Email Campaign Design

Preheader text is displayed next to the subject line most commonly on mobile devices, Gmail, and Outlook (with certain notification settings). Some mobile devices (like Android) will block images by default, making preheader text even more important since this might be one of the first things that the subscriber sees before enabling images and opening your email.

What is email preheader text?

• Located above the logo or header in an email
• Seen at the top of your email design
• Some email clients will grab the first piece of code and display approximately the first 85 characters of the first HTML text...

When people talk about the basic elements of a successful email marketing campaign, there are a lot of facets to consider—responsive design, relevant messaging, personalization, pertinent send time, and beyond. But one facet of a successful email campaign that many marketers regrettably overlook is deliverability. After all, no matter how great the email, if it doesn’t reach the inbox, it can’t be effective.

Which brings us to Sky Angel.

Sky Angel came to ExactTarget in 2007 after experiencing deliverability issues sending emails from their internal servers. As a faith and family television...

Marketers have some pretty bad habits.

From sending the occasional unqualified lead to sales to not segmenting email lists properly, there are little things we do everyday that we know we could be doing better. 

However, like the millions that make and break New Year's resolutions each year, we find ways to convince ourselves that these little slips are OK, that no real harm can come of them, or that nobody will notice. Unfortunately for the imperfect marketer, these excuses provide less protection for us every year.

We are operating in an age of marketing where more is expected of us than ever...

Whether you're just getting started with mobile optimization or you're a pro and need some tips to share with your colleagues, here are our top mobile design resources for email.

Report: Designing for the Mobile Inbox
Get strategic and practical advice to help you deliver content that’s easy to consume on any device in this new report on mobile optimization.

Case Study: CareerBuilder's Responsive Email Design Results
Learn how CareerBuilder optimized their email design and saw increases of more than 20% in click-through and more than 15% in open rates.

Quick Guide: Design Tips: Mobile + Email
This...

Wireframing is one of those mysterious steps of a web or email design project that can be tempting to skip. After all, once the site map and general architecture is established, everyone is eager to see those first beautiful mockups of the homepage complete with amazing photography, perfectly kerned typography and glossy buttons. 

However, taking the time to wireframe before jumping headfirst into Photoshop and mockups can spare everyone headaches down the road. Hereare a few reasons why:

Wireframing serves as a communication tool early in the design process
Developing a full mockup of an entire...

If you’ve mastered marketing automation 101, and even tackled our 9 steps to go beyond the marketing automation basics, then you’re ready for a few of our expert tips. At this point, you should be delivering highly relevant and dynamic email content, sending out drip emails to nurture prospects over time, and managing your social profiles using real-time and scheduled posts.

Sound about right? If so, then read on to find out how you can continue to improve your marketing automation efforts with these 8 steps, inspired by the Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation eBook:

1. Don’t get lazy. At...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Josh Miles writes.

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

Download the case study now

Currently, a stunning 43% of all email opens occur on mobile devices, quickly overshadowing desktop opens (32%) and webmail opens (25%). Data from Litmus shows us that this percentage is up 38% in the last year alone. Basically, subscribers continue to use viewing environments that include many screen sizes:

• iPhone, Android, and tablets (mobile devices)
• Installed email programs like Outlook and Apple Mail (desktop)
• Email accessed through a web browser like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail (webmail)

This means that by a growing majority, subscribers are tapping and swiping instead...

Designing for the mobile inbox takes time not just from a design perspective, but involves other important parts of the campaign process—strategy and content changes, production and QA time, and the general investment needed from a cost and resources perspective to update or redesign your current campaigns.

To help your decision, check out a short guide that outlines:

• Tips on designing for small screens and touch interfaces
• A quick comparison of mobile-aware and responsive email design

Explore your options in to order to choose which mobile optimization approach is right for your brand.

Marketing automation is the intersection of many useful features and functions. It's a proven fact that marketing automation software gives marketers full visibility into aspects of the sales cycle that were previously a mystery. But the sheer number of buttons and tools can seem daunting if they're not old-hat to you just yet.

As you begin to build an effective marketing automation program, you can begin to gain a holistic view of your marketing activities. From there, you can streamline traditionally manual processes (like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management).

Start ...

Email addresses are not permanent. In fact, a historically active email address may suddenly croak—without warning or a farewell note—much to an email marketer's dismay.

Such email addresses that vanish into the ether do come with a somewhat bland obituary, though, in the form of a non-delivery report (NDR). The NDR generally indicates a useful yet enduring error, such as: "no such user";  "mailbox not found"; "the mailbox has been deactivated"; "the recipient has moved on so please stop mailing". (OK, I may have made up the last one.) These are what are known as hard bounces.

Hard bounces...

There’s a big difference between a first-class flight and a pedi-cab ride. Similarly, there are many differences between an ROI-optimized digital marketing strategy and a half-baked, unprofitable one. As a travel and hospitality brand, you’re tasked with creating a seamless booking process for your customers—or else you might miss that narrow window of time when they’re most likely to convert.

Our own Jeff Rohrs recently shared some tips for reaching the digital traveler in a blog post for Ataway Exchange, where he’ll be speaking next month. Here are five of the top tips from Jeff’s post and...

(Warning: Sarcasm ahead)

Sometimes it’s just too easy. The power to communicate through email, mobile and social is all right there waiting for someone to start flooding the world with information. So you strike out into the world with your content and expect great results.

Using email for monthly news, SMS for quick bites of information and social media for event announcements might seem like a good idea, but you can easily end up with a bunch of disconnected content aimed at way too many targets. At this point, you're just sitting and back hoping for results without a specific goal in mind.

Misu...

Join Kristina Huffman, Design Practice Lead, as she discusses and answers seven common questions about responsive email design:

What is responsive email?
Responsive design is a set of techniques in web design and development used to adapt a website to be readable on any screen and/or platform on which it's displayed. These techniques are being repurposed for emails. A responsive layout uses a piece of CSS3 code called a media query to detect the pixel size of the screen on which that email is opened. Based on the screen size detected, multiple stylesheets may be triggered to alter the layout and...

When your birthday rolls around, you may get as many well wishes from companies as from friends and family these days! Birthday emails can drive great results, but since more and more organizations send these automated emails, it's becoming more difficult to cut through the clutter. Here are some ways to stand out:

1. Let Your Brand Shine. Birthday emails are a perfect opportunity to build loyalty. Create an attractive, engaging, personalized email that matches your brand's look and personality. You can learn how to improve your email design here. And don't forget to optimize for mobile!

2. Offer...

You can have a massive subscriber list and a powerful subject line ready to impress, but without the right email designer, your subscribers will be deleting your email long before they notice the CTA.

A highly skilled email designer is a crucial member of your email marketing team, as ExactTarget Regional Manager, Services (Central Region) Chris Studabaker points out. In a recent column for MarketingLand, Chris argues for six required skills that marketers should consider when hiring a designer for an email marketing campaign.

Be sure your next email designer is the best you’ve ever hired...

October 2012 was an exciting time for ExactTarget’s partner ecosystem. Not only was the Orange Partner Network program launched at Connections, but also in front of the 4,000+ attendees, ExactTarget was excited to present the Power of ONE Reseller Partner of the Year award to our Platinum partner, C.TRAC.

C.TRAC has taken ExactTarget’s passion and unwavering commitment to client success and worked it into their own daily business practices by truly embodying ExactTarget's core values. Combined with their innovative strategy, design, integration, database management, reporting services, and...

I'll start with a few simple words to remember: responsive web design is kind of a big deal. Even back in 2012, Mashable declared that 2013 would be the year of responsive web design, and it couldn't be more true.

I was able to attend a great webinar this week given by Josh Miles of Miles Design called the Responsive Design Revolution. He focused on why responsive design is becoming critical for websites, so I'll take a quick break from talking about email design and share his thoughts on web. For those that focus on email, remember that your message is only as good as the site that you're...