The Litmus Test

If you're managing email campaigns and you're finding it difficult / time-consuming to properly test and QA your emails, consider this handy tool: Litmus.

Litmus delivers screenshots of what your email (or web page) looks like in every major client. They currently test on the following platforms:

• Outlook 2007
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2002/XP
• Outlook 2000
• Gmail
• Hotmail
• AOL Mail
• Yahoo! Mail
• Lotus Notes 8
• Lotus Notes 7
• Lotus Notes 6.5
• Apple Mail 3
• Apple Mail 2.1

It's a quick and convenient way to make sure that your email is rendering correctly across all clients. It's relatively cheap too! Only $18 for a day's worth of use, $55 per month for unlimited tests (ideal) and $185 a month for unlimited tests as well as 10 user accounts.

They have a blog that's worth checking out. They update it consistently with all of their updates and integration options.

If you're currently using this, please comment below! Share your thoughts! We'd love to hear what you have to say.

DPI Settings With Outlook 2007

The geniuses over at Bronto have uncovered yet another flaw with the always problematic Outlook 2007. By testing to different computers using Outlook '07 at the their office, there were always glaring inconsistencies with two specific machines. Yet, the two computers that always had issues would always break in their own special ways.

Through diligent research, it was determined that the two computers had separate DPI (dots per inch) settings. The default DPI setting on Windows machines is 96. One of the computers was set to 120 DPI (the large setting) and 82 DPI (a custom setting). The former would blow out the images, causing breaks and the latter would shrink the images also causing rendering flaws.

Basically, only Outlook 2007 (and not any other desktop email client such as Thunderbird) will break any email with a setting other than the standard DPI setting of 96.

This doesn't sit well with me considering that no matter how meticulous you are when testing emails it still might end up broken when it reaches some users' inboxes. The only remedy that comes to mind is to spread the word and awareness through Email Standards Project. If there's enough outcry from the community maybe, just maybe, developers will wise-up and listen.

1 Gmail Address = Infinity Gmail Addresses

Being obsessive compulsive like myself can be a drain. Constantly trying to keep everything in it's place; nice & neat and tucked away in their own little corner is a job unto itself. I take the same OCD approach to every aspect of my life, especially organizing my email. I definitely take pride on how my work mailbox is set up. Every person, mailing list and company has their own dedicated folder. But my personal Gmail mailbox is seriously lacking in the organizational department. It's neglected, to say the least... until now.

I stumbled upon this post at the Official Gmail Blog which was an earth-shattering epiphany of sorts. Apparently you can do one of two things to ultimately help organize your inbox on the fly:

• By simply appending a "+" after your email address followed by any combination of words and you can create as many variations of the same email address. For example you can use "mindcometblog+mailinglists@gmail.com" to sort out all mailing lists.
• You can also add periods (".") within your email address such as "mindcomet.blog@gmail.com" or "mind.comet.blog@gmail.com".

So once you set all of those up you can set up organization variables (or filters) within your account that will direct specific email addresses to their corresponding folder.

Kudos to the Gmail team for keeping OCD freaks like myself sane and perpetually organized.

More Yahoo! Maintenance

Apparently Yahoo! is continuing it's behind-the-scenes maintenance work with both Yahoo! Classic and Yahoo! Mail Beta. Users have been experiencing previously read or deleted emails returning to the inbox unread, consistent JavaScript errors, and messages failing to load properly.

Keep this in mind when gathered open and click results for Yahoo! addresses, as this will definitely skew the numbers.

For more info, check out their blog. There's a growing discourse between their development team and users and email marketers alike experiencing problems.

Thanks to Dylan at The Email Wars for pointing this out.

Do Not Forward

We used to encourage forwarding didn't we? If it's relevant, yes forward along but don't abuse the forward to a friend feature, that's not what it's there for. This website is all about preventing the forwarding of unwanted chain letters and so forth that so many people are known to forward along and why do they feel the need to foward? Maybe because they don't want 10 years of bad luck or hope to start receiving $$$ out of no where, who knows. We are over the myths and chains people, please stop spamming our inboxes.

Taking Advantage of Tax Deadline

I'm a little surprised to see only one company outside of accounting companies, taking advantage of the tax return deadline in regards to the slew of email campaigns I'm on. Bath and Body Works is doing an email only promotion around their aromatherapy products and the tag line "Feeling Taxed, Tax Relief". I thought it was a great idea and showed me that they are on top of their game when it comes to generating themed email messages where relevant. Although I didn't make a purchase, I can still relate to the time of year, how others must be feeling and the relief many will feel either a) after they get their taxes in and/or b) after they use Bath and Body Works products, that if purchased through via the email message, will include a discounted price. I feel the weight being lifted already, don't you?

Should Abercrombie's Click Through Be Highly Credited?

I used to subscribe to Abercrombie emails through my old email address (which I still can't seem to part ways with even though I rarely check it...why is that?) and had forgotten about them for some time so I just resigned up to see what they are up to these days. Seems like pretty much the same thing. Pretty decent subject lines however today's had a period at the end of it, not sure when we started to use periods in our subject lines but none the less the point of today's post is that Im questioning whether they are putting a high level of credit towards their click through. They send you an email with one image, typically a hot male or female body with the call to action to click through. If you are interested in their clothes, well of course you're going to click through or otherwise you wouldn't know what was new. Are they counting these click throughs as successful even though there's really no other option than to click through? Typically when I receive other retail emails, the call to action is usually some sort of discount or sale where Im more compelled to click through because I want to see what kind of deal I can get. To just browse at new clothes, not sure that does it for me, but then again, maybe Im not their target audience. What do you think, good or bad strategy in getting consumers to click through?

Just in case you were interested in todays hot bod :-).