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This year, we felt like starting a new holiday tradition - creating an email template for our customers that's as robust as it is lovely. To kick things off, Matt Farag and myself joined forces to roll both the most recent and most enduring email design techniques into a mobile-optimized newsletter, ready for use in our email editor. Hopefully you'll find it to be as joyful to customize, as it is for your subscribers to receive.

Cheerful in (almost) any email client

To do justice to Matt's sublime design, it was necessary to ensure that it looked as consistent as possible across the most popular email clients. As many designers can appreciate, this involves countless rounds of tweaks, testing, more tweaks and well, table cells. Without rattling on too much about it, here's what our final product looks like in the devil's own email client, Outlook '07:

And here, my friends, is what it looks like in Apple Mail:

Wait, hold on a moment, is that... Snow?

Don't adjust your monitor - the header is smoothly animated with semi-randomized snow in WebKit email clients, thanks to a dusting of CSS animation. I used Estelle Weyl's 'Making it snow...' presentation as a starting point, then handed the template to Matt, who transformed it into something more subtle and stopped it from sprinkling all over the text. The animation was created using pure CSS and thanks to the use of keyframes, displays no visual artifacts in non-WebKit email clients. So when viewed on the iPhone, in Apple Mail, or when the webversion is opened in the Safari, Firefox or Google Chrome browsers, your subscribers will enjoy a little taste of the northern winter.

We'll cover CSS animation in email in an upcoming post, so watch this blog for more.

Finally, we get a lot of questions about whether @media queries work in Gmail on Android phones and the answer is sadly, no - like web Gmail, it has a Christmas list of limitations. The good news is this one-column design should still be easy to navigate in Gmail, but won't display the mobile-optimized bells and whistles.

As customizable as it is forgiving

The most common feedback we receive in regards to our other free templates is that there should be more options for editing header images and footer text. So we've made it possible to change the 'Hello and Seasons Greetings!' message, swap out the logo and well, pretty much edit any text, all from within the email editor. We've even added useful descriptions to the editable images so you know the maximum width that images can be, keeping in mind that the app will resize images that exceed these widths anyway.

Note that the one thing you can't do in the editor is change the default 'Wishing you a safe and merry holiday season!' preheader, however this can be updated in the code.

To really fill your stocking, we've also included the original PSD file so you can edit and re-export parts of the design as you see fit.

Learn timely email techniques for 2012

Despite reviewing and and debugging HTML email code on a daily basis, its been a while since I've been built and tested an email template from the ground up. This process ran across a few afternoons and provided a great opportunity to brush up on email theory and techniques like which CSS3 properties can be used reliably, getting background images to display in Outlook '07/'10 and using @media queries for mobile display. Hopefully it will prove to be a solid starting point for future campaigns - hey, you may even jump into the code and learn a new technique or hack along the way, too!

Here's the template, free for you to download and modify - it's by no means perfect and I'm sure you will pass on lots of ideas as to how it can be improved. Rest assured that it's white-label and we don't need a plug in any shape or form if you do use it - for you to celebrate the silly season with us is enough.

Download the holiday email template and PSD (zip file, 8.4Mb)

All of us here are looking forward to seeing your Christmas creations, so pop us a comment below if you have something you'd like to share. Have a happy holiday ahead!

Email send frequency may seem like a no-brainer if you've only got one regular newsletter. But what is it to your subscribers when you're sending a weekly newsletter, flash sales and regular product announcements in between?

I got thinking about this while reading VentureBeat's post on why Amazon have been unsubscribing inactive subscribers from AmazonLocal, their daily deals list. The reason:

"the Seattle-based retailer has relationships going back more than a decade with some consumers. Continuing to send unwanted emails would hurt that relationship."

Or as I read it: Amazon has determined that email fatigue may not just be affecting one list, but all their lists, if not their brand overall.

The article goes on reinforce a tricky fact - one of the top reasons for unsubscribing is that emails are being received too frequently from a particular sender. Amazon may have seen a lack of interest in their daily AmazonLocal emails as being an email fatigue warning sign and perhaps even a threat to their potentially more profitable (and relevant) email recommendations, launch announcements and updates.

Of course, this move goes both ways. When senders proactively remove inactive subscribers from their lists, it can create a lot of confusion for folks who may be happily receiving the emails, but rarely feel the need to respond. It may be because the email content doesn't contain a strong call to action, doesn't invite the recipient to click through, or perhaps it's just a matter of them waiting for the 'right offer' to come along. For these reasons, it's worth exploring alternate ways to combat email fatigue, aside from downsizing your lists.

What to prescribe before you unsubscribe

The first thing that comes to mind when faced with a scenario like this is running a re-engagement campaign. The message can be something really simple, like: "We see you haven't been getting into our daily deals, so use this link if you would like to stop receiving them". It's also a great opportunity to get feedback from your subscribers and perhaps even offer an incentive to for them to get active again. Fatigue is an issue that all senders have to approach strategically at some point in time, so it's also worth considering now what you can do about it. For example:

• Is it worth consolidating your various newsletters and announcements, say by sending consistently once a fortnight, instead of whenever something exciting happens?
• Are you giving your subscribers what they want, with relevant content and enticing offers?
• How strong is your call to action? How can you improve it?
• Are there alternative channels you can use to effectively communicate your message (eg. social media)?

... and the list continues. There are very good reasons to keep your lists and campaigns responsive, especially as email clients like Gmail are using prior engagement to determine how important an email is.

Overall, the most important action item is to do like Amazon and take stock of how your subscriber lists are affecting your relationship with your customers... And each other. What happens after doesn't have to be as drastic as wiping out all your inactive subscribers - small steps like changing your frequency can go a long way when outpacing email fatigue.