Design Tip: Unicode Characters in Email Subject Lines

By Bob Ullery
Monday, January 7, 2013

Here's a little trick to spice up any email subject line. Try using unicode characters!

What's a unicode character?

★

is a unicode character. And so is

✉

Did you know that you CAN insert these into email subject lines and they WILL render?! So for example instead of writing "I love you," you could write "I ♥ U."

Or if you happen to be sending a special offer, your subject line could read:

"✔ This Out!"

Here's a great resource with a copy & paste list of available characters

It's a little thing, but it just might be enough to get your subject line noticed in a crowded inbox.

Well, that's all for...

10 Ridiculously Cool Ways to Sell More on Your E-Commerce Site Using Email

By Bob Ullery
Monday, August 17, 2009

A show of hands: who isn't already using email in their e-commerce environment?

Even if you raised your hand, chances are you're using at least one form of email communication on your e-commerce site; Payment Confirmation. Most payment processing platforms give the customer a receipt via pdf download, confirmation email, or print option.

The premise of this post is to offer some other ideas on how to use automated email in your e-commerce strategy. I encourage you to browse some of my best email marketing agnostic ideas, like those I covered in 7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice... Read More »

One to One Marketing is My Kung Fu - and It is Strong (Thanks to Landing Pages)

By Bob Ullery
Friday, August 14, 2009

One to One Marketing Kung Fu with Landing Pages

Hey all. Today I'll be discussing how to strengthen your e-commerce kung-fu by utilizing ExactTarget's Landing Page technology.

As you might have realized from browsing some of the other posts on our blog, targeted email marketing is only part of the story. A question to ponder is: 'Why personalize a customer's email only to send them to a non-personalized web page?'.

There often seems to be a disconnect in the minds of marketers when it comes to the partnership between email and their website. If you harness the power of one to one marketing for email shouldn't your website also present...Read More »

7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice on Your eCommerce Site

By Bob Ullery
Thursday, August 6, 2009

Start with this:
Txt ecommerce to 38767

Let's face it. The internet is saturated with other eCommerce sites selling the exact same stuff that you do. Maybe yours is higher quality or less expensive than the ones the other guys are selling. But ultimately, it's the same stuff to the customer.

Even though your customers have a wide variety of competitors to purchase the same stuff from, why do they buy from you? Sure, price is a usual suspect, but as any eRetailer will tell you, repeat sales often boil down to customer loyalty and first time buying decisions are often generated from the...Read More »

Learn from Spam

By Bob Ullery
Saturday, January 31, 2009

We almost always learn from examples. There are good examples, and there is spam. You can learn a lot from spammers: what your marketing emails should not look like, and how it does not work. A good decision maker may not always know the correct way to accomplish a goal, but often they know HOW NOT to accomplish it and go from there.

So get an account at Hotmail, sign up for a few shady sites and wait for the free marketing lessons to roll in. Take note how the spammers entice the user to open emails with their subject line techniques. Examine to body copy techniques.

Now take your notes, paste...

Shorten the sales funnel by pre-filling landing page forms.

By Bob Ullery
Saturday, January 31, 2009

If you want to make somebody buy something in an email marketing campaign, the process must be as easy as possible.

This is why you should not only set up landing pages for different call to actions and link to them directly from the email message, but also use any information you have about the customer to customize the landing page.

Prefilling forms with name, shipping address, and other information you already know leaves the customer with only the choice of clicking submit or not.

With ExactTarget Landing Pages, prefilling forms is quite easy and only requires a short code snippet:

<input...

Comcast transparently releases rate limit requirements

By Bob Ullery
Thursday, January 29, 2009

In a totally Comcastic move, Comcast recently released a handy chart to explain why your batch email sends might not be getting through the door of their mail servers.

Essentially, they count how many emails you are in process of sending and then do a SenderScore.org lookup to determine if your SS rating is sufficient enough to be sending the amount of emails you are.

If your score is not sufficient they recommend changing your delivery throttling. Which is very easy to do with the ExactTarget Email Marketing Application.

Click here to see the chart.

Click here to visit SenderScore.org (A Return...Read More »

Using Unicode Characters in Emails and Subject Lines = TOO COOL

By Bob Ullery
Thursday, January 29, 2009

Here's a little trick to spice up any subject line. Use unicode characters.

What's a unicode character?

★

is a unicode character. And so is

✉

Did you know that you CAN insert these into email subject lines and they WILL render?! So for example instead of writing "I love you", you could write "I ♥ U".

Or if you happen to be sending a special offer your subject line could read:

"✔ This Out!"

Here's a great resource with a copy & paste list of available characters

That's all for now. I'm hungry so I think I'm gonna go to get some ♨.

Animated GIFs can lead to higher CTR

By Bob Ullery
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

A recent round of A/B split tests by BlueFly found that emails with animated gifs in the design can have as much as a 5% higher CTR than emails that do not.

More importantly, those who clicked on the animated call to action spent 12% more once on BlueFly.

So start making your emails MOVE, with animated gifs!

Read More »

Can I use a purchased email list?

By Bob Ullery
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Although this really is not a solutions tip, I felt it important to share a great answer to the commonly asked question:

"Can I use a purchased email list?"

There is a tremendous resource I found that directly answers this question:

www.CanIUseAPurchasedEmailList.com
Read More »

Solutions Tip: Watch that punctuation. Your email depends on it.

By Bob Ullery
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Specifically, periods.

Some email clients interpret a line that starts with a lone period as the 'end of message'. When these clients come across one in your email, they stop rendering and display everything up until that point, often leading to unreadable jibberish.

You: "Who would start a sentence with a period."

Well, this is also applicable for embedded <style> blocks of css. For example:

.mystyle{
color:red;
}

If this were embedded into your email creative, many browsers would stop rendering as soon as they hit the period.

AND NOW FOR A WORK AROUND!

There is a simple work around for this....Read More »

Solutions Tip: Background images bad, Inbox Preview good

By Bob Ullery
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

While using background images on divs, tables and the body can make a web site really pop, stay clear of using them within emails.

As you may already be aware of, individual email clients render html differently. Some like Entourage for Mac will allow the use of background images, while Microsoft Outlook will block them. Most browser based email clients like GMail, Yahoo, and AOL will allow nearly anything you can embed in a web page to be rendered in their web mail clients.

BUT for the sake of ALL your subscribers, you should take care of your design to accommodate rendering in as many clients...Read More »

Solutions Tip: Streamline AMPScript Development with ContentAreaByName()

By Bob Ullery
Monday, January 26, 2009

For the first Solutions Tip of the Week we'll start with a quick and easy technique that you can use right away to shorten your AMPScript development and debugging.

This technique works for both ExactTarget email and landing pages, but is particularly useful for landing pages.

-------------

Don't you wish you could make a quick change to a landing page without having to republish each time you save? Well, you can....

ContentAreaByName()

It's an AMPScript function that will compile a stored content area at time of send (email) or page load (landing page).

Within a @@ContentArea in your email or...

Solutions Tip: Selecting all rows of a Data Extension

By Bob Ullery
Monday, January 26, 2009

AMPscript provides a few good ways to retrieve data from your data extensions:

Lookup()
LookupRows()
LookupOrderedRows()

These work great for looking up values that relate to the subscriber, as you can relate data by Email Address, SubscriberKey, or SubscriberID.

But what if you want to return say, a list of all product categories that are also stored within a data extension? There's really nothing to lookup against. I mean, I couldn't use lookupRows("categories","subscriberKey",_subkey) because subscribers don't have a direct relationship with 'categories'.

My quick way around this is to create...Read More »

Solutions Tip of the Week: AMPScript Function

By Bob Ullery
Thursday, January 15, 2009

For the first Solutions Tip of the Week we'll start with a quick and easy technique that you can use right away to shorten your AMPScript development and debugging.

This technique works for both ExactTarget email and landing pages, but is particularly useful for landing pages.

-------------

Don't you wish you could make a quick change to a landing page without having to republish each time you save? Well, you can....

ContentAreaByName()

It's an AMPScript function that will compile a stored content area at time of send (email) or page load (landing page).

Within a @@ContentArea in your email or...

Solutions Designer? What's that?

By Bob Ullery
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Bob Ullery at the Grand Canyon

About Me

Hi all. My name is Bob Ullery and I am the Solutions Designer of ExactTarget.

You: 'Wow that sounds really cool.'

Me: 'Yeah, it is. No big deal.' ;)

Anyways, my job is to design solutions for 1 to 1 Marketing ideas/problems presented to us on a pre-sales level (usually). However, lately I've had the great opportunity to really innovate on the ExactTarget platform with a few collaborations with other departments. (Shout out to Scott Thomas, Lauren Hertler, Stephanie Zircher and Dawn DeVirgi...

AMP'd Up

Design Tip: Unicode Characters in Email Subject Lines

★

✉

10 Ridiculously Cool Ways to Sell More on Your E-Commerce Site Using Email

One to One Marketing is My Kung Fu - and It is Strong (Thanks to Landing Pages)

7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice on Your eCommerce Site

Learn from Spam

Shorten the sales funnel by pre-filling landing page forms.

Comcast transparently releases rate limit requirements

Using Unicode Characters in Emails and Subject Lines = TOO COOL

Animated GIFs can lead to higher CTR

Can I use a purchased email list?

Solutions Tip: Watch that punctuation. Your email depends on it.

Solutions Tip: Background images bad, Inbox Preview good

Solutions Tip: Streamline AMPScript Development with ContentAreaByName()

Solutions Tip: Selecting all rows of a Data Extension

Solutions Tip of the Week: AMPScript Function

Solutions Designer? What's that?

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