The new Hotmail is quickly being rolled out across the Hotmail user base.

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: Read More

Over the last few weeks various brands have decided it’s a good idea to fill my inbox with irrelevant junk which tries to work on the back of the World Cup. The problem with this is many of the links are extremely tenuous – ‘England are out so treat yourself to something nice’ has been the constant theme this week. It’s so predictable I know the email is coming before I receive it.

No value is  added to the email by mentioning the World Cup, it just seems marketers think that this  cuts through the clutter and empathises with their customer base. It doesn’t – it just adds to the clutter of all those other brands and their tenuous World Cup links. It all just reminds me of a politician claiming to like the coolest band of the moment in case it improves their street cred.

Just like I don’t want our politicians spouting on about their hip music collection I don’t want my favourite clothing retailers talking to me about football – that’s why the BBC Sport website and talkSPORT radio exist.

Read More

A new edition into the Maxemail reporting suite is our “Email Engagement Report”.

One of the questions marketers often ask is; if I get 20% open rates for each email campaign, is it the same 20% or a different 20% each time? And how many subscribers never open an email?

The engagement report answers all of these questions by providing an open and click rate for each individual recipient based upon the emails you select. For example if a recipient has received 5 emails, but only opened one and not clicked on any, the report will show their open rate as 20% and click rate as 0%.

The report also shows the last time that someone opened and clicked on an email. This means you can either target those who have not opened in the last 90 days with a different message or even simply create a segment to suppress those that have not opened or clicked in the last 365 days.

Of course you don’t want to suppress those who have only recently signed up, so the report also outputs their first email and a count of how many emails they have received.

Additional data fields can also be added to the report to show how different segments are more or less engaged with your email marketing.

If you find yourself importing updated CSV files into Maxemail on a daily basis, this new feature will come as welcome news. It is now possible to automate list imports from all major CRM systems or via FTP.

View a detailed summary report without having to log into Maxemail. Schedule a PDF summary of the campaign results to be sent to your inbox at a frequency of your choice.