One interesting facet of email marketing is holding contests—this isn’t exactly a novel idea anymore, but it can add interest and involve your customers.  But if you decide to run a contest, beware of how you post the winners!  Some sites have opted for using a mix of email marketing and other media such as Facebook and Twitter.  If you decide to post pictures of your contest winners in your emails, beware of the pictures you choose to use.  Don’t use pictures that make your winners look bad.  They probably won’t appreciate it, and it won’t exactly make you look like you have a respectable customer base.  And if you don’t have their picture, request it from them—don’t post a default image.  It’s better to request pictures up front from your contestants and let them know that you’ll be putting them in your email.  You’re more likely to get decent pictures that way.  If you decide not to go with pictures, a clever logo or design can be just as creative.  Remember, your customers have used your business and are participating, so do them a favor and present them in the best possible light.

This month we will focus on some simple rules to follow for email marketing compliance, delivery, and the respect of your readers.  Also, make your emails pop with our Spring Fever Sale…details at the bottom of this email (ends April 1st)!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/March/index.html

While doing an email testing for one of clients, we realize that Google’s Gmail no longer supports paragraph as it meant to be. If you were to use paragraph tag (<p></p>), as you should, Gmail seems to ignore them.

Looking at the sample email above, you can see that Gmail is ignoring the paragraph spacing. We hope this is just a temporary bug and Google will resolve them soon but for now, to workaround this issue, we have to declare a paragraph style, margin height to be specific on every paragraph tag:-

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
p {
margin-bottom: 16px;
}
–>
</style>

<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the first paragraph</p>
<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the second paragraph</p>
<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the third paragraph </p>

You can decide on the amount of spacing you want between your paragraph. For this sample we set it to 16px. Once you have done that, Gmail will start showing your paragraph correctly.

We have tested this with other email clients to ensure that adding margin height does not cause any issue and the good news is, it doesn’t. Below are the list of email clients we tested on:-

1. Gmail (Older version)
2. Live Hotmail
3. Yahoo! Mail
4. Outlook 2000
5. Outlook 2002/XP
6. Outlook 2003
7. Outlook 2007
8. Lotus Notes 6.5
9. Lotus Notes 7
10. Lotus Notes 8
11. Apple Mail 2.1
12. Mobile Me
13. Apple Mail 3
14. Gmail
15. Yahoo! Mail Classic
16. Thunderbird 2.0
17. Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 2

If you have a better way of handling this issue or if you know of any other issues on Gmail and have found ways to resolve it, please share them with us.

One of the most common reasons our customers get in touch with our support team has got to do with problems in using images in their campaigns. In this blog, I highlight some of the common pitfalls (and questions) about using images and show how you can avoid them.

What is a good file name to use?

To ensure all your images can be viewed correctly across different email clients and web-based email clients, you must be careful of how you name your image files.  All files should be named without any empty spaces or non-ASCII characters.  This means “my image.gif” is out, and “my_image.gif” or “my-image.gif” should be used instead.

In eConnect Email, we now automatically replace all spaces with underscores “_” in your image filename when you upload via the built-in file manager, so you don’t have to worry about spaces in your filenames anymore.  However, you should still take note to avoid using non-ASCII characters (such as accented characters like “á” and “ë”) in your filenames to ensure compatibility across platforms.

Always remember to check your campaigns before sending them out.  Make use of the built-in test sending function in eConnect Email to email yourselves to see how your campaigns render in different email clients.  After all, it’s free and you can send as many times as you want, until you are satisfied with the results.

What about the supported image formats?
Do not use other image formats other than GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPG (developed by Joint Photographic Experts Group).  PNG might work on your browser but it is not supported on email clients so never use PNG format for your newsletters.

What is the acceptable file size for my image?
This really depends on the number of images you have in your newsletter.  If you are only using one image in your newsletter, you might get away with 25KB in file size.  But if you have more images, you must remember that all of them contribute to the overall size of your newsletter, and this could pose a problem.  As much as possible, keep the number of images used to a minimum, and make sure each image is optimized to the lowest file size possible (without sacrificing too much on the quality of the image, of course.)

What’s a good rule of thumb?  If your image contains a line drawing (such as in the case of illustrations) or text or big blocks of single colors, the best format to use is the GIF format.  Images using the GIF format can be saved in a maximum of 256 colors but the best compromise would be 128 colors where you will get reasonably low file size with good image quality.  If the image contains only one solid color for the image file, 64 colors would be good enough.  You may not see much difference in file size between 128 and 64 colors but since every kilobyte counts, your newsletter will be less bloated and your subscribers will thank you for it.

Saved in GIF format. File size: 2.78 KB

Saved in JPG format. File size: 17.1 KB

For photographs and images with gradient effects, you should save them in JPG format.  Using this format, images are compressed in terms of percentages.  The recommended compression percentage is 60%, but feel free to experiment with compression percentages as far as 80%, because your mileage may vary depending on the actual content of your image.

Saved in JPG format with 60% compression. File size 20.2 KB

Saved in GIF format with 128 colors. File size 29 KB

Finally, this is the tricky part for most of you.  If you have a photograph with text on top of it, what is the best format to use?  I would recommend using JPG format and experiment with the compression percentage.  Do note that lower compression percentages will usually cause bubble-like artifacts to appear around the text, so do opt for the lowest compression percentage that you can go before these artifacts start showing up.

If you are planing to use animation, the only format you can use is the GIF format.  Do not try to create an animation in Flash (.swf – even though Flash animation gives you smaller file size comparing to GIF format animation) and embed them in your newsletter.  It will most likely get blocked and will not reach your intended recipients.  Finally, unless you are sending your newsletter for printing, always work on a 72 dpi resolutions and not 150 dpi or higher.  If you are sending your newsletter for printing, consider creating a web version of your newsletter just dedicated for this instead, and still use only lower resolution images for your actual newsletter.

We are currently busy working on new updates for eConnect Email.  Some of the updates are on our new Preference Center, reports (which we hope will WOW everyone) and a few other smaller updates.  But I’m excited to share with you 4 new templates designed by our team.

They have been tested to display correctly on email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail and web mail clients like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Live, Gmail (with background images showing nicely!) and more.  The one exception being Lotus Notes (versions 6 and 7) for which the rendering will not be perfect but your recipients should not have any problems reading the contents.

Here are a few preview screenshots.  These templates and a few others will be available to you real soon.

Template 1 (comes in 3 versions: left, right and one column)

Template 2 (comes in 3 versions: left, right and one column)

Template 3 (comes in 2 versions: Weekly Newsletter and Monthly Newsletter header)

Template 4 (only one version, good for e-commerce sites)

Ok, let’s get this sorted quickly.  The answer is simply no.  Online video has been the new kid on the marketing block for quite some time, with companies big and small jumping in with some form of video marketing.

Recently, Goodmail, a third-party reputation services provider (RSP), was talking about allowing email marketers to deliver their email with embedded video, for a price.  Sounds like a cool idea but I don’t know if that is going to work, unless they can convince not only the email clients and web-based email developers, but also the anti-virus, anti-spam and a load of other security developers to accept these embedded codes in email.  For now, it looks more like a dream to me, but hey, with the WWW, you never know.

But back to me saying “No video”.  That doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with your newsletters.  I’ve seen newsletters that have included a screenshot of a video that is linked to the actual video, so when recipients click on the screenshot, it will open up their browser and load the video. Smart move!

You could go further by animating a few frames from the actual video and saving it as a GIF animation (watch your file size though).  This would give your recipients a brief (and I really mean brief) preview of the video.  But it’s enough to do the job.