This might sound strange for an email company, but for certain activities we hate email. One such activity is the collecting of feedback from various sources, on what needs to be tweaked in an email campaign.

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.

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.

In this article I will explain how you can now host sign up forms for your email marketing on your Facebook fan page.

What’s the big deal?

There are more than 500 million people across the globe using the social media power house that is Facebook, spending more that 5 billion minutes online per month!

To put that into perspective if Facebook were a country it would easily eclipse the United States!

If you also take into account that the average user is connected to 80 community pages then you’ll begin to understand what all the fuss is about. Read More

Facebook Connect is a tool that allows you to login into a website using your Facebook account rather than go through a whole new registration process for each site.

This gives website developers some fantastic benefits:

Read More

I have recently received two emails which have stood out from the rest because of their use of video. If  a picture paints a thousand words a video paints a few more than that.

Retail brands can spend millions on the creation of their TV adverts, not to mention the thousands spent on advertising slots between prime time TV programmes.  It therefore surprises me that more brands don’t make the most of these ads by sharing them with their email subscribers.

Below are the two emails that have used video to good effect:

Read More