How to create a mobile friendly email

In May we shared the second infographic in this post from Email Monks which summarises the importance of creating mobile responsive Email designs.

In September Litmus published another infographic on responsive email design. We thought this was well worth sharing also since it adds to the first with a technical explanation of  How to Create a responsive email design with a code sample.  

Email Monks infographic on Mobile Friendly Emails will walk you through the importance of adapting responsive mobile email design techniques in 2013. 

With 43% of the people now reading and responding to emails through mobiles and 97% just viewing their emails once, it is high time marketers should use responsive mobile email design and coding techniques to stop providing bad experience to more than 50% of the email subscribers.

Email Monks code mobile friendly responsive…

Ideas to trigger an emotional response from your campaigns

The use of psychology in email marketing is often not at the front of many Marketers’ minds. This fascinates me since we’re so used to seeing the effects of overtly psychological marketing everywhere else we look; on TV, the radio and on public transport. It’s become part of the scenery of our daily lives. Why then is such an effective factor often overlooked when it comes to designing emails? Surely we should be doing all that we can to engage with people?

An important factor to consider is that everything we send to recipients will generate an automatic emotional response; be it positive or negative, large or small. The reason for this is because of the way our brains are wired.

We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis that it would be impossible for us to make a fully…

Five key takeaways from new email marketing research

It's the Holy Grail of subject lines, the El Dorado of email marketing...the one word that tugs magically at the heartstrings, calling siren-like to the customer to claim that click. And it doesn't exist. The right word(s) for a subject line depend heavily on the unique context: what you send, to whom and to what purpose. That's why experts urge you to test for yourself. Intuition, experience and benchmark studies can only take you so far. But...subject line research does help give direction to your efforts. Adestra just released a fascinating study which looked at over 2 billion emails to find correlations between certain keywords in subject lines and campaign response rates. The infographic is below, followed by my key takeaways. Don't take the results at face value, of course. Context matters. But at the least, the study gives you ideas for what you might test. …

When to use specific subject lines (and when not)

The more people open your email, the better. So your subject line should go for maximum opens, right? Probably not, actually. Here's why...

First, take a look at your email list. Don't they look happy?

You're going to send out a standalone promotion for Widgets. The red people may want to buy one. The blue ones have no interest.

(The orange one is a competitor monitoring your emails. And the green one is an email marketer collecting creative for her swipe file.)

Should you use a specific or more general, inclusive subject line? Here's what others say:

Claude C. Hopkins wrote in Scientific Advertising in 1923 (yes, 1923!):

"Address the people you seek, and them only"

In their seminal 2008 study of subject line length Alchemy Worx concluded (my emphasis):

"Getting more people for whom the message is relevant to open the email requires a subject…

The Truth about Video Email Marketing

Look in your email inbox, and on any given day you’re likely to find several emails that feature videos. They can range from informational, educational to simply entertaining. But what is all the fuss about? Does video email marketing really lift response rates? Can anyone use video in their email marketing? What are the best tactics (or best practices for that matter)? Let’s find out!.

Video Email Marketing Statistics and Reports

Simply including the word 'video' in an email’s subject line saw an increase of 7%-13% in overall click-through rates (CTRs) in 2011, according to Experian’s 2012 Digital Marketer Benchmark and Trend Report. Embedding a video in an email generated an average conversion rate 21% higher than emails containing a static image alone. And Videoretailer.org reported that using the word 'video' in the subject line…

8 hacks for common email tasks

In the spirit of working smarter, not harder, here are eight tools that can maximize your email marketing efficiency.

1. Scope - Go behind-the-scenes of an inspiring email

Have you ever wondered how that beautiful email in your inbox got so beautiful? Scope creates a web-based version of any email you choose and reveals its HTML source code, mobile rendering, and desktop and plain-text views.

The free tool, created by the email marketers at Litmus, comes as a bookmarklet and works inside supported email clients like Gmail. Open an email, click the Scope button in your bookmark bar, and start inspecting.

2. Premailer - Convert HTML design to email-ready inline CSS

The retro nature of email design—heavy on tables, blind to external…

Tips to create an effective email template... from header to footer

Here's a useful infographic for Email marketers from Email template designers Email Monks. My favourite infographics prompt us to think "how can we do this better"? While this covers the obvious such as Subject lines and blocked images, I like the way it covers some of the less well known details that we cover in our Email guides and course such as pre-headers, Johnson boxes and an ideal email template width of 500 to 650 pixels. If you found this useful, you may also want to check out our hub page on email creative and copywriting for more advice. …

The value of setting, meeting and changing subscriber expectations

If at first you don't succeed, lower your expectations... It's the secret to a happy life. And one of the (seemingly hundreds) of secrets to email marketing success is guiding and accounting for subscriber expectations. A problem here is that marketers and customers are not always on the same page. A recent survey by RegReady, for example, found that 80% of consumers felt very strongly that making a purchase does not constitute permission to market to them via email. Yet 47% of marketers were sending emails to purchasers without this permission. Marketers and consumers are "digitally different". Research by ExactTarget discovered, for example, that 61% of marketers follow at least one brand on Twitter, but only 12% of consumers do so. We live in a different world and our understanding of consumers is…

Plus 5 things The Hobbit can teach us about email marketing

This is the time of year when we bloggers sit down to write about all the exciting developments and innovations expected over the next 12 months. You know, those game-changing technologies and trends that will represent the "2013 Email Challenge". It's either that or write about "5 things The Hobbit can teach us about email marketing". Actually, there are a few things the hobbit can teach us, here you go: Build anticipation Maintain interest with a multipart content series Don't try to appeal to everyone (you can't and you don't want to anyway) Sometimes longer is better...and sometimes it isn't Use new technology as a tool, not as an end in itself Anyway, hot trends and innovations are important, but there are basic, less glamorous tasks that need taking care of, too. Perhaps what is most important is things that aren't…

5 tips for better marketing copy

Most articles about writing marketing emails look at calls to action, paragraph length and similar. All important of course. But the process of developing text that moves the reader to the right action or thought is not just about the actual writing. It's also about creating the ideal environment for people to write good copy. So how do you help those people do a better job? (At this point, email copywriters like me will simply suggest you pay them more - just kidding). Here a few personal tips that I've found help.

1. Provide the right framework

You wouldn't expect an architect to build you the right house with no more information than "I need a house". So it is with an email copywriter. They need a briefing that goes beyond simply stating what text elements you want written. The more contextual information you provide about the whos, whys and whats of…