Rich media is on the rise in email marketing. In fact, in all marketing. Short videos and animation can help drive up attention & response rates… when they’re done well. Though video doesn’t work in all email inboxes, animation works in all but one: Outlook 2007 and newer will simply show the first “slide” of an animated GIF for example. As long as you remember to make your first image your primary one, you can still use animation in those inboxes that will render it. What goes into a great […]

One of my favorite tricks in designing an email that still works when images are turned off, is the bulletproof button. You may have seen it in action — even if you didn’t know what it was. The bulletproof button is a button that shows up whether images are on or off, by using a single-cell table, a background color and a little CSS with the text link. I’ve had quite a few people ask me how to make one, so I thought I’d post the 4-step how-to. What goes […]

We love when our clients test — and learn — something with their email marketing campaigns. From what works in subject lines to the length of the email to how to best use personalization, testing in email marketing is key to consistently increasing your results. But there’s an important caveat: All tests are not created equal. In order to really learn from your tests, they need to be both scientifically accurate and statistically significant results. Did that phrase take you back to college? It turns out that statistics class is […]

When you’re sending email through a third party, like the emfluence Marketing Platform, there are a few important technical items that your Email Service Provider (ESP) should help you take care of.  One of the most important is your email authentication.  When you set up a new account or switch to a new email platform, the platform team should ask you to add two text records to your DNS – SPF and DKIM – that will help optimize your inbox placement. A lot of this process may sound like jibberish […]

Using rich media in marketing campaigns is definitely trending up for 2015. Email is an excellent way to drive your contacts — buyers, prospects — to your content, and so every so often, we get the question, “Can I embed a YouTube video in my email?” The short answer is, “not really.” The standard video embed code won’t work with any inboxes, but HTML5 video can be used to render in iOS, Outlook.com and Apple. HTML5 still won’t work in Gmail, Yahoo!, or Outlook, though — arguably the three biggest […]