.
I have always been an advocate of simplicity.
If I want to promote something in an email campaign I would strive to make the offer and the call-to-action clear and simple. In marketing it is all well and good to be clever, but not if you’re the only person “clever” enough to get the message.
An email I received today demonstrated this point perfectly… well it at least proved too clever for me to “get it”.
In late January 2012, a draft text of the European Union’s new Data Protection Regulation (a wider overhaul of the 1995 Data Protection Directive) was published. The draft is going to be debated and discussed by the European Parliament and by the Council on Ministers, and any changes to the draft regulation could take up to 4 years to come into play.
Do you have a Google + account? But you’re not quite sure what to do with it? Or are you steering clear of the latest social media phenomenon?
It’s Friday afternoon, and the pressure is on to send the final campaign of the week. You have spent a long time perfecting the copy, no spelling mistakes - check. You’ve inserted the links and tested them; they are all live and working - check. The correct data set is in place - check. The sales team are prepared for the promotional campaign to be delivered – check.
Phew, the campaign is sent. Time to pack up and start getting ready to enjoy your weekend! But what could possibly go wrong?
You wouldn't think the question about what makes a new version new would be very complicated or lead to lengthy debates, but that's just what is happening at the moment, and it has implications for everyone. Read on to see what a version means to companies like Google, and also us here at Extravision.
This post was originally posted on the DMA Email Marketing Blog
At the email evolution conference in Miami last year, Yahoo and Hotmail announced that they were looking at allowing dynamic content within an email. ISP’s are concerned about users leaving their site when they follow links in an email. The idea is that when a user clicks on a link they don’t leave the ISP’s site but the content of the link is displayed in the email. This was an encouraging sign that ISP’s would start allowing us to do more with our emails.
Recently I celebrated my birthday and I received a flurry of texts, tweets and Facebook posts wishing me well, as well as a few real cards through the letterbox! I also got some emails from brands and businesses I’d subscribed to, who had cleverly used the data they hold about me to get in on the birthday fun.
This post was originally posted on the DMA Email Marketing Blog
Early last year the DMA’s Legal and Best Practice hub and I published a whitepaper on Email Creative. It was never meant as a definitive guide to creating great email campaigns but more a collection of ideas to consider during the design process. The world of email is constantly changing both from the sender and the recipient’s perspective and as such we always need to be adapting how we design our emails for the best results. A template that worked well last Christmas may not achieve the same results this year, although that may not all be down to the creative.
We recently noticed some odd behavior with the Google Chrome and Internet Explorer web browsers, where we'd alter a resource like an image or SWF file, and although we would see the changes fine here, they wouldn't show up to anyone else for what looked like a random amount of time. Mozilla Firefox would also always see the changes, which made it even odder !
Now we've got to the bottom of it, read on to see how we fixed it and what we traced the problem down to.
Talk of Christmas started back in August for Extravision, when we created our new corporate Christmas ecard range, and I’m happy to say that since then we’ve had lots of interest.
It’s now 1st December and we can officially start the countdown. Decorations will be going up across homes and offices throughout the land. Some people will have ‘Christmas all wrapped up’. You know the type (women?), shopping done, cards written etc. I hate those people! And there will be the other group of people (men?) for who Christmas hasn’t even crossed their minds, and probably won’t until the 24th December!
There are to be no more internal emails sent. Ever.
Fortunately this only applies to one company, Atos. This technology giant is one of the first to impose a ban on internal emails to be brought in by 2014. It seems radical and unimaginable at first. But take a minute to think about all the new mediums of technology now being used to communicate – Skype, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to name a few. There is a whole host of other ways to send electronic messages that which has already begun to dilute of use of email. Think about when there were only 4 terrestrial TV channels to watch. Now with hundreds of channels available thanks to providers such as Sky, Virgin Media and Freeview, there are constantly reports that viewing figures for normally top rated shows, are slumping.
As you may have heard, here at Extravision we will soon be releasing a beta of our new reporting application.
One of the improvements we wanted to offer was to deliver a richer, more graphical and engaging experience, and we're delivering this using Flash.
Although Adobe claim an extremely high penetration statistic for Flash, there is always the chance that in any particular market sector, for whatever reason, people may not have the Flash Player, or at any rate not a recent version. For this reason, we've been looking into the statistics of our users, and here are the results.
Posted on Wednesday November 23rd, 2011 by Stephanie Yates
Being pretty new to the world of email marketing, I’m still learning, and every day I read a new article that gives me some more insight into what makes better email campaigns.
But when I recently received a couple of rogue emails, I knew straight away that they had made some obvious mistakes.
How many pieces of junk mail do you get through your letterbox each day? I regularly struggle to open my door at night thanks to a flurry of unnamed ‘to the homeowner’ letters as well as takeaway menus and other mailings I don't want. In fact the average UK household receives more than 370 unwanted items of paper mail each year.
Posted on Thursday November 17th, 2011 by Steve Bossons
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but a real bug-bear of mine is when I’ve spent several hours designing an email for a client, then getting the design signed off, then painstakingly turning the design into a html email, setting up the campaign, firing off a first test to myself and then the despair of seeing my morning’s work turn belly-up in my junk mail folder.
When I heard that MC Hammer was heading up a new search engine to rival the likes of Google and Yahoo, like most people I instantly thought, ‘ what a joke’!
But after a little while, curiosity got the better of me, and using my search engine of choice (Google) I found out a little more about this crazy idea.
Posted on Thursday October 20th, 2011 by Tom Chiverton
One of the bigest current storys in the technology world is about Apple (again!) and their just released update to their phone and tablet O/S.
iOS 5, as it is known, has a wealth of new features and toys to play with, and is paired with new hardware - the iPhone 4S. As with any update there are a plenty of new features to like, some changes to hate, and the odd little wrinkle.
Posted on Monday October 17th, 2011 by Simon Hill
This post was originally posted on the DMA Email Marketing Blog
The term spam trap gets used a lot in email marketing especially when talking about deliverability. They are difficult to spot, changing all the time and can seriously damage the reputation of the sender. Most large ISP’s and spam filtering companies use spam traps and the consequence of landing in the various traps differs. Landing in a single spam trap might not cause you too many problems but land in the same trap several times or land in multiple related spam traps and you could find yourself blacklisted. Rather than trying to spot them, the best approach is to try and avoid them altogether.
When I wrote before about changes in the mobile landscape and their effects on once-great Nokia I talked briefly about Google's Android devices, but I didn't mention what is set to become the second best selling mobile device ever; and you've probably not heard of it either.
Back in July, Hotmail announced that they now supported HTML 5 which includes the new video tag. Therefore I decided it was time to investigate (again !) the possibility of embedding video in the content of an email. In the past there have been a number of paid services that have offered to send emails with video content but the big problem has always been support in all the major email clients and the issue of wanting to send the email on your own IP address with the good reputation that you have been working on for such a long time.
Following a night of very ugly rioting in London last night; residents seem to getting in touch with their inner Womble! Armed with brooms and dustpans, groups of people have turned up all over the city in true British spirit, to clean up the streets.
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If you have a microsite or website and want to track an email receipients progress through the site when they follow a link to the site from an email, then there are two options. You can use our google analytics integration or our microsite tracking feature. Google Analytics will give you detailed metrics about the overall figures such as the number of people visiting each page from the email but no details about individuals.
Posted on Wednesday July 20th, 2011 by Amy King
This year’s series of The Apprentice was compulsive viewing again, but now the series is over, one thing I will definitely not be missing are all the embarrassing cliché’s that kept spilling out of the mouths of the weaker contestants every week!
Some time ago, I wrote about some of the issues Nokia was facing and as it became clear what their strategy was, how it looked like their tie-up with Microsoft would pan out. Well today we got the answer.
Unfortunately it's not good news for Nokia, who announced their second quarter results today.
With the introduction of Outlook 2007 some years ago, most designers stopped using background images as Outlook 2007 didn’t support them using the conventional method. Using the code below is a way of making sure your background images are viewed in almost 90% of email clients.
In the past an ISP would judge your email reputation on the number of complaints they received via feedback loops. And, in the case of Hotmail, the number of unsubscribes via the automatic unsubscribe link. Its fairly obvious that this isn't an accurate measure of reputation. Spammers are very aware of this and send a large number of emails to email accounts that they know are dormant just so their percentage complaint rate is still low and they are not recognised as a spammer.
Posted on Monday June 6th, 2011 by Amy King
Having recently attending an interesting seminar at the TFM&A event in Manchester, I came away with a signed copy of John Sadowsky's book “Email, Social Marketing and The Art of Story Telling” which as an email marketer, I was really looking forward to.
We can test our HTML emails in different email clients and in different browser based clients, but we still can’t know exactly how people will have their clients set up. That's why it’s important that you prepare for the fact that some people will have their images switched off by default.
Whilst having a hosted version of your email and a ‘View this email online’ link is a good place to start, here are 4 more ways to make sure someone that viewing your email with images disabled, still gets the message.
Last week I attended the Amazon Web Services Summit in London. This was basically a conference all about the cloud computing services that Amazon offer. Extravision is always looking at improving its infrastructure and reliability and we see cloud computing as a possible next step forward.
One of the growing trends today is for 'cloud computing', which is like a managed data center, only more so. Cloud computing offers a number of benefits over running your own computers, but you still need to be careful of a number of things, some of which are legal requirements for the processing of your users data.
The Upside
Like many email marketers and bloggers, I really dislike the word "blast"! So much so, that when I heard it again recently, I felt compelled to put pen to paper, following in the footsteps of many others before me. Fellow email marketer Scott Cohen writes in his post "The Naughtiest Word in Email Marketing" about "its general evilness and lack of thought about the recipients" and goes even further by saying that the word should be banished as it “de-humanises your message and it devalues your customer”.
Borders created using CSS are unreliable in HTML emails, even when coded inline. Browsers and email clients all have different ways of displaying borders and they may or may not add extra pixels to the overall width of your template, leaving gaps in your design. They can also render inside your <td> or outside. Here’s our solution to the problem!
Posted on Friday May 6th, 2011 by Amy King
When I first heard that Alex Epstein (Unemployed Head of Communications) from last year’s The Apprentice, was to be a key note speaker at this year’s Business North West exhibition; the question that immediately sprung to mind, was why? Surely the Manchester business community deserves better than this?
I remember back to my school days, spending my work experience time in a local law firm. I’m not inclined to give my age away, but admittedly, things were different back then. The digital boom was only just upon us and the day to day running of any workplace was based around the telephone and the fax machine. In fact, I think I spent most of that week filing and faxing rather than learning anything remotely ‘law-related’. Perhaps that’s why I now work in sales?!
Following on from my previous post regarding the new EU law governing cookies the government has now published the regulations which are due to take effect on 26th May 2011. Along with this the ICO have also issued some advice on what is acceptable and what you should do if you are currently using cookies.
I’m off on holiday soon and having the usual panic about what might crop up at work while I am away. I am also waiting for the inevitable moment at 4pm on your last day in work before you go away, when everyone starts emailing you out of the blue! It’s always something that will be difficult to hand over and you feel like you’ll never get away.
One of the many areas of the internet that is still showing rapid progress and frequent changes is authentication - or user names and passwords to you and me.
Many sites now require you to login, either to access basic features (like your email) or to offer you a better experience (like remembering what you were reading at work when you get back home). This it what leads to an all to common problem we all have - how to try and remember a different password for each. Users will also often be put off by having to create an account, because they wont see it as a requirement 'just' to buy some socks.
In my blog ‘You can’t email a hand shake’ I highlighted the value of meeting your clients face to face. In this article, I take a humorous look at some of the things that can go wrong when you walk into that crucial client meeting and what NOT to do, to avoid blowing the whole thing!
Posted on Wednesday May 25th, 2011 by Alastair Campbell
Keeping on top of unsubscribe requests and complaints is essential for successful email marketing. Obvious I know.
However, I spoke to a guy recently who proclaimed to be an experienced e-marketer. Despite this, on the subject of unsubscribes he dismissed the importance of monitoring responses for unsubscribes ‘informing’ me there is no point pandering to “idiots who have forgotten they subscribed in the first place”.
“Perhaps they have changed their mind?” I suggested.
In my last website whitepaper The Importance of your Call to Action I reminded readers about avoiding the over use of “click here” and thinking carefully about the design and placement of any call to action. As all marketers know, every website should have an objective for users to complete; whether it is filling in a contact form, signing up for a newsletter, picking the phone up etc. Of course, an email marketing campaign is no different.
Last time around we talked about using a visual design process to quickly work out the look and feel of your application. The intent is to develop an application that users will like to use, because it doesn't get in their way or provide distractions from doing the thing they want to do.
Recently we were asked the question "What difference will the new European Law regarding cookies make to email campaigns ?". This was in relation to an article written on the BBC website New net rules set to make cookies crumble.
One of the inexorable truths of email marketing is that you can never second guess a spam filter.
The complex and often illogical algorithms used to select what is, and is not, spam can be infuriating for email marketers. We simply want to send a campaign safe in the knowledge our efforts will not be consigned to a junk folder. We want to present information clearly so recipients can quickly decide whether they are interested in our message or not.
Since I began working life in 1997 I always relished the prospect of the Easter holidays. The combination of the Good Friday and Easter Monday bank holidays made for a lovely long weekend without needing to use up any annual leave.
Posted on Monday March 28th, 2011 by Antony Malone
CSS for list styles are very limited within email clients and will all be rendered differently. A clear and stylish list can have a positive impact on your overall email design and increase ROI.
The best way to guarantee your list style is to use tables and images for the bullets.
Until now it has only been possible to download data from a report in Comma Separated List format (csv). Generally this has not caused too many problems since CSV is a standard format and can easily be opened with Excel or Notepad.
Posted on Thursday March 31st, 2011 by Amy King
After a couple of weeks travelling in Australia, I was starting to have Facebook withdrawal symptoms, as I like to know what everyone is up to ( mainly my grown up daughter!) and so I decided to pay for 15 minutes internet access at a coffee stop in Port Douglas, up in Queensland. Dollars loaded, flat white slurped & I was off.
Last time we discussed a visual approach to deciding which competing features should be included in your application, so the next step is obviously to actually build them.
If you are a designer (so you actually take your hands off the keyboard at work) you already know some of this, because what we're basically talking about is sketching.
Phishing is often overlooked by clients, or they simply don’t know anything about it.
So, we thought it would be a good idea to run through what it is and explain how to stop it in your emails.
I wrote several several months ago (What's up at Nokia) about the problems Europe's largest mobile manufacturer was having, and today Nokia announced what it is going to do. To see what this might mean for mobile services and devices, look through my musings below.
Firstly, here is the detail on what Nokia has announced today.
Over the past few months I've been working on a best practice guide for email creative as part of the DMA's Best Practices hub. Its taken a while to put together but it should be ready for release very soon. Its not meant as a definitive guide on how to create fantastic email campaigns but more a collection of ideas gained from experience.
Today we received an email from the CEO of Goodmail Systems informing us that as of 8th February 2011 Goodmail will cease operations. Our contact at Goodmail tells me that they were close to doing a deal with Symantec but it didn't quite materialise and this was the only option available.
Feeling a bit down and with very little money left after Christmas, those January sales can be so hard to resist as a little pick me up...all those lovely discounted clothes and useful electronic goods! Of course, retailers know only too well that they can get us to make purchases we don't need, while enabling them to clear old stock.
Last time I talked about ways to think about who your users actually are, and now we know who they are, we can think about what they want from our service.
You might think it'd be easier to just ask them - but this turns out almost always to be less than useful. For instance, users may want something to work a particular way "because that's the way I work", when most people work a different way. Alternatively, if you ask 'how' a new product might work, users will normally suggest ways that exist in other products, which may prevent you from building something easier to use, or with a unique selling point.
So, what is to be done ?
The embarrassing subject of embarrassing CC’d email mistakes rose it’s ugly head again today, when the office chat turned to Alex Epstein ( Unemployed Head of Communications/contestant) from Lord Sugar's TV series The Apprentice.
Following on from last time, we now have a good idea of who are users really are via a set of stereotyped personas, and what they want our product to do via user stories.
However, it's almost certain that there will be conflicts between what users require from the service (everything, yesterday) and what there is time and resource to develop. Even though it might be technically possible to deliver all the features all the persona's want, or there may be many people willing to work on the project, this approach may cause problems.
Posted on Tuesday December 21st, 2010 by Antony Malone
Rather annoying isn’t it , when you have designed an email knowing that a minority of your customers will have images disabled. In most email clients you can style the image even if images are disabled...
Since we began designing, promoting and sending Christmas e-cards in 2004, they’ve become more and more popular each year. Our clients love them because they’re cheaper than traditional cards, better for the environment and the interactive format means you can check whether your customers opened the card.
Posted on Wednesday November 24th, 2010 by Antony Malone
This is a common problem and in some designs it’s really important that the background colour is shown. The simple solution is to add the background colour to a 100% table. See here for an example:
So there I was in my 3 Star Guesthouse in Cornwall, soaking wet after a long journey down from Manchester (which included a tram, a train, an aeroplane, a taxi and a walk along a windy sea front). I had to ask myself why, in this age of video conferences and online meeting centres, we still subject ourselves to the hassles of travelling to see clients? I mean, we’ve all become so lazy now due to these advances in technology. Many people are reluctant to even pick up the phone – they would rather email. And like the first sales manager I ever had said to me “Paul…you can’t email a handshake”.
Before you can build anything, you must understand what it is you are building. And you can only know what to build if you understand who will be using it - users.
Users are often seen as the bane of any developers life, but this tends only to be because there is a big difference between how a user sees the system, and how the developers and maintainers see it.
“Your country needs you” Mr Cameron reminded us last month.
Lord Kitchener he isn’t, but nevertheless we have for several months, heard endless requests from the coalition government for each of us to play our part in the Big Society. What does this mean? Well, that each of us will have to take more responsibility, pay a little more to the State and receive a little less from the State.
Is this fair? That’s questionable. Is it necessary? I think probably. And therefore I for one am happy to do my bit.
Yes, I am loving The Apprentice again this year, with all its warts and foibles. But there's one thing that bugged me with the last series and looks like it's happening all over again ...why are the contestants seen clutching 4 inch thick copies of the Yellow Pages when they are looking for business or doing cold calling? What is going on? Why aren't they seen using the latest laptop and mobile technology?
Whilst very excited about this year's series of The Apprentice starting this week, I have also been giving some thought as to whether this really is just another well packaged game show, that I should just sit back & enjoy purely from an entertainment point of view? Or if I should take it a little more seriously and be open to being informed from a business and marketing perspective?
Hi, my name is Tom Chiverton, and I recently became Extravision's lead developer.
I've previously been involved in a wide range of projects from web-based tracking of vehicles to displaying corporate address books on mobile phones. I'm really looking forward to getting my teeth into some of the improvements we've already talked about internally.
Posted on Friday October 22nd, 2010 by Amy King
Successful Christmas email marketing campaigns cannot be put off, like last minute Christmas shopping! Planning for your Christmas email marketing campaigns is something you really need to start now, regardless of whether you work in B2B or B2C. And if you follow our 5 Tips to help with your Christmas email campaign planning, it will be a doddle...
It’s annoying when you get your email to look good in all email clients such as Outlook, Lotus, hotmail etc and then you look at it on an iPhone. You’ll notice that the font size when viewing emails using an iPhone will be larger than it should be.
The iPhone email client automatically scales smaller font sizes up to 12px minimum rather than the original inline css that you have. This can lead to formatting issues within your design and can make your email look unprofessional and messy. Below for an example of the font size render problem:
A while back, when mobile phone's first became affordable to me, I knew I wanted a Nokia. Everyone had a Nokia - it was in danger becoming a verb like ‘to google’ is today. I still have great memories of playing two player Snake with it’s primitive wireless connections.
Posted on Wednesday September 15th, 2010 by Antony Malone
With the release of Outlook 2010 this summer, many email designers have been worried about more problems with the rendering of emails. The reasons for these problems are because both Outlook 2007 and 2010 use Word rendering to interpret the html emails, unlike the most popular versions of Outlook - 2000 and 2003, which use Internet Explorer to render emails.
Microsoft has announced that they are discussing if they will continue with the rendering of emails in Word for future editions of Outlook. In the meantime we need to work with Word rendering.
Often when you create an email campaign you use a standard template and insert text and images in the appropriate places. Often the images you are given are the wrong size, need cropping to focus on a particular point or just need jazzing up a bit. This is normally a job for Photoshop assuming you have it installed and can be bothered waiting for it to load. Or you have to email the images to a colleague and try and explain what you would like done with them.
Ever thought about how your message looks in email client preview windows? Graphic designers are the first to admit they often overlook this. In this article, we’ll take you through some points that will help enhance your email in the preview window and increase your open and click through rates.
My last blog article Twitter for Business – What’s all that about? was for the Twitter cynics among you, as I shared my experiences of launching Twitter as a new business communication channel. Last time was mostly about tips and advice; this time I’m getting down and dirty as I take the lid off some of that confusing Twitter jargon to try and get a few more converts!
Would you believe that I’m hanging fire with an article that I wrote early in June about making the most of the summer months to start planning your Christmas marketing tactics.
And I’m not the only "saddo" with the “C” word on my mind - there was a great big plug for Doctor Who this Christmas at the end of the last season run on BBC3!
Posted on Friday July 2nd, 2010 by Antony Malone
You may have noticed that recently hotmail and Gmail have been setting spacing to images, making it a nightmare for developers making image based email designs working in these email clients.
If you imagine html emails as a language and the email clients as the interpreters, it’s easy to understand why there are inconsistencies between the different email clients.
For all you Twitter cynics, who think it’s all about what Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry had for breakfast etc, I’ll begin this blog article with some very good reasons to be tweeting!
10 good reasons to Tweet for your business
Following the launch of the iPad in the UK last month, our partners at Litmus have added the iPad to the list of mobile email clients available to preview your email on.
Posted on Monday June 14th, 2010 by Amy King
It started so well.
England's World Cup campaign got underway on Saturday night with a performance that, but for a dreadful howler and poor finishing, would've probably been very satisfying.
However, putting to one side both the result and Robert Green's mistake, there were a number of plus points to take from the game. Emile Heskey put in a dominant display to (temporarily) answer his critics, Glen Johnson caused the USA numerous problems and Aaron Lennon scared the bejesus out of his marker every time he had the ball.
In the past, reports for your email campaigns could only follow users up to the point where they clicked a link in your email campaign after which, the tracking ended. This week we released a new feature so that if you're using Google Analytics to track your website you can extend your email campaign tracking throughout your website.
Most of us know from Dale Carnegie's principles in his book "How to win friends and influence people" that using names is great for relationship building and it's these same principles that you should apply to your email marketing campaigns.
There are just so many networking opportunities out there, it’s hard to know where to start and exactly where you and your business will fit in. Businesses face the choice of dedicating time and resources to traditional networking, or newer technology based solutions, or both! The answer to this question will vary from business to business, based on the business itself and industry characteristics, the comfort level and skill set of the person in charge of networking and the goals of the business.
Users of our email inbox preview system will be well aware that you can preview your emails in all the popular webmail systems such as Hotmail and AOL. Until recently this was only possible using Internet Explorer as the browser. This was not ideal as depending on the web browser used to open your email in Hotmail and others, it can be rendered very differently.
To solve this problem we now show 6 webmail clients in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. The following webmail clients are all available in IE and Firefox.
With the World Cup coming in June, those ads and promotions, exploiting the football theme, are starting to kick in, excuse the pun. As its fast becoming “the bandwagon”, I thought I would jump right on it to see if there are any tenuous links between football and email marketing that I can shamelessly claim!
Football - No football team succeeds without getting the basics sorted. The simple, unspectacular stuff like pass - move - pass. And just getting the basics right is often enough to win.
The temptation to include large striking graphics when designing emails is too common nowadays and can effect open rates and give high spam ratings . However, if used in the right way they can be very effective.
Spam filters often class an email as spam by looking at one of the key factors which is often overlooked in email design – text to image ratio. Spam filters work out the size of images and compare these to the amount of text in the email.
If you're a BlackBerry or iPhone user you already know how popular mobile email is and how HTML email support on mobile devices has improved dramatically. As a result of the better rendering, the number of users reading their email on mobile devices has increased dramatically over the past two years.
Using our email preview system you can now test your emails on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices with more devices planned for the future.
So, the new great invention from Apple was released in the US this week. The iPad was released on Saturday 3rd April and people queued for hours to try and get hold of one. It seems that Apple have the knack of developing products that look like they are from a sci fi movie that everybody wants.
I love my iPod and have had many generations of them. I don't have an iPhone and prefer my Blackberry for email. And I've been thinking for a while about getting the Apple TV. But I'm struggling to figure out what I would use an IPad for.
Just as “two heads are better than one”, it makes sense that two complementary marketing practices can be used more effectively to engage with customers in less of a disjointed way. Consumers need brand consistency as they jump from one social platform to the next and so getting friendly with these social platforms, can give email even greater strength.
Loving The Yellow Brick Road's recent review of the html newsletters for each political party. Yes, the Conservative one from George Osborne had a personal signature, but it was very wordy with no sub-headings, making it pretty hard to digest.
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression and so no pressure with my first blog then. And same rules apply when it comes to writing the subject line for your email, as this really is your chance to create a first impression with a customer. If you get it wrong, you can damage a relationship forever.
Microsoft Outlook 2010 is currently in beta and looks like it contains some useful new features. You can get a list of the changes between Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 here and the new release which is due out in June 2010.
Our friends at Litmus has already begun testing with this new email client and it has been added as one of the preview clients in our full preview.
I read an interesting article on the BBC website today about how a long running Canadian magazine had decided to produce an online version but had seen poor results due to spam filters. They have decided to change their name from "Beaver" to "Canada's History". I can only imagine the costs and time to rebrand a 90 year old magazine and I'm sure they didn't take the decision lightly.
Today there have been some problems with delivery to hotmail accounts. This was not a problem with the Extravision system but a Hotmail issue. The Hotmail email servers simply wouldn't accept any emails for delivery. This meant that emails addressed to the hotmail domains just sat in our mail server queues and their delivery was delayed.
I contacted Hotmail and they confirmed that they have been "experiencing some technical issues" but the problem was now resolved. I checked our mail queues and all the affected emails have now been delivered.
So, the day has finally arrived. Its time to start the Extravision blog and the duty of writing the first article falls to myself. All sounded really easy when we started designing our new website and decided we needed a blog. Sure, I'll write lots of blog entries I said. It will be easy, I shouted. And here we are ...
After a quick google search I discovered there are lots of sites out there telling you how to write a business blog. I read a few of articles and they all basically said the same thing. The key to a good blog is make it interesting.
Extravision is a privately owned UK-based email service provider founded in 2004, with a great ISP reputation ensuring high deliverability rates. We offer flexible email marketing solutions to both small and large businesses across all sectors.
The posting and presence of content in a blog entry on this site does not necessarily mean that extravision agrees with the content, ensures its accuracy or otherwise approves of it. Nothing in any blog constitutes a binding representation, agreement or an endorsement on the part of Extravision. Please review the site terms of use carefully.
