Email Design

Day Two Design at Connections 2011

By Anna Meier
Friday, September 2, 2011

Need a little design pick-me-up? Join us in the design track on day two of Connections for SEVEN breakout sessions filled with the creative caffeine needed to improve your interactive marketing program.

Check out the line-up:

Designing for the Modern Subscriber
The Contact Strategy Visualized
Email to [X]mail
Inform: Email Design That POPS! (beginner track)
Email Design in the Mobile Inbox Age
Actionable Email Design Insights
Ask the Design Experts

View times, speakers and descriptions for day two breakout sessions at connections2011.com.

Looking for expert advice? Submit your email designs & questions t...Read More »

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Hotmail – Recent Changes

By Anna Meier
Tuesday, August 24, 2010

If your subscribers are viewing in Windows Live Hotmail, you'll want to be aware of a few rendering changes that come along with the Wave 4 Beta enhancements released recently.

Email Alignment, Background Color Rendering
Since the Hotmail Wave 4 Beta release this summer, previous emails that were center-aligned in the Hotmail inbox might now be left-aligned when viewing in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Email rendering in Internet Explorer has not been affected.

This change is caused by Hotmail constraining the width of an email to the largest defined width in pixels. In the past, we...Read More »

Design Tip of the Week: Email Design Tips for Retailers

By Anna Meier
Thursday, June 10, 2010

Looking to increase your email marketing ROI and take your emails from "ehh" to "AHH"? Whether you're a beginner or seasoned retailer, below are a few key ingredients to optimize your email marketing programs.

Personalize
By personalize I don't mean adding your subscriber's first name in your email. We all know email can do that. Instead, personalize the content you present to your subscribers based on their chosen interests, purchase history, location and behavior. By doing this your message will automatically be more relevant and engaging to your subscribers. Read our recent blog post for more...Read More »

ExactTarget participates in 7th Annual Mutt Strut

By Anna Meier
Friday, April 30, 2010

Last Sunday, ExactTarget employees and family participated in the 7th Annual Mutt Strut, a pet walk around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to benefit the Humane Society of Indianapolis.

Despite wind and rain, our team sported ExactTarget ORANGE bandanas and shirts in support of the thousands of animals at the HSI shelter.

With help from ExactImpact, we were excited to raise over $1000 for the event. ExactTarget has participated as a corporate team since 2007 and has raised over $6200 to date. For more information on Mutt Strut or to donate, visit indymuttstrut.org

View photos from the event on Fli...

Design Tip of the Week: Notes from Google

By Anna Meier
Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Looking for a dose of inspiration to jumpstart your marketing program? Take a few notes from Google's Marissa Mayer. She spoke at Make/Think, the AIGA design conference last October. For me, her points were the most valuable of the entire conference. Focus on the user, value simplicity, let the data decide and be unexpected.

Focus on the user - Giving your audience timely and relevant information should always be your main objective. Google focuses on decreasing search latency through optimizing how their site is coded.

In your situation, this could mean developing an SMS opt-in program or...Read More »

Design Tip of the Week: Visit our NEW Design Center!

By Anna Meier
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Recently, our Design Solutions team launched the Design Center on 3sixty. Within 3sixty University, the Design Center is an all-inclusive design resource to view and download our latest design whitepapers, template source codes, custom button collections and more! An extensive list of frequently asked design questions and HTML troubleshooting tips are also available, ranging in topics from preview pane dimensions to CSS support in email.

We invite you to visit, explore and gather inspiration for your next email campaign. We will continue to add and update features, so be sure to visit often...Read More »

Connections Extreme Makeover: AAA Ohio Redesign

By Anna Meier
Tuesday, December 8, 2009

As I kicked off last week in Connections Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition Results, our next few design blogs will focus on each of our Design Solutions teams’ redesigns for AAA Ohio, Pier 1 and Marketing Experiments.

So let’s get right to it: AAA Ohio’s Annual Membership Renewal email. AAA's current email was being sent to members annually to prompt online, phone or in-store renewals. After our first meeting with AAA, we realized that members could benefit from AAA in many life activities, which in turn fueled their customer loyalty. Thus, our “Renew Your Journey…” design was...Read More »

Connections Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition Results

By Anna Meier
Thursday, December 3, 2009

Recently, the ExactTarget Design Solutions team competed in Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition during our annual Connections user conference. Our competition included teams at Mighty Interactive and Smith-Harmon. ExactTarget clients Pier 1, AAA Ohio and Marketing Experiments participated to have each team create an email redesign. Each design was then deployed to a subscriber segment and analyzed by Marketing Experiments to arrive at a winner based on clicks and conversions.

After weeks of preparation and anticipation, the winners were revealed. During the reveal, the Connections...Read More »

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Hotmail

By Anna Meier
Friday, September 25, 2009

We know by now that all email clients are not created equal. Your email campaign will not render the same in Outlook 2007 as it does in Yahoo, Gmail or Lotus Notes. This week we’re focusing on email rendering in Hotmail. Look for design tips for other email clients in weeks to come. Below are six important topics to consider when building your email campaign in order to create the best experience possible for Hotmail subscribers.

Preview Pane
Hotmail users have the option of viewing their email in a vertical or horizontal preview pane. Be sure to consider the content of your top left email real...Read More »

Email Design Tip of the Week: The Back of the Napkin

By Anna Meier
Thursday, July 30, 2009

To add to the previous blog, Ideas from the Global Sales Meeting, Dan Roam also gave an inspiring presentation on Visual Thinking. The Design Team was privileged to hear Dan preach that “we can solve our problems with pictures”, a philosophy we were interested to hear.

Author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, Dan spoke about breaking down our problems into simple steps and questions. By answering direct questions and then drawing them with basic shapes and stick figures (on the back of a napkin), we can come to a better understanding of the problem...Read More »

Email Design Tip of the Week: Organize your ExactTarget Portfolio

By Anna Meier
Tuesday, June 16, 2009

How organized is your ExactTarget portfolio? Is it A. one folder full of images and documents from your entire life within ExactTarget or B. multiple folders categorized by campaign type, month and year that are easy to understand and navigate. If you answered B, congratulations, you are on the right track! If you answered A, let me make a few recommendations…

Start by creating a folder for each year. Within that, create a subfolder for each type of email campaign you send. If you send each campaign frequently, organizing these campaigns by month is also a great idea.

One of the requirements of...

Email Design Tip of the Week: Refresh your Color Palette with Kuler by Adobe

By Anna Meier
Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Looking to refresh your color palette? Looking for the perfect complement to your brand blue, when no other colors are specified in your standards? Let me suggest the tool, Kuler, an online application by Adobe that allows you to browse and create custom color themes in a variety of ways. Upon entering, you can browse color themes by newest, most popular, highest rated and random. The fun begins though when you create your own theme from a base color and build your palette by selecting a rule (analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades or custom). Each of the five...