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More business, increasing sales, better prospecting and higher conversion rates are frequently discussed business issues facing our clients and many businesses in today's marketplace. It's a topic occupying many business owners' minds today. Do you find you have a list of prospects that you've reached out to - but for some reason or another, they weren't ready to buy?  They liked what you had to offer, acknowledge that there is opportunity down the road, but the timing wasn't quite right?

I have found for Element Three's clients and for our own organization, many times we let these conversations go silent.  We forget to follow-up and get so caught up in the busy-ness of every day that we overlook the opportunities of working with these companies; 6 months, 12 months, even 24 months down the road.

What if you have a systematic way of keeping in front of these prospective companies? What if you could ensure they were communicated with at consistent intervals with a pertinent message about what your organization could do for them? And, you don't have to  think about it EVERY day!

Let me introduce you to an email drip-marketing program.

For those unfamiliar with the term "drip-marketing", it's basically a not-so-fancy word that marketers use when talking about a campaign that has been scheduled to go out at pre-defined intervals where you 'drip' very focused snippets of information to clients or prospects. Think about when you water a flower. If you dump a huge bucket of water on it at once, it is going to be very limited in the amount of water it can actually take in and a lot is going to slide off and be wasted in the process.  Conversely, if you put that same flower on an irrigation system where water can be slowly 'dripped' in -- the flower will be able to absorb nearly all of the water it is given.

Same concept applies to marketing.  If I send a 10-page brochure to a client - chances are (if I'm lucky) they'll skim it and then throw it away. I've gotten only one chance to talk to them and most of the message has been 'wasted'. But, what if I sent that same prospect just one main point off of each page in the brochure over a period of 10 months? Your chances of the recipient being able to digest and retain the information relevant to their business are much greater. That's drip marketing.

Use the methodology identified above, use HTML email to deploy the message and you've just set up an email drip marketing program. Drip marketing can be done via mail and email. However, email is cheaper than print, targeted, customizable, you can easily update content and you can track engagement!

4 Steps to Setting Up your Email Drip Marketing Program:

1) Ask Permission

Spam laws/rules apply to drip marketing too. Be sure to get verbal approval before adding prospects to your drip marketing campaign. We recommend only using drip marketing with those folks you've already had some type of engagement with - either a face-to-face meeting or a phone call. Getting their email address does not constitute permission. Ask them!

Also, use an HTML email service provider like Delivra that will keep you CAN-SPAM compliant with the ability to opt-out and the appropriate sender contact information included in every send.

2) Sorry, it's not about YOU.

Don't turn into a "me monster" just because you've got a captive audience. Don't just talk about what you do, the features on your product or how much experience you have. Unless the recipient is your mother - they really don't care. What they care about is what you can DO for them, not how special you are. Talk about what they GET. Talk about your abilities, features and offers only though the context of how they APPLY to the people to who you're sending communications.

3) Check the Stats.

You can wait for them to call you. But keep in mind, they rarely do. Watch the stats - who is opening the emails, engaging in the content and forwarding to others in their company? Follow up with them.

4) Follow-up

Which brings me to the 4th point. Follow up. And not with another email, but with a phone call. Follow-up with those folks who are engaging in your content, downloading your white papers and taking your assessments. Fish where the fish are.

If you're unsure of where to start, how to outline the campaign or struggling with the message; give us a call at Element Three. We'd love to help you. I'm confident this will make a big impact in your top line.

Guest Blogger | Tiffany Sauder

Tiffany Sauder is the President of Element Three. Tiffany brings a bright, fresh approach to a very familiar business: marketing and branding. Through Tiffany's eyes, its sole purpose is to improve the bottom line. She firmly believes that all marketing and branding engagements are a direct result of a business issue or opportunity - and that business, branding and creativity can't be separated if they're going to succeed.

Tiffany's acumen at process thinking can help you find more customers, find the right kind of customers, bring products to market profitably or create awareness, among other things. Strap yourself in. She's likely to start charting our potential approaches, ball parking an array of financial strategies or imagining successful business options as soon as you start talking.

To learn more about Tiffany, visit her blog.

By now, you've probably seen this video clip from 1994 making the rounds on Internet.  If not, take two minutes and watch it now.  Then scroll down for a question:

It's easy enough to laugh smugly at this now, in 2011, when Internet email is part of our national consciousness, and Bryant Gumbel isn't.

But where were you when you first encountered email? Probably not on camera like Gumbel and Katie Couric, I'm guessing.

In terms of familiarity with email, I had an advantage over the Today Show anchors, because in 1994 I was a college student.  I had discovered Internet email two years earlier, when I learned that my account on the university's VAX/VMS mainframe could be used not only for sending messages on campus, but could also communicate with my high school classmates attending schools in far-flung places like Muncie, IN; Bowling Green, KY; and Knoxville, TN.  And when we found out that my parents' Prodigy online service included email, it became a cheaper alternative for keeping in touch with them than long-distance calling.

HTML email was still unheard of, as the main application for HTML, the World Wide Web, was still a curiosity, even on campus, where Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, had only been recently introduced to the PCs in the Computer Science department lab.  Obviously, then, we weren't using a Web-based email client, or any client at all; instead, we used terminal emulation programs, or actual dumb terminals, to connect to the server and read plain text emails there.

But outside the university, email wasn't fully mainstream.  When I took my first job out of college in 1996, working tech support for Software Artistry, Inc., our clients included Fortune 500 companies, most of which still didn't issue Internet email accounts to their employees.  When problems occurred, it was not uncommon for customers to fax us a 50-page printed log file that today would just be attached to an email.

That's my "when I met email" story—what's yours?  Were you flummoxed like the Today Show talent?  Was your first email account through school, or work, or your home AOL dial-up service?  Or are you're of the generation that has never known a world without email?  Post your story in the comments section below.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Recently, Delivra announced that it would be the first ESP to integrate with TabSite by Digital Hill Multimedia. The goal with this integration is to allow Delivra customers a way to easily create an email sign up form for their Facebook Fan Page and it allows new customers to sign up for Delivra email marketing services through TabSite.

With today's blog post, we'd like to clarify what this integration means for you and how you can make the most out of it!

1. TabSite Account. In order to use the two systems, users must have  a TabSite account. The great part is that TabSite is modestly priced and even offers a FREE option as well.

2. Email Icon. Next, find the email icon in the TabSite toolbar. Once you click on the Email Icon, an information box will pop up.
3. Sign In. The pop up allows you to :

a. Not a Customer: Sign up for Delivra email marketing services.

b. A Delivra Customer: Sign in and get access to your Delivra account.
4. Form Code: Once you've gained access to your Delivra account, you can access your signup code under Utilities:  Web Forms:  New Subscribe Form.  Click Get HTML.  Copy the code and then paste it into your TabSite Page Manager.

From there, TabSite will ensure that the form works on Facebook and those that sign up via your Facebook Fan Page will automatically be added to your email marketing list in the Delivra application.  What's even better is that you can take that signup form and brand it with headers and graphics to make it easier to find and act upon within your Facebook page.

Need help getting started? TabSite wrote a blog post that outlines these steps with great graphics.

Still having trouble getting started? Check out the TabSite How To section!

Lavon Temple | Marketing

E-mail campaigns lead recipients to landing pages for a variety of reasons: to provide the customer or prospect with additional information, a video or registration for events, to get them to sign up for white papers or enter contests; or to request that they fill out a credit card form or take a survey, among other reasons.

Landing pages have some kind of mystique about them.  Some e-mail marketers don't really understand the mechanics behind how a landing page is built, so they tie up precious resources of their IT department and Web team to create landing pages for campaigns, or pay their e-mail service provider (ESP) an extra fee for a landing page creator.

There is an easier way.  As marketers create e-mails for campaigns, they can use their ESP's e-mail editor to create a separate HTML e-mail that will function as a landing page.  The landing page can be stored in a content library, and an e-mail can link to the file.

Besides saving money and resources, there are many benefits to using the "e-mail as a landing page" method.

To find out the other benefits and read the rest of the BtoB article, click here.

For more information on landing pages, check out these other Delivra blog posts:

Make Your Own Landing Pages

Successful Landing Pages: 3 Tips

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

Yesterday, Delivra announced its first ever Extreme Email Makeover Contest.  Today, we wanted to take the time to actually detail how to submit your email design entry to eliminate any confusion.

First of all, you want to save a copy of one of the current email designs you are using.  When saving, make sure you save it in a "picture" format, just as a JPEG or GIF.  Do not save it as a webpage or an HTML.  In order to obtain an image of your email design, you can take a screenshot of them from a web browser.

Here are some ways to create a screenshot: if you're using a Mac use the combination "shift-command-3" to save an image file of your screen, or "shift-control-command-3" to copy it to your clipboard to paste into an image editor.  If you're using a PC press the "PrintScrn/SysRq" key to copy your screen to your clipboard.

I use Google Chrome as my web browser and have found an easy application for taking screenshots.  In the toolbar, click on the wrench and click on extensions.  From there, search for the application: Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate.  It is really simple to use and you will be able to easily take a screenshot photo of your email design, crop the image, and then save it.

After you have saved your email design, click on the Delivra Facebook Contest tab.  When there, scroll down and click on the Enter Contest button.   To start, you will enter information, such as your name and email address and then press the continue button. Once that is completed, you will be asked to upload your email design.

If you have questions, please email me at ltemple@delivra.com.  I look forward to helping you join in the fun!

Abby Alexander | Design Services

Lavon Temple | Marketing

I have the exciting opportunity to partner with a client who is literally starting from scratch. No e-mail content to send and no e-mail addresses to e-mail the content to. What a fantastic situation to be in!! First, it answers the age old question “How many e-mail addresses do I need to have in my database to sign up for Delivra services?” Apparently you do not need any. Second, starting from scratch gives them the opportunity to start with best practices from day one, think through and determine their long term goals with e-mail marketing, establish what is going to be the most effective way to grow their list, design a branded HTML template to mirror the website, and set benchmarks for success.

I believe that anyone can theoretically start from scratch.  What would you do differently if you had a blank slate? What process would you change? Template would you redesign? Benchmarks you would set? The good news is that you can start over one change at a time. The new client and I are not making all these decisions all at once and you don’t have to either.  Just change one thing.

• Ask for a quote on a personalized custom template (or make some changes to one of our new templates).
• Set up an automated Welcome Message.
• Talk to your account manager about determining benchmarks for success.
• Brainstorm with your team about opportunities to capture new e-mail addresses and demographic information (ask us about a profile form if you do not have one).

Little changes can make a big impact. Need help figuring out what to change first? Call us. That’s what we are here for.

Rachel Rewerts | Account Management

All of the fonts available in Delivra’s HTML Editor are web-safe and automatically include the font family.

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

I don't know about you, but email marketing isn't the ONLY marketing function I handle these days.  In fact, it is one function of about 500 others.  In addition to that, unless you go to school for Web design many schools never even cover email marketing, HTML, or even the web-based technologies that we are all using today to manage those hundreds of things we do.  I doubt anyone can disagree that email marketing, when done right, generates tremendous ROI.  According to the DMA just last year, email marketing can generate as much as $43 of ROI for every ONE DOLLAR you spend.  That's pretty powerful when you think about all of the other marketing methods and tactics that are typically generating one-to-one or two-to-one at best.  And isn't that what it is all about?  ROI-Return on Investment.  Here is a very simple video to learn the concept of ROI...

In today's economy if you are a marketer that isn't measuring each tactic and the results it generates, then you are likely headed for the same demise as the 8 Track Player, the Walkman, or even very soon, the CD!

So NOW you truly get it and you begin marketing by the numbers.  You know email brings the greatest result and you want to integrate more into your strategy, now what?  Well, if you are like me you are juggling all things marketing and cannot self-teach yourself HTML overnight.  there are still a few things you can do to be successful.  Here's my list of three things that will guarantee your marketing superstar status regardless of your knowledge of HTML:

1. Use an Email Marketing Service Provider (otherwise known as an ESP) to manage your campaigns.  You see, with an ESP you get the software to build, send and track each campaign with ease.  In fact, almost all ESPs have very user-friendly editors & templates in which you can use to build your HTML message.
2. Find resources that help you along the way...whether you design in Dreamweaver, FrontPage or in an ESPs editor, finding email marketing or HTML tips and guides to reference along the way will help you a ton!  Email Marketing Reports has an excellent article where they reference over 50 articles on HTML and email design.  The Email Experience Council offers research, blogs, and webinars for you to learn more.  In fact, even Delivra offers webinars to our customers now to learn more about the email basics and next steps.
3. Outsource your design work.  It's not unheard of!  We,  as marketers, outsource PR, web design, and many other projects....you can outsource your email design as well and be more effective with the strategy to implement each campaign.  Here at Delivra, we have a full-time design team that can provide advice, custom project-based services along with full-service.  Not only is it a great service for your investment, their design often makes mine blush!  You can even follow their tips, hints, and tricks in our blog in the Design Category.

Hope this blog post provided you some insight and resources to get started today!  Drive powerful results with email marketing today and let me know what questions or comments you have.  Comment today!

Carissa Newton | Marketing

I always get excited when we can devise a new way for a client to build a list and communicate with their subscribers. In this case it is a franchised hotel.

Background
The hotel had done little marketing in the past. They are located near a major airport and business demand kept the rooms full and the food service facility busy. However, economic conditions have reduced business travel and business.

Marketing Goal
The hotel marketing manager was looking for a high ROI method to build sales. Email was on her list but she was unsure of how to proceed. With 200 email addresses in hand and no previous email marketing program the task looked daunting. In addition, the facility did not have authority to post anything on the franchiser's national website.

Needed
Before you can market with email you need a recipient list to mail to. How do you build a sizable list of email subscribers interested in receiving site specific information (in this case the airport hotel) and with offers that are relevant and timely?

Solution
The solution required connecting four marketing tools. Print, web, email and smart phone.

Printed announcements are to be placed in all guest rooms and maintained by the housekeeping staff. The printed offer sends hotel guests to a one page web site hosted by Delivra.

The web site has a subscribe form with text boxes for email address and optional name. Plus the offer is reinforced on the site. Revisions to the web page are easily performed using simple editing tools already in the Delivra solution.

An emailed coupon is delivered in real time to people who complete the web site subscription form.

Using any smart phone that displays HTML or text email, a guest can merely display the coupon to hotel food service staff who redeem the offer.

Payoff
The hotel gets an instant boost in sales from current guests plus they build a list of email addresses for an email newsletter aimed at encouraging return visits.

Neil Berman | President & CEO

In my line of business, I sign up for a *lot* of email newsletters.  Most of my subscriptions aren't necessarily based on an affinity for the brand, but rather a desire to stay in touch with how other companies--beyond Delivra's clients--are using email.

One observation I've made is that (in my inbox, at least) the bulk of email I receive from retailers is aimed at driving traffic to their e-commerce websites.  But brick-and-mortar retailers can use email as a way to motivate shoppers to visit their physical stores.   In fact, we recently added a feature to our HTML editor to allow retailers or retail brands to create their own scannable coupons that email recipients can print and use.

Our Creative Services team has been using our new Barcode Editor to insert barcode images into mailings they've designed for a regional retail chain in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.   We're now pleased to offer this capability to all of our Professional and Enterprise clients, available by request to your Delivra Account Manager.

Partial screenshot of Barcode Editor

The Barcode Editor supports the most popular barcode formats supported by retail point-of-sale systems, including UPC, Code 128, and Code 39 (also called "3 of 9").  Designers can control the size of the barcode image, as well as the message to be encoded.   Barcodes are inserted into mailings as JPEG or PNG images, and can be oriented vertically or horizontally with respect to the mailing content.

If you choose to send barcoded coupons to your subscribers via email, keep in mind the following tips:

1. Before sending, test your barcodes by printing the email and scanning the barcode with actual equipment used at point of sale.   Without going into too much technical detail, let's just say that not all scanners can read all formats or dimensions of barcodes.
2. Be careful about the offers you send.  A Midwest grocery chain recently found itself in hot water with shoppers after it pulled the plug on an Internet coupon offer that proved too popular and was becoming too costly.  The coupon, for $10 off a purchase of $10 or more, amounted to a giveaway of free money, with the company realizing no benefit.  Once a coupon is published on the Internet, assume that it will be forwarded and multiple copies printed.  Consider using a "percent off" offer, or one requiring a higher minimum purchase amount, to limit your financial risk.
3. The "text" of your barcode--the letters and numbers it represents--can be dynamic.  You could load a unique coupon code for each recipient into a Delivra demographics field such as Text2_, and use a merge tag (%%Text2_%%) as the text to encode in your barcode.  When the mailing is sent, a unique barcode will then be generated for each recipient.  If your point-of-sale system supports it, this would give you a way to track which recipients' coupons were actually used, or to limit each unique coupon code to a single use.

Interested in learning more or getting started with bar codes in your emails?  Contact your Delivra Account Manager today!

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Tales from a poor confused artist who thought school was finally over

I’ve been working at Delivra since last summer. I started with a basic e-mail marketing I.Q. of about 12, and considering how lost I get during conversations within the company or with other big-wigs of this particular market, that number does not seem to have changed much.  Fortunately, as a designer, my job is relatively straightforward and simple, but it does come with some memory-testing challenges.

The whole process seems to be like a never-ending finals week. You spend a few days studying (building the email), turning in homework (sending the client your drafts), you take the pre-quiz (send the test email), then panic your way through the final exam (send the email).  It’s stressful, nerve-wracking, and worth everything when it results in a perfect A+ (a happy client). And while it probably isn’t as nail-bitingly terrifying as that Psychology exam you just found out about, it is enough to give you nightmares about being eaten alive by HTML.

Fortunately, cliff-notes and study-guides are available in the form of blogs. Those come in really handy when an HTML-monster project comes along, and your usual weapons of choice aren’t cutting it. There aren’t many challenges out there that another designer hasn’t overcome, and they’re more than willing to help a clueless fellow out.

Before your next test (email), here are some things to memorize that'll help you out:

1. Paragraph and Header tags are evil. They sound like a brilliant idea, but really, they are not to be trusted. If you’re wondering why you have so much space between text, images or just space that doesn’t need to be there, chances are there is a <p></p> or <h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6></h> somewhere in your HTML code. P-tags will just show up uninvited if you hit enter after a sentence. Instead of enter use shift + enter; this will enter a break tag or <br />, which will move the cursor to the next line without inserting space that has no business being there. Also, instead of using header tags, just resize the text to match the size of your choice. Painless and a lot less hassle.
2. Keep your tables simple. You would be amazed how much havoc a complicated table can wreak. I got a lot of hate from an email I was working on, and could not figure out why until fellow designer Celeste looked at my code and pointed out how ridiculous my table was. I had all kinds of merged cells and spacing issues that looked ok in Dreamweaver, but neither email client or web browser were feeling it.
3. CSS: Embedded and External = Bad, Inline=Good. Styles in e-mail are becoming more and more common, but knowing which ones can or can’t be used is a little tricky. Not all email clients are created equal, and most clients treat CSS like a weird cousin who wasn’t invited to the family reunion but came anyway.
4. Convert Word Document or Copy to Plain Text before pasting into HTML editor. Doing this helps to prevent weird symbols popping up randomly throughout your email. No more question mark apostrophes for you!  Not sure how to do this?  One way that I often do this is to drop the text into Notepad, which is an application listed under your Accessories of your computer (Start | Programs | Accessories).  You can then select Edit/Paste from Notepad and take it right into the HTML editor without any pre-defined formatting that might not otherwise work in an HTML version.

Hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

Peace out!

Abby Alexander | Design Services

One of the most common questions fielded by our Support team goes something like this: "My email looked just like I wanted in the editor and when I tested it, so how come it didn't look the same for my recipients?"

It's a common misconception that HTML is a "standard."  Web developers have known for years that different web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) interpret HTML in slightly different ways.  I like the way this web design tutorial puts it:

Your Web browser is a translation device. It takes a document written in the HTML language and translates it into a formatted Web page. The result of this translation is a little like giving two human translators a sentence written in French and asking them to translate it into English. Both will get the meaning across, but may not use the same words to do so.

There was a time when browser compatibility was a bigger problem for Web page designers than it is today.  Years ago--during the so-called "browser wars," when Microsoft and Netscape were competing for market share--both browsers added their own proprietary "extensions" to HTML, instructions that only worked in their web browser. The difficulty faced by designers, trying to write HTML that would look good in either IE or Netscape, gave rise to a "Web Standards" movement, which held that:

If Netscape and Microsoft persisted in building ever–more incompatible browsers, the cost of development would continue to skyrocket, tens of millions would find themselves locked out, and the Web would fragment into a tower of digital Babel. In fact, we said, it had already begun to do so.

Adoption of Web Standards by the browser makers has eased the burden of compatibility testing on Web page designers.  But what about those who write HTML for email rather than for Web sites?  Unfortunately, there hasn't been widespread adoption of standards among different email clients (Outlook, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc).  Worse, some of the recommendations of the Web Standards movement aren't fully applicable to the current state of email clients.

For example, one of the principles of the Web Standards movement is that HTML should only be used to define document content and structure, while CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for formatting.  Therefore, use of HTML tags like <font> for formatting is no longer recommended.  And while the <table> tag still has a purpose, it has nothing to do with aligning and positioning text on the page. But if a designer tries to apply those recommendations to email, they're not going to be pleased with how their message looks in, say, Outlook 2007, or Gmail, or Lotus Notes.

So what's an email designer to do?  May I suggest:

1. Test, test, test.  Set up accounts on the free web-based email services, and use them to preview your email before releasing it to the world.
2. Use tools like EmailAdvisor, which send your email to a seed list of addresses, then provide you with snapshots of how the HTML message looked in each of several popular email clients.  Or...
3. Use a simulator that doesn't require sending to a seed list--this is especially useful when the designer is not the same person who will be triggering the email send (and therefore doesn't have access to a seed list).  Our designers at Delivra find a tool called "Email on Acid" particularly useful.
4. Design for the lowest common denominator.  Our built-in HTML editor purposely does not generate code that uses the newest instructions.  That way, when you create an attractive-looking mailing, you have fewer worries of it breaking in, say, Outlook 2007 due to lack of support for certain CSS features.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

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

During a demo of our software a few months ago, a prospective client--the owner of an agency specializing in web design--commented that he admired the features of our product but was concerned about giving his clients access to a user interface that looked "too much like Windows 95."

Ouch.  I couldn't argue with him, though.  Delivra had added many features over the years, but we had never taken time to refresh or upgrade the appearance of the application.  As a result, the plain-brown (or, more literally, plain-blue) wrapper around our software was not an accurate reflection of the advanced features we had to offer.

That's one reason why, starting today, clients logging in to our service will see a new look to our application.  We haven't done anything crazy, like reorganize the menus, that would cause current users difficulty.  Functionally, nothing has changed.  But we've added color and contrast to the site, and made the styles more consistent with our company web site and other Delivra publications.  Our goal was to give the site a more modern and interesting look, but without affecting the ease of using the software.

Snapshot of new Delivra user interface

Another change we've made with the new design is the removal of Lyris logos and branding.  There was a time when it would have been accurate to refer to Delivra as a "Lyris reseller," which is to say that our business consisted mostly of licensing ListManager software from Lyris and offering subscriptions to access it over the Web under the "software-as-a-service," or "SaaS" model.  When SaaS was a relatively new concept, that was a helpful way of understanding Delivra's offering.  But now, as we enter 2010, "Lyris reseller" is no longer an adequate description of what we do.

For starters, we've been making our own proprietary changes and additions to the software for several years.  Delivra has its own HTML content editor, its own media and graphics library, and its own API, all of which offer more features than the ListManager functions they replaced.  Plus, we've added:

• social media integration (with tracking!)
• our own mailing list import utility
• list segmentation options using engagement and geographic proximity
• our own forward-to-a-friend application.

And our product roadmap predicts that 2010 will be our busiest development year ever!

Furthermore, Lyris is no longer our sole supplier of technology.  Our email is now being sent through Momentum, the mail transfer agent software from Message Systems, with whom we announced our partnership in June 2009.  We've also partnered with Cantaloupe to integrate email and video (again, with tracking!) through their Backlight application.  And we continue to seek out other partners who can help our clients get the most from their email marketing efforts.

Lyris technology has been part of Delivra's product for years, and our solution will surely always contain at least some Lyris DNA.  New customers who come to us after having used ListManager elsewhere will find our offering familiar and comfortable.  But when combined with our own features and contributions from other partners, it's misleading to refer to what we have as "Lyris ListManager."  That's why, starting today, it's just "Delivra," and the new user interface for 2010 reflects that.

We hope you like the new look and feel!  Be sure to let us know what you think or if there are other improvements we can make to enhance your email marketing experience.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

One of our clients called Tech Support recently, suspecting something might be broken with our built-in email content checker.   The problem?  Her message's SpamAssassin score was too good.  She had never before seen a perfect score of 0.0 and wondered, "Did you guys change something?"

Actually, we did (thanks for noticing!).  Our content checker formerly used a SpamAssassin server hosted by a 3rd-party, but we recently brought that service in-house.  We're now running our own SpamAssassin service in the Delivra data center, to give us more control over the scores being returned to our users.  Running a local SpamAssassin server also allows us to store your content analysis results in our database, so that we can display them to any administrator who reviews a message in the Mailings::Approvals queue:

SpamAssassin results link for mailings pending approval

But our user who called didn't see a perfect score because we're rigging the results to make her mailings look better, and no, we haven't started grading email content on a curve.   We're merely running the most current version of SpamAssassin (v. 3.2.5) in its  out-of-the-box configuration.   As a result of this change, most of our clients did see their anti-spam scores improve for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that SpamAssassin 3.2 has retired certain tests that are no longer considered relevant, such as the one that would assign 0.2 points if the <tbody> HTML tag was present.  The other is that we chose not to report on certain tests that contribute only one one-thousandth of a point (0.001) to the overall score.  If you're actually worried about the fact that SpamAssassin adds 0.001 to your score just because the message contains HTML, then I dare say you're focusing on the wrong things.

So, congratulations are order for our client.  Nothing's wrong with the system; hers was a decidedly non-spammy-looking mailing.  But still, a caution is in order: content is only one factor affecting delivery or non-delivery of your message.   A perfect SpamAssassin score can't hurt, but check out these other posts for more advice on getting mail delivered.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

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

I don't know about you, but I was not born a designer.  I have learned quite a bit in the years since I have been marketing and even more so since I have been creating email marketing campaigns.  One of the greatest things I learned over time is to find valuable resources that you can call on from time to time.

Now with almost every email service provider out there, including Delivra, marketers are able to create visually appealing design that aligns well with brand guidelines and renders well to the end recipient.  With the advent of WYSIWYG editors, a busy marketer like me can easily drop images, copy and links to create that final email campaign.  The key now is to find resources that will help make that job as easy as possible.  Here are a few that I have found and use frequently:

Images: While most organizations have logos and standard in place for colors and fonts, images always help make an email more impactful and engaging.  Copy is king, especially in the email world where you cannot always predict how your emails will be rendered, but you do want to have an HTML based email with images as your first choice with a text based backup.  Here is an economical site I use to find images that fit what I want to communicate:  istockphoto.com.

HTML Cheat Sheets: While I am certainly no code developer, there are times when I may need to troubleshoot why the HTML code is not rendering correctly in my testing.  I found GoSquared.com as a great resource with cheat sheets that I could reference to fix any code errors I might have.

Witty Quotes & Sayings: Not sure if you feel this way, but after writing so many different types of communications, I am often stumped with creative inspiration.  I reference Brainyquote.com often for a relevant quote or for inspiration in my writing direction.

With tools like these, I can design with the best of them.  And last but not least, here's a list of even more!  I never claim to be an expert, but I certainly know how to find tremendous resources that help me get the job done.  Now design away without the worries and remember to keep it simple and keep it relevant to your audience.

Juggling a million other marketing items like me?  Strapped for time?  Short on inspiration?  Let us help!  Did you know that we  offer full service creative design services? (here are a few samples)  At Delivra, your success is our primary goal, so leave the work up to us and we will make sure your email campaigns are dynamic & engaging.

Carissa Newton | Marketing