MindComet

YOU FIX

The Email Standards Project by way of Campaign Monitor is pleading with the developers at Microsoft. Microsoft are insisting on keeping the Word HTML rendering engine (most recently used with Outlook 2007) in place for their next release of a predictably disappointing and bloated email client, Outlook 2010.

For anyone who has designed and coded an email in the past three years knows how big a pain in the butt Outlook 2007 is to work with.  There has been an outcry from day one about it’s drawbacks, as it has done nothing to push the flexibility and growth of email forward.  It’s done quite the opposite, I’m afraid. For starters, it doesn’t allow background images and it has crap support for CSS. See Campaign Monitor’s example here:

Microsoft wants to continue their reign of mediocrity, and I for one, have had ENOUGH.

If you go to fixoutlook.org you can use your Twitter account to send a clear message to Microsoft:

“Wow! @msofficeus is breaking HTML email by using Word to display emails in Outlook 2010. See http://fixoutlook.org and RT”

The site displays every Twitter user who has included “fixoutlook.org” in a tweet. As of 9AM this morning, there have been over 10,000 tweets.  This is an incredibly effective way to help our pleas resonate. It puts face to the name for the petition, which I’m not sure has been done before. Hopefully, this will force Microsoft developers to second guess their decision… Hopefully it will make a difference.

So let’s show the fatcats at MS what the mob mentality can accomplish.  Let our voices be heard!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 24, 2009

Email and Social Media Living In Digital Harmony For Your Brand

Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing.  In many ways, they’re one in the same. Both need to…

a) inspire and become a means of communication between the brand and its audience
b) cross-promote the other
c) involve a certain level of testing
d) be precise, personal and avoid “marketing” speak

Read more after the jump!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 28, 2009

Leveraging Twitter for your Email Marketing Campaigns

returnonsubscriber.com recently posted a very interesting idea… Sending out your email campaigns via Twitter.  It’s quite simple, actually:

First, create an email address ( for example). Then make sure your email address is aliased with the new one you just created for Twitter. This is the “subscriber” that you will use to track your Twitter activity.

Secondly, sign up to your email campaigns. When you send out your next email, will receive it. Make sure there’s a “view in browser” link at the top of the email.

Once you receive the email, click on the “view in browser” link, copy the browser URL and shorten it (using tinyurl.com). 

Now, from your Twitter account, paste this tinyurl into a tweet and send it out!  (example: Company Newsletter for January ‘09 - New Blogs, Recent Launches: http://tinyurl.com/asdfa89).  As a rule of thumb, you should always incorporate the subject line of the email. With Twitter and their 140 character limit, you can get a little more descriptive than would with a subject line.

Next, log-in to your ESP and search for your “twitter@yourdomain.com” email address.  From here you should be able to view the statistics for the specific message you just sent to this account, including the stats from the tweet.

Although it won’t tell you which Twitter users clicked on your link, it will help extend the reach of your message.

I will be trying this with our newsletter, The Lowdown (see the column to the left to sign up) at the end of the month.  Stay tuned for the outcome of this little experiment!

If you use twitter, be sure to add mindcometgroup!

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Posted by MindComet on Jan. 21, 2009