Interactive Marketing Design Tips

Happy New Year from the Design and Campaign Solutions teams at ExactTarget!


With the new year, we’re welcoming in some quick code updates that will save you a little bit of time – but more importantly, keep you up to date on HTML efficiencies for email. In the introduction of the most recent version of Yahoo! Mail, the link color issue that we were previously experiencing has gone away. It’s a small thing, but worth a note in the interest of writing clean and efficient HTML for email.

As noted in our post from last year, an older version of Yahoo! Mail caused link colors to change to a...Read More »

In the last post of our series, we’ll explore the vast array of message types and the formats they take on. View my previous posts to learn more about Contact Strategy Development and Message Personalities.

MESSAGE TYPES
A successful contact strategy will be a thoughtful combination of the message types needed to meet unique business goals and subscriber needs. Which make sense for your brand?

Newsletters News / Editorial Feed Welcome / Opt-In Profile Updates / Preferences Promotions / Cross-Sell Retail Promotions Rewards Coupons

Reengagement / Retention Subscription Confirmations Alerts /...

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Picking up from my last post on Contact Strategy Development, we’ll continue to explore the message personalities that make up successful contact strategies. As our own human personalities set us apart as unique and special, messages also provide the opportunity for a brand to allow their unique voice to come through. Brands can set themselves apart from the pack using clear communication, unique presentation and outside-the-box thinking, and those results become more meaningful when the value to the subscriber is apparent.

Message Personalities
When planning, each message that makes up an...Read More »

In the ever-changing inbox, it's critical for brands to have clear goals and objectives when creating an email contact strategy. Marketers are pairing a smart mix of strategy, user experience and effective design to drive engagement and deliver relevant, timely messaging.



Contact Strategy Development
Beyond the basics, it's important to address two vital components in developing a good contact strategy. Focus on both your business needs and subscribers needs, using a simple checklist:

1. Define your audience
   To whom are you sending?
2. Determine business goals and  set a clear value proposition

   What do...

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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 »

You've got your subscriber list and communication strategy, but before you start creating your emails consider these tips for designing a more effective campaign:

1. Create Brand Synergy. Utilize your current brand elements to create a cohesive online brand experience.
2. Watch your Image and Text ratio. Images may look aesthetically pleasing, but too many divert attention from your message and may cause your email to be too large for and blocked from some email clients. Images should balance and complement your text content.
3. Use Tables. For consistent display and better control of your email layout,...

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As marketers, it's difficult to push engaging, relevant, timely content in every single email you send. When you start to see those open and click rates dip, it may be time to wake them up with a re-engagement campaign.

After pouring through various marketing email examples, we've compiled a few of the reoccurring tactics marketers use to get a subscriber's attention.

Education:
The main message of this tactic is to encourage subscribers to make the most of their subscription. Give instructions on how subscribers can get the most value from your emails. Unengagement may mean they have a lack of...Read More »

In any email communication, it’s important to deliver a clear message, letting the subscriber know exactly what you’d like them to do. The average time spent reading an email is mere seconds, so you have a small window of opportunity to grab their attention. Using a good call-to-action is a critical part of any performance-driven design, and should be created mindfully so that the subscriber isn’t left guessing.

Call-to-Action Recommendations

To get a desired action from a subscriber, we’ve compiled some simple recommendations on formatting and design.

• CTAs should be direct and action-focused...

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Happy Holidays from everyone on the ExactTarget Design Solutions team! To end the year with a bang, we’re highlighting our ten (okay, a few more than ten) most useful interactive marketing tips from 2010.

1. The 6 Stages of Subscriber Experience 

   Performance-driven design is the foundation on which emails are created.
    
2. Email + Video Take 1 and Take 2
   
These posts discuss support, delivery methods, benefits and the concerns of using video in email.
    
3. The Design Center on 3sixty
   
The Design Center is an all-inclusive design resource to view and download our latest design whitepapers, template source...

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I recently delivered a guest webinar for Litmus about how to approach email programs and email design on mobile devices. The recorded webinar and associated materials are now available on the Litmus blog. The presentation slide deck and a sample of a mobile optimize email we built for the session are also included. We had almost 1,000 registrants, some great content and a lot of interesting questions — please enjoy, and add your questions and comments to the conversation!

Email Design in the Age of the Mobile Inbox
Desktop. Laptop. iPhone. Blackberry. Android. SmartPhone. iPad. Learn how to...Read More »

Before starting my career at ExactTarget, the title “designer” often brought to mind thoughts of artworks and purely aesthetic pieces that are meant to be appreciated and interpreted by their viewer.  However, I have been introduced to an entirely new aspect of design that goes far beyond pretty pictures and mad Photoshop skills: Performance-driven design.  

Performance-driven design is the foundation on which emails are created. In fact, it is the visualization of a business plan and takes into consideration the subscriber at all stages of development. Rather than a designer trying to express...

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On Thursday at 11am EDT join me - Chris Studabaker, Senior Design Consultant - for a special webinar in conjunction with Litmus: Email Design in the Age of the Mobile Inbox.

Desktop. Laptop. iPhone. Blackberry. Android. SmartPhone. iPad. Learn how to start thinking about mobile and email and what you can do to ensure your emails render as you intended. If you're considering building mobile-friendly email campaigns you won't want to miss this.

I'll discuss:

• The current state of the industry
• Discovering whether you have a mobile audience
• Strategic considerations for mobile email design
• Tactical...

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During Connections 2010 last week, Sir Richard Branson delivered a great keynote. While the thoughts he shared were great life principles, they also apply to marketing and the influence we hold within our own brands and on our subscribers, fans, and followers. Take a quick peek at what I thought were some good reminders.

Thoughts on Life and Marketing

1. Use marketing power for good. No matter what position you hold, find a way to make a positive difference. As marketers, we have the immense potential to influence others and should use that power for good.
2. Take risks. Take them responsibly, but...

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ExactTarget's Design Solutions team is getting geared up for the best Connections yet! We’ve been planning sessions, compiling handouts, helping with some rockin’ demos and designing buttons. We're here to make sure you learn all that you can about how to improve your interactive campaigns through strategic design.


Our Top Ten Conference Design-Musts:

1. Design Booth Buttons

   Back by popular demand, make sure to drop by to grab a few of these.
2. Design Booth
   
Your fearless designers and their leader - Chris, Kristina, Andrea, Anna, Tana and Justine – are waiting to chat about all things design in the...

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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 »

The power of 1 to 1 direct email marketing is amazing. You can deliver a tailored message to your subscribers with a push of the button. Within minutes, your message is delivered. Deployment consultants are often called on by our customers to help leverage ExactTarget’s application for email campaigns.

What is a deployment consultant? We’re more than the people who hit the send button. Basically, we treat sending an email like sending a rocket to space; making sure the best product is sent to ensure success of the campaign.

We work with our Services team to provide support you in the...Read More »

If you are wondering why your links have been suspiciously changing colors in Yahoo! Mail recently, we have the answer for you! Better yet, we have a solution that will restore the desired styles to your links.

First, a quick explanation. Due to some recent changes in the way Yahoo! Mail highlights links, all <a href="http:..."></a> tags will show as blue (specifically, #366388), regardless of any style="color: #xxxxxx" properties you may have in the <a> tag or any containers (such as the three header links and the four navbar links in Figure 1 below). You will see that it does not affect any...Read More »

For some time now, Yahoo! Mail has had a feature called Yahoo! Shortcuts. Yahoo! Shortcuts scans each email as it is displayed and places a dotted-underline link on any of a number of actionable items. According to Yahoo!, these links are "waiting to save you time." Yahoo! Shortcuts recognize and link many types of items, including the following:

• Street addresses
• Phone numbers
• Locations
• Calendar events
• Email addresses
• Videos

The street address in this screenshot is a Yahoo! Shortcut to a Yahoo! Map.

To use these Shortcuts, the user simply hovers the cursor over the link, and a pop-up appears with...Read More »

Design and Code for Success
According to a recent study, Outlook users account for 43% of all email client users— beating out big names like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and AOL by significant margins. You might already know about some of the challenges posed by getting an email to display perfectly in Outlook 2007, and the newly released Outlook 2010 is much the same. We’ve compiled some great tips that will save you time and ensure your success when it comes to this environment from both a design and HTML coding perspective.






Email Design Tips
Our latest whitepaper includes the following...Read More »

Image maps tend to be considered the "black sheep" of web design by many, but do they in fact have a place in HTML for email? The answer is yes and no – but mostly no.

When desiring to link multiple areas of one image to different locations, a coder may choose to use an image map to overlay a custom link map on an image; this allows one image to be linked in unique ways (including non-rectangular regions such as circles and polygons) without having to slice, code and link multiple smaller images. Utilizing image maps reduces the effort involved, but how successfully do they function in major...Read More »