MindComet

Hotmail Kind-of Sort-of Announces HTML5 Video Support

So Hotmail now supports HTML5 video in email. This is a major development in the video-in-email saga, but it’s not a bullet-proof solution… yet.

Once the email is opened and images are displayed, the user must right-click on the video and select Play. This is due to Hotmail stripping out the <video> tag by default. Unsurprisingly, IE 7/8 doesn’t support HTML5 video yet, so you must have fallback content (such as an image) in place for users browsing the web with IE. Safari does not allow for right-click enabled playback, so fallback content is completely necessary here, as well.

Ros at CampaignMonitor brings up a good point in regards to autoplay in that having a video automatically play in users’ inboxes is likely to be a huge annoyance and will ultimately be a great way of encouraging users to unsubscribe. Food for thought.

All in all, this is not a solution that has been fully-realized, but it is only a relatively short matter of time before its fleshed out to the point where videos in email is viable and worth pursing in future efforts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 20, 2011

Mobile Email Design DOs and DON’Ts

Style Campaign has always been one of my favorite email marketing blogs, primarily because they seem to focus on niche topics such as video, animated gifs and now, mobile.

Mobile is on top of every marketer’s minds who have any involvement in email. It’s an exciting time for us in the industry. In a relatively short time, the entire email landscape is going to be effect by mobile’s influence. It’s not a question of “if”, but more a question of “when” it will take over the majority of email client market share.

So with that it mind, it is becoming increasingly clear that email designs must be able to conform to mobile devices. This article at Style Campaign goes into much detail about the do’s and don’ts regarding email design. It’s a fantastic read for anyone interested in mobile-centric revamping your newsletter.

Key takeaways:

The peak of mobile email use is around 7AM, when everyone is waking up. This means people’s vision is bleary and their overall effectiveness of handling their phones properly is decreased. Because of this, we must design our emails to make it easy for the beleaguered, pre-caffeinated masses.

44x44 is the perfect dimension for a fingertip to touch a link, according to Apple. With this in mind, there shouldn’t be any competing links within that block. Convenience for one-handed users is key.

Big buttons make for a better mobile user experience than tiny ones.

Most people handle their phones with their right hands. Keep general ergonomics in mind when and where you place specific icons and links.

Text under 12px will scale up, which in turn can break your design. Auto-scaling can be prevented by adding the style ”-webkit-text-size-adjust:none”

While it is a best practice for your email’s navigation to resemble the site’s navigation, that’s not necessarily the case for mobile email.

So with the increase of mobile use, will we see all best practices slowly change and evolve? Will we see mobile’s influence effect all email designs from this point on? Time will tell.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 06, 2011

Mobile Email Usage On The Rise

According to a recent study conducted by Campaign Monitor, mobile email is on the rise. Now this shouldn’t be much of a surprise as mobile devices are becoming more and more prominent pretty much everywhere in the world, but what is surprising is the rate at which mobile use is rising.

With the release of the iPhone, iPad and Android phones, the mobile market share has gone from 4% to 20% in 24 months. This, to me, is insanely quick growth. Of that 20%, iPhone unsurprisingly accounts for the vast majority with iPad and Android falling behind in pecking order. Even more alarming is the rate at which Desktop clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail and the like have dropped: almost 11%.

Go here and check out this fantastic article. It’s well worth your time.

If this isn’t evidence for more mobile-centric email designs, I don’t know what is. If your ESP allows for a mobile alternative, be sure to utilize it.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 16, 2011

Your Facebook Page As An Email Design

When one of the purposes of your email is to increase likes / fans of your Facebook page, what design tactics and strategies would you use? Would you design your email in any specific way for the sole purpose of increasing your reach on Facebook?

LA Fitness recently employed—what I thought was—a fairly brilliant design for their Facebook email campaign.

As you can see, their email design very closely resembles their actual Facebook page, all the way down to the site’s standard navigation. This email could’ve been finessed somewhat with better typefaces and logo placement, but all in all it works. Essentially, LA Fitness’s Facebook page landed in my inbox… it’s nothing too complicated or convoluted. Its simple and straight to the point. Sometimes a similar approach is the best solution to your email campaign’s design.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 23, 2011

Background Colors Can Help Improve Your Open Rates

Take a look at this example from Simple Shoes.

The default background colors alone—not the alt text—compelled me to display images. Which is not to say that alt text isn’t important… this email has alt text within the main call to action, which reads “Collect: Our Friends Over At Good Magazine Took Over Our Blog And Left Us With Some Really Great Stories. Check Out What They Have To Say About Water Waste, Music And Earth Day.“ but this was too long for most email clients to render. Another lesson learned in brevity with alt text.

Regardless, this email succeeds where most fail in terms of readability and eye-catchiness in email clients who block images by default.

I received this in my Gmail inbox and after testing in other major clients, this email looks the same in all but ONE email client. Can you guess which one doesn’t display correctly? Give up? Ok…

Outlook 2007:

Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

Not every email campaign or brand can get away with using color this liberally, but most can at least try. Always remember to test your email with images off, as the majority of desktop and web clients don’t render them by default.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 03, 2011

Amazon SES For Transactional Messaging: Ramping Up Your Daily Allotment

We have recently been using Amazon’s Simple Email Service for their Transactional Messages capabilities. So far it’s turned out to be a fantastic choice both in terms of service and cost. We are especially delighted with the service due to it’s API and ability to adapt to any ESP we are currently using.

If you use this in the future, one thing I suggest you keep in mind is the allowed daily messages when your account first becomes active. You see, once your account is approved by Amazon, you’re only allowed to send 1,000 messages per day. After three days, you will be bumped up to 10k. Within two weeks you can send up to 1 million messages per day. The amount of emails sent per second can also be increased in conjunction with the daily rates… from one email per second, all they way up to 90 per second.

The diagram below further illustrates sending limits:

This is all due to deliverability. Amazon insists that new accounts should be slowly ramped up to these daily levels. If a new account suddenly starts sending out tens of thousands of messages a day, the likelihood that they’ll be delivered to inboxes is slim. The IP address needs to be established first and whitelisting needs to occur. Then, once Amazon is ready, they will allow you to the next level of their daily rate.

If you’re launching a site in the near future while utilizing Amazon SES, please keep this in mind.

Check out their Developer Guide for more information.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 02, 2011

Urban Outfitters Has A Knack For Animated Gifs

The image above makes up the majority of an email I just received from those trendy folks at Urban Outfitters. (View the entire email here) I must say, I am quite impressed by their creative use of animated gifs here. It pulled me right in and got me clicking through in an instant. The revolving wardrobe is just dead-on in terms of tone and persuasion.

Urban Outfitters knows how to catch their subscribers’ collective eyes with animated gifs such as these. If you’ve been paying attention to this blog for a while, you may remember this post, where Urban’s use of an animated gif was almost too much, but definitely left an impression on me. This email is no different. I wish more companies would incorporate cool animated gifs like this more often.

What do you think? Is this a great use of animated gifs or what? Do you have any examples of successful campaigns with animated gifs? Post ‘em below.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Apr. 20, 2011