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Celeste Odell | Senior Graphic Designer

Celeste Odell is Delivra's Senior Graphic Designer. Her main responsibilities are to assist full-service clients in designing and coding beautifully rendered emails, provide leadership to the creative team at Delivra, and to stay up-to-date on the most current email design trends and technology in order to keep Delivra at the top of their game. In addition to client-facing needs, she assists the Delivra staff in numerous branding and design needs for both print and web.

Following a strong artistic background, Celeste obtained an associate degree in graphic design from International Business College in 2006. She joined the Delivra team in early 2007.

I love testing. I love finding out what works and what doesn't. It's amazing the things you learn by watching how your recipients interact with your content.

The problem? Not enough email marketers try it. Even within my own client base at Delivra, only a handful have chosen to run valuable test scenarios with actual takeaways. This just blows my mind: why are marketers so hesitant to start? It does take time and effort. You will need to be dedicated to your email marketing strategy to run valuable tests. But the rewards are worth it!

So what can you do to get those gears grinding? Below are 3 tips to get started:

1. Get brainstorming on improvements you can make to your email marketing content.
   Know what your competition is doing. Subscribe to other email lists and pay attention to what they're sending. Would aspects of their email newsletters be relevant to your own audience? What is it about your own content that is not living up to your competitor's? This is a great starting point to brainstorm on - what you could, or should, be changing in your emails.
    
2. Have a plan.
   It's not worth your time to blindly test different aspects of your content with no goal in mind. Know the different ways to test your content with multivariate or email AB split testing, and figure out what aspects of your content would benefit from a change.
   
   Let's say you're testing out 2 different subject lines: Don't simply split your list and send one subject line to each half. Where's the benefit in that? Instead, know why your subject lines are different and set up a test group beforehand. Say you send each subject line to 10% of your list. Give yourself enough time (I usually advise 3 days minimum) to review the email analytics and send the 'winning' subject line to the remaining 80%. Using this information, you'll see a much better response to your email campaigns.
    
3. Don't be afraid.
   Yes, there is a chance your recipients will not respond well to change within your content. But if you don't test it out, how will you know what you're sending now is the best content possible? No email marketer wants a negative result, but even knowing what doesn't work for your recipients is valuable information.

What have you learned about your audience through testing? If you haven't tried testing your content, why not? Comment and let us know!

Are you responsible for creating the emails for your company? Have you noticed when you are sending emails they have white gaps through the images? Avoid those ugly white gaps!

The solution for getting rid of them is relatively simple. If you have images stacked on top of one another, a simple fix to remove the gaps would be adding a style="display: block" attribute to each image.

Have other HTML design concerns?  Looking for HTML design tips and tricks?  Check out the Delivra HTML Email Guide created by the Delivra design team!

The HTML Email Guide was created to help with your HTML code and to assist in creating beautiful emails!

Years ago, I would have been impressed if I came across a commercial email with my name in the subject line. I would have felt like that email was written with me in mind, and I'd open it to find out more about it.

Today? That's a different story. I'm especially skeptical of any email in my inbox with my name in the subject line. I've seen too many spammers 'personalize' their content to get my attention by pasting my name (or worse, someone else's) in the subject line or header. When I find an email advertisement in my inbox that has nothing to do with me personally—but has my name slapped across the top—it can seem even less personal... like it was an afterthought; they're simply using my name to push an open or a click. Personalization is an old trick, but it needs to be done right.

There's more to personalization today than simply adding in a simple name merge. Setting up a profile form, respecting my choices and sending content to me based on my subscriber history are all parts to a great marketer-subscriber relationship. To get your recipients to really listen and pay attention to you, you need to listen and pay attention to them. Great email marketing is a two-sided conversation.

A few quick ideas on truly personalized email:

• Design a custom message for inactive members to re-engage them with a special offer
• If a recipient clicks on an ad or article topic in a newsletter, send them more information on that specific topic
• Create a customer loyalty email to reward your most engaged recipients
• Send content to a recipient with coupons/event information/store locations, etc. for their nearest location by zip code
• Invite the recipient to write a review on the product they just bought

Every recipient is different. Simple personalized subject lines or email content can still be used to increase results depending on your recipient base, so I'd always suggest testing to find out what works for you. Being truly personalized, however, is always a positive for your email marketing plan.

Celeste Odell | Design Services

If you've done any research on email best practices, you've read about a lot of rules and guidelines.  For any beginning email marketer this is a must.  After getting to know your recipients, learning the basics, and knowing which rules can and which rules cannot be bent, it may be time to start experimenting.  Track your data closely along the way and make notes on what works for you and what doesn't.  Good designers experiment in breaking the rules; great designers have the experience to know which rules to break.

An example: a client of ours sends out a weekly e-newsletter.  Due to a very design-heavy format, we created it using only images above-the-fold excluding the 'view as webpage' link.  We knew this was breaking a general best practice, but decided it was worth testing out in that format as the design (with images on) was so strong.  Interestingly enough, this newsletter scored one of the highest CTRs I've seen in my years at Delivra. Combined with their responsive recipient base (who were already used to image/HTML emails) and highly timely and relevant content, this format proved a success for this client and continues to today.

Am I saying you should redesign your mailings to be all images?  No.  But I am saying it's always worth testing.  Your recipient base may respond to your content in ways that could surprise you.

It's interesting to think how email design may change in the next 5 years because of marketers/designers that decide to bend the rules.

Celeste Odell | Design Services

You’ve learned a lot about your recipients through their response to your emails… but let’s say you need more info. How can you obtain that information? Utilizing surveys in your email marketing can help you be sure you’re sending your recipients the information they want, when they want it. Below are some quick tips on creating a successful email survey:

Get Organized
Plan ahead and figure out exactly what information you need and how you’re going to use it. The way you word and format your questions will affect how you can use that information. Will you need to create segments based on this information? Will you need to track personal info in order to follow up with your recipients? How large will your sample group need to be? Knowing this information ahead of time will streamline the survey creation process.

Be Transparent
Let your recipients know why you need this information. Set the right expectations; if your survey is 50 questions long (let’s hope it isn’t), it wouldn’t be a good idea to say it will only take 1 minute of their time. More people may click your survey link, but most would abandon it halfway through. If your recipients know what they’re getting into, they’re much more likely to complete your survey.

Be Brief and Concise
Make it as easy as possible for your recipients to give you what you need. Include just a sentence or two and a strong call to action on your email content to entice your subscribers to click through to the survey. Word your questions to be as concise and clear as possible, and avoid making too many questions open-ended; try to make responding as simple as a multiple-choice answer.

Create an Incentive
Let your recipients know how they will benefit from filling out your survey.  This can be something as simple as sharing the end results, stating how you will use the information to improve your service or product, or entering them into a prize drawing. If you have a longer, detailed survey, try sending it to your most engaged members; coupled with a prize incentive, this could also be a good way to reward your most loyal subscribers.

Need some advice on setting up a survey of your own? Your Delivra account manager would be happy to help!

Celeste Odell | Design Services

The perceived level of professionalism in your email design can, among other elements, be heavily attributed to your use of font. The fonts you select for your design affect its readability and flow. Fonts should be used carefully in any print design, and especially in web or email design.

Web Safe Fonts: Why Should I Use Them?

Web-safe fonts are extremely common on most machines, whether they be Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever. Using web-safe fonts, you can assume that all of your recipients are viewing your email in the same font that you are. Be sure to include a font family as a fallback. For example:

<span style="font-family:  Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif">Hello World!</span>

The words “Hello World!” will appear in Tahoma. Should a recipient not have the font Tahoma on their computer, the text will display in Arial instead; if not Arial, then Helvetica, and so on.

If your brand manager demands you use a font that is not web-safe, you can always create that text in an image (although this isn’t a good alternative. Most email clients block images by default, so your recipients wouldn’t see your text unless they enabled their images).

How Should I Design with Fonts In Mind?
As a general design rule, it’s a good idea to use only 2-3 fonts per piece. More than that and your content will likely appear visually jumbled. If you have an email with 6 different lines of information, don’t write up each line in a different font and size. Sure – in theory, you’re making each line of text distinctive and eye-catching, right? Wrong! In reality, you’re making your content look like a scrambled mess. No recipient is going to look at your content and read all six lines of text at once. Try using a heavier, bold font as a headline and a simpler font for the body (and since Comic Sans is a web-safe font, you can even use that – but we’d advise you not to let your designers find out).

If you have a lot of information that you think is individually important, try to number the points of information by importance and design the text from there. It’s possible to guide your recipients’ attention to important areas using fonts, but it’s not so easy to make everything jump out at once.

Celeste Odell | Design Services

Delivra customers know we have a stock of free-to-use email template designs under our Templates section. This month, we have three new designs available:

The Nail Polish/Product - templates include social sharing links above the fold and are great for highlighting product imagery alongside text blurbs. The design has a delicate, soft feel to make your product imagery pop!

The Free Thinkers - available in both Newsletter and Announcement format and include prominent & powerful social media links. The design is strong with eye-catching colors.

The Fruit + Gray - designed with tiering tables of information to allow for a natural flow to your newsletter content. The design contains bright fruit imagery and colors above the fold to engage recipients.

Haven’t tried out our free templates yet? They’re a great solution for a clean, professional design on a low budget or short timeline. Once logged in, head over to the View Templates section under Content. Browse the tabbed categories and see if we have a design that fits your needs.

One of the great things about Delivra’s free ready-made templates is that they are completely dynamic. Don’t like one of the images? Replace it with your own. Need three columns for content instead of two? Just add another.

Keep an eye out for regular updates to our free templates section in the coming months!

Delivra Design Team

Keeping your email designs and layouts fresh and interesting is tough! One learns quickly that in the world of email design, there are many technical constraints and best practices that can make your options for design seem limited. We’d like to think we have glorious ideas just pouring out of our ears, but let’s face it – this isn’t always the case. For those times you find yourself sitting in front of a blank screen with an equally blank mind, here are a couple suggestions on keeping those email design ideas flowing.

Try subscribing to a few of your competitors’ & partners’ email programs, and even emails unrelated to your industry. Don’t simply copy what they do (I see this all too often), but take notes on interesting bits and pieces they incorporate into their designs and content. Try testing some of these out in your own campaigns. I frequently find myself stopping to admire and study the layout, art or code behind all sorts of marketing emails in my inbox.

If you’re working on a design and it’s not turning out to be what you had hoped, put it away for a while – clear your head and work on something else for a couple of hours. Once you come back to it, you may notice something that needs changing or some errors you didn’t see before. If you’re on a tight deadline and don’t have an hour or two to spare, have an honest coworker take a look at it – outside critique is valuable.

Lastly, if I’m having trouble finding inspiration, I’ll take some time to look through design blogs, books & resources. Example is always the best teacher, and Spam Meltdown has a lot of email examples in sorted categories.  While Ideabook.com has lots of resources and tutorials on print layouts, it certainly helps to get my gears turning on email designs. Checking out original and interesting art and designs in other mediums helps me to think outside the box. If you’re testing your email content, you may find that breaking the rules a bit can be just what you needed.

Design is everywhere; if you train yourself to see and analyze it, finding inspiration for the work you do will come a lot easier!

Celeste Odell | Design Services

Your landing page is the stepping stone between your clicks and conversions. Your email content may be expertly designed and written, but if little thought is given to the Web pages that your email leads to, all your efforts are wasted.

Earlier this month, our own Support specialist Todd Weymouth blogged about the ease of creating your own landing pages using our HTML Editor. Taking that a step further, below are 3 simple tips on designing your own successful landing pages:

1. Keep it relevant. In the world of email marketing, relevance has always been a key component. Create a customized landing page that ties in specifically with your email offer. If your beautiful, targeted email is simply dumping your recipients on your homepage – leaving them to navigate to your offer themselves  – you can bet most of them will give up quickly.
2. Reinforce the call-to-action. Make it absolutely clear to the recipient what steps they need to take next. The less guesswork you leave to your recipients, the more likely it is for them to convert. Break your content into key points that make your information clear and skimmable; lastly, keep pertinent information above the fold. The more “fluff” your recipients have to scroll through to get to the point, the more likely you are to lose them.
3. Keep the design flowing smoothly. The look and feel of your landing page should match that of your email content. Convince your recipients that they are on the correct page with a second’s glance by keeping your branding, imagery, colors and fonts similar to that of your email content.

Did you know that in addition to customizing landing pages, we can customize other pages available with Delivra? Your Forward to a Friend page, your profile form page, your surveys, triggered mailings – these can all be branded with simple elements like your company logo and colors. If you’re looking to create something a little fancier, you can also hire the help of Delivra’s design team! Your account manager can give you more details.

Questions? Have another email design topic you want to hear about? Feel free to shoot me an email.

Celeste Odell | Design Services

ALT text is not something to ignore when putting together your email creative. Not all email clients will display your images’ ALT tags, but they’re still worth using. In the likely event that a recipient will have images blocked upon viewing your email content, the ALT text is what they will see first; if the text is visible and enticing, more recipients will open and click through your mailings.

It’s best to make your ALT text concise and clear, but try to use enough text to convey the content of the image. If you have a shiny orange image button covered with text and photos of packages, set it’s ALT attribute with just the text needed to convey the value – i.e. “50% Off Shipping - Click Here” (assuming you were, unfortunately, unable to use a bulletproof button in the first place).

Most email clients will simply cut off the ALT text relative to the size of the image. Keep small images’ ALT texts set to just a word or two, if possible, and limit your more descriptive lines of text to your bigger images.

Both the left and right versions above were coded at the same width, but the image on the right side did not have height and width attributes set (having these set is a best practice). As a result, most email clients stretched the image space to allow for all of the ALT text, ignoring the tables' set width and breaking apart the email content.

More interesting words from the industry on using ALT tags for email:

• Using ALT tags properly in emails and XHTML
• HTML Email + Alt Tags = More Bagels Sold
• Using ALT Tags in Email Design

Questions? Have another email design topic you want to hear about? Feel free to shoot me an email.

Celeste Odell | Design Services

Let’s say you’re just about done putting together your email content. It’s approved to send out and you’re proud of how great it looks. You send yourself a test email for one final check… and it’s completely blown apart! What do you do? Before you light your computer on fire and throw it at the nearest intern, check to see if it’s one of these top 4 issues.

• Are you using only inline CSS and HTML tables? If your text is displaying without all your fancy colors, sizes and fonts, you’ve probably formatted them using an embedded or linked style sheet. Make sure all your content is formatted with only inline CSS or HTML. Stay away from using CSS for positioning – use old-school tables instead.
• Were your images saved at the correct size before you placed them in your HTML? An image saved at a size too big for your email template may break it apart… even after you’ve set the correct sizes in your HTML. A few email clients will ignore your HTML image attributes, so even though you’ve sized down your beautiful 1200px by 1700px banner, it may display at its original size – stretching out the rest of your email. Save your images at their final sizes before you place them in your email content (or Delivra’s Media Library).
• Does your HTML contain lots of nested tables or tables with merged cells? Excessive use of nested tables (tables set inside tables) or complicated tables with merged cells can cause problems. Plan ahead and lay out your content before you take it into HTML. The more you tinker with your HTML as you put it together, the more likely it is that problem-causing invisible elements will be left in it.
• Are you using background images or colors? Code placed in or above the <body> tag can be stripped out – so any background colors or images here may be lost. It’s safe to use background colors in your tables and table cells, but some clients won’t display background images regardless of whether it’s set in HTML or CSS. Place a background color along with your background image just in case (especially if you have white text over it).

For more tips on coding your email content, check out Delivra’s HTML Coding Guide or our HTML Editor Help Guide.

Celeste Odell | Graphic Design 

Every now and again, I have a client ask me if it’s possible to animate their email. Since it’s a bad idea to try to use Flash or embedded video, we can’t use animations either, right? Wrong—you can! Animated GIF images can definitely be used in your email campaigns, and if done right, can work to improve your results.

First off, there’s one problem you should keep in mind: while most email clients will run your animation, there are ones that won’t… like Outlook 2007. Instead, Outlook will only display the first frame of the animation as a static image. So any call to action in your animation should be in the first frame, even if the frame displays for only a fraction of a second.  If your first frame is blank, no one using Outlook 2007 will get your message.

Secondly, the file size of your image must be taken into consideration. Generally, it’s a good idea to keep the animation (and any other image in your email, for that matter) around 30kb. This means that your animation is probably limited to just a few simple frames or colors. The longer and more detailed your animation, the more time it will take the recipient to download. Worst case scenario, your recipient may look over your mailing and move on before the animation even runs.  So while your animation of a velociraptor dancing at a rave party with your call to action on its T-shirt may be awesome, it certainly wouldn’t be practical for email.

Lastly, as an animated GIF is still an image, I wouldn’t suggest limiting any call-to-action to just that area. Some good alternatives would be to also include a call to action in text, or maybe to use the animation as a subtle way to direct the recipients’ attention to your main message. The possibilities of tactfully and successfully animating your email are endless, and testing your email is never a bad idea.

Have another email design topic you’d like to see covered? Feel free to let me know.

Celeste Odell | Graphic Design

When creating the content for your HTML emails, the dimensions are an important aspect to consider. The size and layout can have an effect on the success of your campaign. Below, I’ve listed a couple of basic pointers to keep in mind.

Width
The typical email has a width of 600 to 650 pixels. This may sound pretty small – but if you create your email any wider, your recipients may have to scroll both vertically and horizontally to view the email in its entirety… making it a pain to read. Create your email any narrower and your email may become very long in order to fit all of your content.

Despite the width norm of 600-650 pixels, formatting emails horizontally seems to be a growing trend among some retailers. The very helpful Smith-Harmon blog has highlighted various designs in horizontal format, which seem to be generating good results. (It’s worth noting that with these designs, the content usually isn’t very tall – so most recipients would only have to scroll in one direction. This is a good plan; the more you ask your recipient to do in order to read your message, the more likely they are to lose interest).

This just goes to show that it could be worth it to test out different variables in your email creative. Every group is different, and what doesn’t work for one group might create great results for another!

Not only does this email include pertinent information above the fold, the first line is coded in HTML – so the recipient wouldn’t have to enable images to see the text right away.

(click image for full view)
Designing for the Preview Pane: The 250-Pixel Rule
Many email clients will display the top portion of your email in a preview pane, which recipients will view before deciding to read the rest of your email. The size of this preview pane varies depending on the email client (Hotmail/Outlook 2007/etc.) and the recipient’s individual settings, but you can generally expect that most of your recipients will see the top left 250 pixels of your email in their preview panes. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to include compelling HTML content in this area to entice your recipients to read further.

Stay tuned for further posts covering email design basics! Have a topic in mind? Feel free to drop me a line.

Celeste ODell | Creative Services & Design