Marketing Manager at Emailcenter since October 2008

Emailcenter won the Silver standard award at the Travel Marketing Awards last night. We received this award for the innovative work we have done for environmentally friendly adventure holiday company – ResponsibleTravel.com.

This award is the latest in a long list of reasons why companies are turning to Emailcenter to deliver highly innovative and targeted email marketing campaigns to their customers.

By using behavioural data captured from their website, ResponsibleTravel.com were able to target their customers with highly relevant holiday emails, resulting in a 254% increase in conversions of prospects.

Read the ResponsibleTravel.com case study.

To discuss how behavioural targeting can help your email marketing get in touch >

The rise of the smartphone over the last few years has been phenomenal. It seems as though almost everyone has either an iPhone, Android or Blackberry.

Whilst most B2C email recipients do not read their emails on their smartphones, the numbers are growing. In fact, according to a recent survey by Knotice 1 in 5 B2C emails are being read on a mobile handset.

With this ever increasing mobile activity for emails, we thought it was time to give you some tips on creating a mobile friendly version of your marketing emails.

I personally think that its more time efficient to create an online mobile friendly version (similar to a weblink) rather than setting up two versions of each email, but the tips below are valid for both methods:

• Make sure that you are sending a text alternative to your HTML version.

• Recommended width of 320 pixels (Max 600 pixels), the list below is in order of market share:
  1. Iphone – 320 pixels
  2. Android – 480 pixels
  3. Blackberry – 360 pixels
• Stick to a single column layout and make sure the content is left aligned

• Keep images to a minimum and make sure they are small in size

• Automatic text resizing – many mobile devices automatically resize your fonts, which can impact on the design. Use the CSS rule below to disable this:
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

• Space your links out! It can be troublesome clicking the correct link on a touch screen so make it as easy as possible.

• Is your website mobile friendly? It’s all well and good optimising your email marketing for mobile devices but make sure the landing pages you are directing them to are as well.

• Test your work – make sure that you thoroughly test your web version before going live.
  There are some great tools out there for this, such as Litmus.

If you wish to discuss any of this with us, then please email the client services team or call us on 01327 355871.

We have been working hard to develop even more innovative features in Maxemail and will soon be releasing Maxemail Version 6.

Version 6 will contain some exciting new features, including:

Visual Feedback Interface

• Give feedback on an email design by tagging/highlighting the actual email within Maxemail itself.
• Feedback is visual and therefore will reduce ambiguity and save time.
• With all feedback and comments in one place there will be no more endless email chains.
• Store revisions for archiving/auditing purposes.

Advanced HTML Editor

• Non-technical users will now be able to edit emails through a drag and drop interface without needing HTML skills. No more broken code!
• Ensure branding consistency by locking down areas of a template.
• Update all emails using a particular template by simply updating the master template.
• Easily change the order of content within a template and add/remove content blocks.
• Maintain a content library of assets and simply drag content into the email.
• Dreamweaver compatible – create a ‘Dreamweaver Template’ (.DWT file) and import it into Maxemail without the need of any special markup code.

Automated Split Testing

• Predetermine win criteria and Maxemail will complete the send once campaign results are in.
• Choose criteria on any statistics, including open, click and conversion.

Enterprise Control

• Define specific access rights to data, emails and assets per user.
• Control which groups of users have access to which lists, emails, content, reports and other assets.
• Set read and write permissions on any folder.
• Each user can belong to any number of groups and Admin users can see and edit everything.

To speak with a member of our team about any of the features above please call 01327 350921 or email our client services team.

Here at Emailcenter we love football and have started to sponsor our local football team – Northampton Town FC.

Northampton have had a number of memorable results this season, including a victory over Liverpool in which they beat them on penalties in-front of the Kop and Tuesday night’s triumph over league two rivals Crewe Alexandra.  Northampton came from a goal down to romp to a 6-2 win.

This was the first time Northampton have scored six at their current ground and the sweet victory was enjoyed by a good crowd including a number of us from Emailcenter.

Another memorable Northampton result in which 6 goals featured, was the game against Manchester United in which George Best scored his famous double hat-trick.

Watch the highlights

For marketers who have many people setting up email campaigns one of the problems that can occur is each user uses different from addresses, templates or Google Analytics tags to everyone else. Our new function allows you to define exactly what should be used by default, giving you superior control over your email marketing output.

What can I set?

You can set any of the settings that you see on the Email properties page, including:

• Character encoding
• Analytics tracking code
• ROI tracking code
• From name & address
• You can even upload default HTML/Text content

How do I do this?

1. Log into Maxemail and go into the ‘Content’ area on the menu bar.
2. Right click on the ‘Email Templates’ header and create a ‘New email Template’.
3. Create the email template in the root and call it ‘default’.
4. Set your desired defaults, then hit save.

You’ll notice that when you go back to your ‘Emails’ area and create a new one that it has all of the settings set by default.

If you need any further assistance with this or anthing else in Maxemail then please contact the Support Team on either 01327 810741 or via support@emailcenteruk.com