One of my main responsibilities at Emailcenter is ensuring we offer our clients the very best delivery rates into the inbox.

Today it is no longer the case that the content of an email determines whether it is junked or not. It is now the reputation you have as a sender with the receiving ISP or filter that is important.

Why is reputation important? Well it’s because you can change content to bypass content filters (think of the shift in spammers technique from Viagra to V1agra) but you cannot fake your reputation.

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There are different schools of thought when it comes to using images in email. There are many people that think you should minimise the usage.

However these are normally given from a functional and technical point of view. From a marketers point of view we know that images say a thousand words and are aspirational.

So what are the reasons given by people for minimising the use of images? Lets go through them one by one and analyse if they are an issue. Read More

This video blog post, oh sorry “vlog” post is the first of a new series of email marketing videos staring Emailcenter staff.

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Here is a scenario many email marketers might be familiar with:

Your boss comes along with the need to send an email to your customer database with a fantastic special offer. Having already sent an email that week you are concerned you might be bombarding your customers but he is the boss and at least it is a great offer.

So you send the email and the campaign is a great success. The next week at the department meeting the results of the emails sent the previous week are discussed and it has been the best sales week for email ever. So as the two emails led to this record week you now have to send two emails a week to the database. Read More

The launch of the Microsoft Office 2010 is pencilled for next year (surprising to see the dates matching!) and the first release for testing – the Technical Preview, which is invite-only – has been released.

This has generated a fair bit of talk between email designers, due to the notorious perceived failings of Outlook 2007′s HTML rendering, and whether this will be continued in Outlook 2010. There has even been a bit of a storm whipped up on Twitter, due to the aim of fixoutlook.org to send a rather loud message to the chaps at Microsoft.

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