Endless chains of emails are sent between those giving feedback and the person making the changes. This person needs to make sure they do not miss any changes, while trying to decipher ambiguous change requests.

To address this problem, Emailcenter have introduced a tool to streamline the feedback process and improve communication. The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key features:

• Provide feedback by drawing on top of the email – remove ambiguity with visual annotations, so everyone is clear what the feedback means.
• Each comment is easily identifiable to the region and commenter, helpfully stored in one location, to make it easy to review all comments.
• Comments are archived for auditing purposes.

To understand how the Collaboration tool can make your email team more efficient, call the Support team on 01327 355871.

However not without a significant issue for email marketers.

One of the first things we have noticed is the alignment of your email and some background colours are missing when using a user reads your email in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or any other browser which is not IE.

This is nearly 70% of Internet users according to w3schools.com

Here is an old versus new Hotmail example on an email:

Old version of Hotmail:

New version of Hotmail:

As you can see it looks like the email is now left aligned and the grey background has gone. What has actually happened is Hotmail will only display your email as wide as the maximum defined width in pixels – either from a table width in pixels or the width of the widest image – whichever is wider.

So if you have a containing table used to help set alignment and background colours at a width of 100% it won’t work. If your inner table which is set to a fixed width rather than a percentage of say 600 pixels then that is the width your entire email will be shown as.

So the background colour and alignment is as we defined but your 100% width table will only be 600 pixels wide and therefore none of it will be shown.

Why does it do this?

Essentially Hotmail has some code on the page which will always render the width of the email as the maximum fixed width you defined.

How do I fix it?

You could force the containing table to be say 900 pixels – but those viewing it in low screen resolutions or only a partial screen will not be able to see your full email. Indeed Hotmail even prevents you from scrolling to see these parts.

What you need to do is tell Hotmail to change it’s code and you can do that with a CSS reference. The items that restrict the width are much further up the page.

Simply put this CSS within your email and this will fix the issue:

<STYLE type=”text/css”>
.ReadMsgBody
{ width: 100%;}
.ExternalClass
{width: 100%;}
</STYLE>

This tells your browser to change the code that Hotmail uses to restrict your email width.
And to prove it works here is the email with the fix:

New version of Hotmail (Email Fixed):

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toptable.com have added an extra dimension to their already fantastic emails. Not only do customers receive emails tailored to their location and usage frequency, but now they can even smell before they book!

This may seem a strange innovation to make but when you consider that “Flavor is recognized primarily by our sense of smell,” (Paul A. Kedeshian*) things starts to become more clear.

This feature is obviously just a tongue in cheek gimmick for most recipients as their computer screens cannot actually produce smells, but due to the launch of the iPad and the next version of the iPhone with their scent omitting capabilities, scratch and sniff emails may become more common place.

Stay tuned for further developments!

* (Paul A. Kedeshian MD, assistant clinical professor in the division of head and neck surgery at UCLA)

The newest member of the Emailcenter team (Simon) talks about the main issues to consider when trying to get your marketing emails to render correctly in Outlook 2007.

One good

I doubt this email is personalised, unless the baubles change depending on the films you have recently rented! The fact that LOVEFILM have put the effort into customising the decorations makes me feel it is worth paying attention to this email.

The message is clear and to the point. The “Visit Shop” call to action and the time limit tells the customer what they need to do and when to do it.

It could be better though. The entire email is made up of images, when it would have been easy to turn the wording into real text, making the message clear even if images were disabled.

One not so good

After half an hour of scouring iStock in search of an image that doesn’t look tacky, overused or clichéd, I start to feel a little light headed and sick of looking at my computer. This email makes me feel the same way.

In contrast to the LOVEFILM email the Woolworths email makes me feel unimportant as a customer and as if I am not worth the effort. This email looks like it could have been an image taken straight from iStock that has just had “Woolworths.co.uk” stuck on top of it.

There is no clear call to action, just the generic phrase “Christmas gifts for everyone”. Who cares! Isn’t that obvious?