Articles/Tips Archives

Do your readers understand your terminology?

Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 24, 2008 2:18 PM

We web designers and developers can easily forget how much of our day to day language is incomprehensible to outsiders who don't know their AJAX from their Jif. Over time, we tend to develop ways of talking to our clients that they can actually understand, which is great.

However, there are other areas where industry specific jargon can creep in without being noticed. One such spot is in our MailBuild templates. Not so much in the technical construction of the templates, which are intended for clients, but more in the labelling used, which is aimed at your client's subscribers.

For example: You know what a web version is, and your client might know, but their readers? Probably not. Instead of using the actual phase web version in your template, why not describe what it actually is. "If you can't read this email, view it on the web".

There are other spots you might want to work on. Do email readers understand what "unsubscribing" actually means? Could you be clearer perhaps: "If you are no longer interested in these emails, unsubscribe now and you will not get any more."

Once you've sorted out your templates, you can work on your language when explaining things to your client. Do they know what an open rate actually is? Have you helped them understand what bounces are? These are useful terms that can be easily glossed over.

You may already do this of course, which is great! Now all you need to worry about is your clients using their own jargon that the readers don't understand!

1 comments so far

What's the latest CSS support in email clients?

Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 12, 2008 11:55 AM

Over at Campaign Monitor we've posted our 2008 update to our testing of CSS support in email clients. There's been no Outlook 2007 style shocks this year, but we have seen some changes worth noticing.

There's now 21 different sets of test results covering both desktop and web based email clients. This information will definitely come in handy when deciding how to construct your templates.

Visit http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css for the full report, including downloadable PDF and web versions. Thanks to Freshview community and support guy Travis for putting together this big update.

0 comments so far

Getting subscribers to 'whitelist' your emails

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 12, 2008 2:32 PM

One relatively simple way to reduce the number of your emails (or your client's emails) ending up in spam folders is to ask them to whitelist your 'from' address or newsletter name.

Many email clients will not mark as spam emails from people who are in the users address book, or on their whitelist, or are otherwise 'known senders' of valid email. However, with so many different email clients out there, it can be tricky to know what instructions to provide for readers to put you onto their safe lists.

We recently discovered, via a comment on the Campaign Monitor gallery a simple online tool that will generate for you a single HTML page of instructions specific to your own sending address and newsletter details. You just fill in a short form, and you get back a full page that lists instructions for major email client, spam filters and ISPs.

From Chris Lang, the tool is called the Whitelist Email Instructions Generator. To get an idea of what it is about, see Chris's example generated whitelist page.

You can create your own, and then just grab the resulting HTML and paste it into your own site somewhere. Then link to it from the head or foot of your emails, or include it in your clients templates for them.

It's a smart tool that will save you a lot of time compared to working all this out yourself. Well done Chris!

Visit the Whitelist Email Instructions Generator.

1 comments so far

Help your clients use MailBuild more often

Posted by Mathew Patterson on April 22, 2008 10:01 AM

Often MailBuild users create one or two major templates for each client - perhaps the standard monthly newsletter template, and maybe an announcement format. That will meet most of their needs for email marketing.

However, if you would like to provide more value to your clients, and give yourself the opportunity to get some additional income from either template production charges or an increased number of campaigns, think about offering some more specialized templates.

What do we mean by 'specialized'? The idea is to think about ways that your clients can use email marketing outside of their normal practices. That might mean a special '10% off sale' campaign, or a special offer to their top customers.

If you can come up with these ideas for them, and then provide custom templates to suit those campaigns, you can help your client increase their business, and increase your own billing income too.

Here's a couple of examples to get you started:

• A "10% off" sale
  You could create a template that is very much focused on a single idea - it would be designed differently than a normal newsletter template, perhaps with a 'sale!' badge or banner and an image header that focuses on the savings.
  
  Design it so that there is a repeater for some of the top discounted items, and make sure the email has big 'call to action' buttons at the end.
• A 'Forward to a Friend' focused template
  You could combine this with a discount voucher offer, and create a template that your clients can send that really focuses on encouraging people to forward it to their friends. Also, make sure the email links prominently to a subscribe form, so that your client can build their list.
• Favourite customers
  Encourage your clients to send a special email to their top customers or most frequent readers. Help them use custom fields and segments to create a list of those top customers they can send to, and give them a special template that is designed to make those customers feel special.
  
  Think about how you would design for people who know your client's brand well, as opposed to people who might be just new. How would the wording change? Perhaps the logo is not as important for those people?

If you can come up with some smart ideas to help your clients get more value from their email lists, they will love you for it, and you may end up benefiting directly from their increased sending.

I'm sure you can come up with something even smarter for your clients, and we'd love to hear about it in the comments!

2 comments so far

Ruby wrapper for the MailBuild API

Posted by David Greiner on February 27, 2008 9:49 AM

This post probably isn't relevant to most of you guys, but if you're interested in things like API wrappers and wsdlDrivers, then read on.

I just caught this great post from MailBuild customer Barry Hess on calling our Subscriber.AddWithCustomFields method via our API. Barry was generous enough to share his hard work in creating a Ruby wrapper for adding subscribers to a list, including custom fields support. On top of this, he also provides some great links for those interested in mastering the use of SOAP service in Ruby. Check out the post.

A big thanks to Barry for sharing all his hard work.

0 comments so far

It's 10 O'clock - do you know where your client is?

Posted by Mathew Patterson on October 18, 2007 3:53 PM

Without wanting to take on the alarmist tone of those commercials, it is important for you as the MailBuild account owner to keep an eye on what your clients are getting up to in your account.

First off, it's just good business. If you know what your client is sending, and who they are sending it to, you can make suggestions to them about new templates they could use, or smarter segmenting that could improve their results. It's good for them, and good for you if they get more value from their emails.

Secondly, you are responsible for making sure your clients are only sending to people they have permission to email. If you don't take on that responsibility, then spam complaints can result in the closure of your whole account. Of course, we understand that in some cases you do your best to explain permission and require reminders and things still go wrong.

Don't forget our permission handouts which are great to give to new clients.

We've got some ideas about ways to make it easier for you to get an overview of what your clients have been doing, but we'd love to get your ideas too. Leave us a comment about the kind of client related information you'd like to see made more accessible.

4 comments so far

An easier way to do inline styles

Posted by Mathew Patterson on October 4, 2007 2:46 PM

Any designer who has been sending HTML knows the annoyance of dealing with email clients like Gmail that strip out CSS from the head of the email. To get around it you need to painstakingly add inline styles to each element.

That can be very time consuming, especially if you need to go back and change a style in many places. Fortunately, super smart Campaign Monitor customer Alex Duane has developed a useful script that takes your page from a URL, strips the CSS from the head and automatically produces a version with those styles inline.

Not only that, but it also checks your styles against our guide to CSS support and lets you know about possible issues. It doesn't handle every stylesheet, and MailBuild tags can cause issues, so it is best used as a step between your initial HTML and CSS design and adding the MailBuild tags.

Check out premailer and see how it can save you some time.

1 comments so far

Broaden your email marketing knowledge

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 22, 2007 4:16 PM

If you are a web designer encouraging your clients to send email newsletters, it helps to have more than a technical understanding of email marketing. The web is full of fantastic resources to help you learn about the best way to use email newsletters to grow your business, and your client's businesses.

The more advice you can offer your clients, the more valuable you will be to them (and the more you can charge!). We've collected a few of our favourite blogs and sites here for you to check out.

• BeRelevant — Tamara Gielen's excellent blog on email best practices
• Email Marketing Voodoo — constantly posts great advice and links to research
• Email marketing reports — Mark Brownlow provides great articles, reviews and links
• Marketing Sherpa — A fantastic collection of articles & research in their email category

Dig into these resources and you will soon be able to help your clients get better results out of their email newsletters. If you have another favourite, let us know by leaving a comment.

1 comments so far

Designing with the table of contents tag

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 15, 2007 1:54 PM

When you use a repeater element in your templates, you can also make use of our <tableofcontents></tableofcontents> tag to pull out the title of each item in the repeater, and link it to the full item below.

You can wrap the <$repeatertitle$> in a list, or paragraph tags, or whatever works for your needs. We've seen some excellent designs that make use of the table of contents tag, and we wanted to highlight just a few, as some inspiration for next time you are working on a template.

Single column

This is the basic vertical list format, heading the contents column. It helps your readers get a quick overview of the contents, and jump to what they are interested in.

Horizontally styled

If you have a fixed number of articles, a horizontal layout like this can make the design look really well finished and professional.

Integrated into the header

Getting the contents high up in the preview window can grab the readers attention in the brief time available.

Styled list

Visually tying the table of contents into the design of the email as a whole is great for consistency and branding.

Have you done anything interesting with your table of contents? Leave us a comment below.

0 comments so far

Nailing your client's welcome email to their subscribers

Posted by David Greiner on August 7, 2007 10:36 PM

For every subscriber list in your client's account, you can set a plain text welcome email to be sent to any subscribers the instant they sign up. This can be an incredibly important part of the subscribe process and is a great way to get your client's email marketing off on the right foot.

I just came across a great new series of insights over at the Email Experience Council from a range of industry experts on this exact topic. The prevailing piece of advice is to make sure you set clear expectations about exactly what the subscriber should be expecting off your client in the future. It's a valuable read and one that should motivate you to revisit the current welcome emails you've set up for your clients, if any.

Related: 9 steps to better welcome emails for new subscribers on the Campaign Monitor blog.

4 comments so far

Template help: CSS Support in Email for 2007

Posted by David Greiner on April 20, 2007 11:06 AM

Last night I published our annual guide to the state of CSS support in all the popular email clients out there. This resource should come in pretty handy when designing your MailBuild templates. I've included Outlook 2007 in this year's test suite with some fairly disappointing results.

The big takeaway from the article is that CSS based layouts are getting harder to justify for your clients sending B2B emails. Even if you're creating table-based templates with a dash of CSS, it's still worth making sure those CSS properties have decent support across your target email environments. Head over to the Campaign Monitor blog to check it out.

0 comments so far

Permission guidelines for your clients

Posted by Mathew Patterson on March 15, 2007 12:42 PM

If you have setup your clients on MailBuild, you are responsible for the email campaigns that they send out under your account. Part of that responsibility is to educate your clients about who they should and should not send emails to.

To help you do that, we've created a simple one page handout that covers the main guidelines for deciding if a subscriber list is really permission based or not. You can go through this with your clients, and give them a copy to refer to.

As well as the guidelines, we've included a version that has an area for your clients to sign off. Both are available in Word and PDF formats for ease of branding.

You'll find these in our updated resources section, along with a bunch of other useful articles. Please leave a comment if this is something you find helpful, or if you have other requests for materials like this.

4 comments so far

Emails for all occasions

Posted by Mathew Patterson on March 6, 2007 4:10 PM

A lot of the email campaigns we see going through MailBuild are traditional newsletters, normally fortnightly or monthly updates on what groups or businesses are up to.

These are valuable and effective tools, and there are some really great ones out there. However, there a whole slew of other possibilities for email marketing that you might like to consider for your clients.

What about designing an attractive invitation template that your clients can use to invite special customers to an event? Or an announcement format for them to send out with the introduction of a new product?

You can check out some other types of email marketing in our latest resources article. We've actually revamped the whole MailBuild resources section recently, and added a bunch of articles to help you expand and improve your email marketing services.

Here are some highlights:

• 4 reasons why web designers should offer email marketing as a service to their clients
• Ideas you can use when pitching to your clients
• How to charge for email marketing

We'd love to get your feedback. Is there anything else that would help you grow your business? Leave a comment below and let us know.

2 comments so far

Feature Spotlight: Adding sent campaigns to your client's site

Posted by Mathew Patterson on January 2, 2007 5:04 PM

If your clients are sending newsletters filled with useful and informative information, they may want to offer past newsletters as a resource to their customers, and as a tool to build their profile.

MailBuild makes it easy for you to help your clients to display sent campaigns on their own website, with minimal technical knowledge required. Here's how you do it:

1. Log in to your MailBuild account
2. Select the client you want to work with
3. Click the 'Client Settings Tab' in the far right
4. Follow the link to 'Add sent campaigns to this client's site' in the right column

On that page, you can see the two parts: The display options, and the html code. Configure the display options to show some or all past newsletters, in ascending or descending order, and using html lists or paragaphs.

Make sure you hit 'Generate the Code' after you change any option so you get the correct HTML. Once you are happy, copy the HTML code from the textbox and paste it into any page on your client's website for an instant newsletter archive.

Your clients could use the archive in multiple places on their site. They may want to link to just the latest newsletter from their homepage, but have a full archive list deeper in the site. They may even like to offer a limited set (say the last 5) to casual browsers, but offer the full archive as a benefit only to subscribers from a password protected page.

Generate as many display variations as you like, and paste the resulting code into the appropriate pages. Newsletter archives are also a great way to display your client's expertise in their field.

If your clients are using archives in an interesting way, or have seen success with them, leave a comment below and let us know.

7 comments so far

Tip for avoiding image compression

Posted by David Greiner on December 22, 2006 12:17 PM

If your clients are sending campaigns that include photos or other large images, here's a quick tip to improve the visual quality. MailBuild will automatically resize images to match them to the width that is set in the template.

We do a pretty good job of scaling images down, but as an automatic process, it is not always ideal. If you know that you want to use particular images, you can get better results by doing the resampling and scaling yourself. Then add the image at the correct size and avoid any compression from MailBuild.

When you need your images to look their best, custom resizing is the way to go.

2 comments so far

Tip: Adding a MailBuild opt-in checkbox to an existing form

Posted by David Greiner on December 15, 2006 12:06 PM

Integrating a subscribe mechanism into an existing form for yourself or a client is a great way to attract new subscribers. For example, you might want to let people join your newsletter when they complete your contact form, or purchase something from a client's web site.

By following a few simple steps, you can easily add an opt-in checkbox to any form and hook it directly into your MailBuild list. For the advanced users out there that this is a no-brainer for, I'd recommend using the API. For the rest of us who don't do a lot of server-side work, there's another approach we can take using some simple redirects.

For this example, let's say you have a contact form on your client's site, like the following:

Now, let's jazz it up with an unchecked opt-in to join this client's monthly email newsletter list.

Now that the form has an opt-in option available, we need make a few changes to what happens after the form is submitted.

1. Get the address you should be redirecting to

   Head into the subscriber list you'd like to integrate into this form in your account and click on "Add a subscribe form to my site". In the supplied HTML code, you'll notice a URL for the action= address like http://clientname.createsenddotcom/t/1/s/d/. Copy that address.

2. Modify your existing form code

   Normally when you process a form, you'll redirect the user to a confirmation or thank-you page after all the processing is done (like generating an email for our example). Add a check to make sure someone has checked your list opt-in checkbox. If they have, we want to redirect them to the address specified above instead of the usual thank-you page.

3. Add the new subscriber's email address and name (optional) to the address of the page we're redirecting to

   The first thing we need to do is grab the corresponding element name from our form for email address. So, if our email input is <input type="text" name="mb-d-d" id="mb-d-d" />, it's the mb-d-d that we're after.

   Next, we add these values to the redirect URL by adding a question mark (?) followed by mb-d-d= their email address &mb-name= their name.

   The full address should look something like:
   http://clientname.createsenddotcom/t/1/s/d/?mb-d-d=name@domain.com&mb-name=Ben+Richardson

4. Set a subscribe confirmation page in your MailBuild account

   We can now redirect them back to the same old thank-you page that we always use, so just copy and paste that address into the "Subscribe Confirmation Page" for that list in the "Add a subscribe form to my site" we copied the address from. This will ensure they'll be silently redirected back to your own confirmation page after the subscriber is added to this client's list.

One last important thing to note is that these redirects will happen extremely fast and be transparent to your subscribers.

15 comments so far

Tip: Combining first and last name in Excel

Posted by David Greiner on November 17, 2006 11:44 AM

Because MailBuild doesn't support custom fields right now and we only offer a single field for subscriber name, some of you guys are having problems importing from files that split first and last names into separate fields.

While we still allow you to personalize your emails with first name, last name and full name, you'll need to combine these 2 fields into a single one before importing it into your account. This can actually be done very easily in Excel using the following formula:

=CONCATENATE(A2," ",B2)

Where A2 is the first name and B2 is the last name. I've also included a sample file of this formula in action that you can easily copy and paste into your own file before importing.

Custom fields support is the next feature on our list after the billing update, but this technique will get you there in the mean time.

5 comments so far

Applying specific styles to user entered content

Posted by David Greiner on September 11, 2006 5:42 PM

As we pointed out recently, MailBuild ensures any content entered by your clients is converted to clean and standards compliant <p> paragraph tags. This means that even if you apply a style to an editable area using CSS, such as:

<p class="introduction"><$description$></p>

As soon as your client starts adding their own content, we'll end up with the code below and lose our paragraph-specific formatting:

<p class="introduction"><p>Your client's content goes here></p></p>

Joey Marchy, a customer of ours has written up a simple approach on how to do avoid this problem with a slightly different approach to how you structure your templates. Most of the time these different paragraphs will be in different DIV's or table cells, so it's really just a matter of formatting your paragraphs via these containers as opposed to the paragraphs themselves. Cheers Joey.

5 comments so far