MindComet

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

Fix for Gmail Image Rendering Issues

Gmail has recently changed the way they interpret and display code. Most noticeably, this has caused a number of emails to render incorrectly. The broken Gmail emails are suffering from the same symptoms—horizontal lines between rows of images—Hotmail was encountering recently. Find my post about that issue here.

The same fix that applied to the Hotmail issue also applies here. Simply include img {display: block;} inbetween the style tags of your email and that should do the trick. If you want to be even more thorough, you can apply the same bit of code inline. Example:

<img src="images/header.jpg" style="display: block;" />

If there are any other ways of fixing this issue, please comment your findings below!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 17, 2010

SEO Tip For Your Email Marketing Campaign

Sure, you always post a link in the preheader pointing to a webpage-version of your email. It’s a best practice that everyone adheres to. But more important than the inclusion of the link is where that link is hosted. I’m sure the ESP you’re using hosts it for you, right? Right. Well, if you want to add some SEO value to your website, you may want to reconsider letting your ESP host your newsletters and just host it yourself.

Last week, Blue Sky Factory posted a very clever idea regarding SEO, traffic and your email campaigns. If you’re including links in your email that drive users to your site, why would you deviate the flow of traffic with a link to your email hosted somewhere other than your site? It takes literally seconds to host a new .html file on your site (if you have ftp access, that is). If you want that added traffic juice, don’t take the easy way out with your ESP’s hosting service. Host the email yourself on your own site.

And while you’re at it, you might as well link to these newsletters as a means to preview what potential subscribers will get if they sign up. Just a thought.

More on this can be found at the Blue Sky Factory blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 10, 2010

Outlook 2010 - The Inevitable Letdown

Apparently the fixoutlook.org campaign was “too little, too late”. When the campaign hit it’s stride and Microsoft took notice, they had unfortunately already begun developing the next version of Outlook: Outlook 2010. And with the development of their new email client comes the same glaring issue all email marketers find so abhorrent: using the Word engine to display their emails.

Dave Grenier from CampaignMonitor has been pivotal in putting this on Microsoft’s radar in the first place. He’s had direct correspondence with Microsoft’s development team for some time now and reported the following from them:

“At this point, our plans for email authoring and rendering in Outlook 2010 are unchanged. However, I can tell you that this is a significant topic of discussion as we plan our business going forward, and something we will definitely be thinking about for future releases of Outlook.“

The highly-regarded testing service, Litmus, had access to test the Beta version of Outlook 2010 and have posted their results here. Needless to say, they’re not surprising and are more or less in-line with what we’ve come to expect from Outlook.

So hopefully by 2013, Microsoft will release another email client—this time using a significantly better rendering engine thus allowing for elements such as background images to render correctly… Emphasis on “hopefully”.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Mar. 30, 2010