MindComet

Outlook 2007 Can Now Render Background Images

For the past 3 years, designers and marketers alike have been trained to avoid implementing background images into their email’s designs. This was due to Outlook 2007’s inability to display such images. We all just kinda accepted Outlook’s faults and our collective emails designs were held back. But, alas, we will be deprived no more!

It has recently been discovered by a user of CampaignMonitor that background images can indeed display in Outlook 2007! But not without some hacking, of course.

First you have to add xmlns:v=“urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml” to your html tag.

Secondly, within your style tag, add the following selector:

v\:* {
  behavior: url(#default#VML);
  display:inline-block;

Then, within your table cell, you must add:

<td width="600" height="402" valign="top" bgcolor="#000000" background="images/yourimage.gif">
  <!—[if gte mso 9]>
  <v:image id="image" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:1;' src="images/yourimage.gif"/>
  <v:shape id="text" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:2;'>
  <![endif]—>
  <p align="center" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#ffffff; font-size:18px;">This is the text in front of the background image.</p>

<!—[if gte mso 9]>
  </v:shape>
  <![endif]—>

Believe it or not, the combination of the steps above allows for background images to render in Outlook 2007. Try it out yourself. I'll be testing this all day today, if I come up with any issues, I'll be sure to update this post. If you find anything, please share them and comment below or on the original thread at Campaign Monitor.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 15, 2010

Is AskMen.com Coming On Too Strong?

As an email marketer, I am all about getting as much subscriber information as possible. Knowing who they are and knowing what is relevant to them is invaluable. Having this information makes for an ideal relationship for both the marketer and the subscriber.

But how exactly are you supposed to go about getting this information? Do you ask for as much personal and lifestyle information as possible up front? Or do you take a more lengthy approach, collecting data through responses and activity over time?

AskMen.com believes in the former.

When signing up for their newsletter, you’re given a series of options that are presented in a 4-step process.

The first step being the “List City Guides” step. Mainly, there is a pre-selected opt-in to their newsletter , the “A. List”, which covers everything “guys need to know” about. They also set expectations informing users that it arrives every Wednesday. Nicely done.

In addition to opting in to receive their general newsletter, it provides the opportunity to sign up for newsletters based on a major US, Canadian, UK or Australian city. I’m assuming this comes in handy whenever AskMen is sponsoring an event in that particular city or when a they have a lot of editorial or user-submitted content for a specific area.

The second page consists of more general demographic info—name, sex, zip, etc. The usual suspects. It also provides an option to receive BlackBerry text versions of the newsletter. Smart move, as I’d imagine a large portion of AskMen.com’s potential subscribers probably use BlackBerrys.

The third page consists of an arbitrary refer-a-friend step, which is where AskMen.com loses focus. There is no incentive for the new subscriber to invite their friends to a newsletter that they have not yet received. It comes off as being a little greedy, but I give them an A for effort.

Finally is a sports-centric page with the opportunity to sign up for newsletters on all of the major american sports.

Once this process is complete, they know what city you live in (or near), general demographic info, if you’re using a BlackBerry, who your 5 closest friends are and what your favorite sports are… and they know all of this off the bat.

So is this method of data collection overkill? Does it turn potential subscribers off from signing up? Or is it best to collect this information upon sign up and get it out of the way?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 14, 2010

The EEC Spearhead Metric Standardization

Since the inception of email marketing, professionals have struggled to come together and agree upon a means of determining metrics. Believe it or not, there have yet to be any standards put in place.

The landscape of determining email metrics have largely consisted of rogue marketers and independent states, determining their own specific way of measuring the results for their emails.

But this is all about to change. The EEC (Email Experience Council) is stepping up and facing this problem head on by proposing industry-wide standards for metrics. The EEC has created a group of leaders in the email marketing industry, dubbed the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable. The group is focusing on ESPs (Email Service Providers) to join the movement, as they are the ones who will be implementing the reporting standards in the future.

For more information on the S.A.M.E. (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) project, visit the EEC’s site. Once there, you should review the particularly interesting Project Guide PDF. Pay close attention to the ESP Reporting Matrix in that document… Out of 10 ESPs, each determined Delivery, Opens and Clicks differently—no wonder there’s such a huge need for standardization.

I can predict that if this gets momentum on the ESP side of things, there are going to be huge changes in email marketing. New terms and definitions popping up, completely transforming the ideas of success and failure. Hopefully for the whole, the growing pains won’t take too long to leapfrog.

MindComet will be in full support of this initiative, adopting the new standards by December 2010.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 07, 2010

Arial Unicode MS: Your Safest Bet For Consistent Foreign Language Display

If you’ve ever had to manage and develop international email campaigns, you may know how frustrating getting the text to display consistently across all major email clients is. With multiple languages and their vast character sets, it’s difficult to find one font that can support so many foreign characters.

Recently, we have been developing email templates specifically for Chinese users. During testing, everything was going smooth until we began testing for Outlook ‘07 (no surprise there).

From troubleshooting and tweaking the code, we determined that if you’re going to code an email for Chinese users, make sure the text renders using the Arial Unicode MS font.

This is the most forgiving and widely-accepted font, especially for Chinese characters. It contains all of the characters, ideographs and symbols defined in the Unicode 2.1 standard. It is distributed with Microsoft Office, it is automatically installed with Vista and XP and is also bundled with OS X 10.5 and later. Unfortunately, it does not ship with Windows 7. You can find more on this on Microsoft’s Unicode Support Page.

Microsoft owns AUMS, which is no surprise why anything other than the sans-serif font would work in Outlook ‘07. Oh, and Outlook ‘07 is stupid and doesn’t know how to search for similar fonts unlike every other email client on the market. Just sayin’.

So if you’re sending out emails that are encoded for UTF-8 which use fonts other than AUMS, the likelihood that all of the characters will display is slim.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 01, 2010

Microsoft’s Hotmail Update: Social Media & SPAM-Centric

Microsoft recently unveiled a new look & feel to Hotmail including additional features focused on eliminating inbox clutter and social media. Here are a few key takeaways:

Hotmail Highlights:
This is a dashboard breaking down emails from your contacts, social networking sites, flagged emails and any upcoming events you’ve marked. They’re more or less built-in filters from the get-go. Nicely done.

Filters:
There are also filter tabs that sort out all of your inbox messages based on the criteria of the filter. On-the-fly sorting.

Categories / Quick Views:
Photos, Shipping Info, Documents. The most common emails sent to you will be sorted out automatically based on their contents.

Sweep:
Most importantly, Microsoft has implemented a “Sweep” feature that allows users to remove clutter from their main inbox. For email marketers, this means that your campaigns may suffer with Hotmail users.

Trusted Senders:
You can boil this down to being Microsoft’s equivalent to Goodmail. They pre-approve specific senders and IP addresses for users to ensure delivery, complete with a safety logo next to the subject line.

Their SPAM handling techniques are quite interesting, too. They’ve developed a way of sorting out legit email that you may have signed up for unintentionally (which they dub “graymail”) and actual SPAM, which they’re calling “SmartScreen”.

Most of the updates on the surface seem to be “too little too late” to covert a Gmail user, for instance. But the advances of the new Hotmail user experience as a whole makes the argument that email is further planting itself as the hub for all social communication online. Unfortunately, I don’t think these fundamental changes to Hotmail will go over well with their users, since they skew older and spend less time online. But nonetheless, it’s progress. It’s one step forward and not two steps back (*ehem* Outlook 2007, *ehem*).

There are more features listed on their preview page including Office and cloud storage implementation. It’s a definitive step in the right direction for Microsoft & Hotmail and I’m curious to see what they release next.

So what do you think this means for email marketing? If these features are widely adopted by Hotmail users will email campaigns of the future just be “swept” away, overlooked to never be opened again? I think it’s a definite possibility and one that deserves discussion. Comment below if you have any thoughts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 17, 2010

Thumbs Up / Down: Instant Segmentation Feedback

If you’re looking to easily segment your subscribers, try implementing “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons to your email campaigns.

What better way to provide users with relevant content than to ask them to ‘click here’ if they like the email and ‘click there’ if they don’t. It’s instant feedback which you can use to segment your users more effectively the next time around. Most ESPs can track which subscribers clicked on specific links. If your ESP doesn’t offer this, you should probably look into switching providers. This may also cut down on unsubscribe rates, as you will be continually delivering more relevant information to specific subscribers.

With each thumb, drive the user to a respective landing page simply stating that they will or will not receive emails with similar content. After 5 seconds, re-direct them to a landing page.

For more tips regarding a user-generated relevance rating system with your email campaigns, check out this Exact Target blog post.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 08, 2010

NHL Network Scores Big With Animated JPGs

As a means to promote their Stanley Cup coverage between the Blackhawks and Flyers, the NHL Network sent this beaut, leveraging one of the best animated GIFs JPGs I’ve seen in a long time.

Check out the whole email here

The only flaw to incorporating an animated GIF JPG this compelling is it’s size. The image is a whopping 6.3 MB. It includes roughly 90+ frames and runs for a little over 15 seconds, so it’s no wonder the file is so large. This may have caused huge deliverability issues in the long run, but it really all depends on their reputation with the major ISPs. Considering NHL’s size and overall output when it comes to email marketing, I’m sure they’re in good standing with most of the major providers.

Another thing to consider are mobile users. This email has a link specifically for mobile users (merely a text version of the same email), but most smartphone users still receive HTML messages by default. Most of these users are likely using their provider’s network and not WiFi. When forwarded this to my iPhone, I viewed it using the 3G network with a good signal and it took a little over one minute for the image to start animating. Maybe if the NHL cut back on the image’s length and ultimately it’s file size (at the same time being just as eye-catching), it would’ve been more effective for your average smartphone user.

So, if animated images are appealing to you and your marketing campaign, there are a few programs that will easily turn any video into an animated image—ideal for email:

SnagIt Video Capture

Debabelizer Pro

Find more information on video-to-image for email at Style Campaign’s blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 28, 2010