I’ve just been chatting with a client about email marketing – exploring which tools they should/could use to support their email strategy. I thought I’d do a quick review of some of the options we looked at.
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Inline CSS emails at Campaign Monitor
The folks at Freshview have introduced yet another great feature to Campaign Monitor, their web-based email management system: Automatic inline CSS styles.
While there are tools out there that do this (most of which I found out about through the Campaign Monitor blog), having this functionality embedded within the tool itself makes it even easier.
While this probably only means something to developers, it actually will save clients a lot of money too – developers have to spend a lot of time maintaining and updating newsletter templates to get them working right in various email clients. This “one click” solution will make that whole process a lot easier.
New feature in Campaign Monitor
Freshview have announced a new feature that allows you to compare the performance indicators (open, bounce, click rates) across a number of campaigns.
I can see this feature being immensely useful for anyone that is using the tool. Previously I’ve had to pull together various reports in a spreadsheet to get nice graphs comparing performance over time etc. and this makes it a lot easier.
I also dig Mathew’s suggestion of doing A/B comparison of different subject lines etc. A great way to tweak the performance of your campaigns.
Futuremakers email featured at SitePoint
When I was working at WWF-Australia a lot of effort went into making the organisation’s key email communications as effective as possible. So I was delighted today to see that Mathew from Freshview has chosen the Futuremakers email template as a sample of good email design in his SitePoint article The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email. (Thanks Mathew!)
A lot of “behind the scenes” work went into making sure that the email format worked across all the popular web email software (esp. Hotmail and Gmail). But also we had very clear objectives for the content layout, which is what Mathew highlighted in his article.
P.S. the email was also featured previously in the Campaign Monitor email gallery, which is a great resource for reviewing best practice in email design – as well as providing some nice eye-candy ;)
del.icio.us links (19-Jan-2008 to 23-Jan-2008)
- 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers – Darren Rowse writes up his thoughts on the benefits of Twitter. His focus is specifically on bloggers, but still useful for anyone wanting some ideas as to why Twitter may be useful to them.
- what’s new on reddit: new features – reddit will soon support focused, private and semi-private reddits. I think this is important for orgs wanting to use del.icio.us except for the “public-ness” of it. We might see retooling of del.icio.us tools to support reddit if it takes off.
- Zookoda – An interesting looking (free) service – from what I can tell it takes an RSS feed and sends HTML email updates on that basis. Great for promoting your blog or creating quick email newsletters for your organisation. Will need to look into it some more…
(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed between 19-Jan-2008 and 23-Jan-2008.)