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Long before food bloggers and review sites came into being, there was Time Out, a publishing company that's spent the last 40 years guiding us on what to do and where to go in the world's most exciting cities. Given the long-lasting success of their monthly magazines and websites, it wasn't really a surprise to see their email campaigns kicking some serious goals, too. In our most recent case study, we got together with the Time Out Sydney and Time Out Melbourne teams to find out how email fits into their fast-paced publishing schedule and get a few tips on how to send compelling email newsletters.

"...we can design an email, send a test and schedule it within 4 minutes - no joke!"

If you've only dreamed of getting your newsletters out the door in minutes, as well as consistent click rates of 45-50%, then there's practical advice in here for you. Of course, it always helps to have a team of talented writers and photographers like Time Out does, but even those on a smaller budget than this content powerhouse will find a takeaway or two.

It also goes to show that 'old' and 'new' media are in no way incompatible. The idea that websites and email are somehow corroding the relevancy of print is at odds with the Time Out approach, which uses email to offer timely updates and bolster the brand in between their monthly magazine editions.

Read the full Time Out interview, or browse through our other case studies, including Q&A's with 37signals, Xero and more.

Selling something? For a refreshing store-building experience, check out Goodsie by HiiDef, popularly known as the makers of Flavors.me. Goodsie is quite simply, a stripped-down, yet full-flavored online retail service for creating branded storefronts, sans code. You can either create a stand-alone store with a custom domain, or embed your products into an existing site, like a Tumblr or WordPress blog. Of course, the 'must-haves' are all there, like payment gateway support, coupon management and detailed sales stats.

To add the icing on the cake, Goodsie now sends email campaigns and manages mailing lists using Campaign Monitor. Oh, did we mention that you can build really sexy storefronts? Check it out:

Email marketing in the express lane

As a fan of Flavors.me, I was excited to fire up a Goodsie Premium account and try building a store for myself. As it turns out, they've gone the whole hog with their email marketing service, which features a drag-and-drop email builder that automatically passes the completed HTML email to Campaign Monitor for delivery. You don't need to start a Campaign Monitor account, fiddle with API keys or pay additional fees to send as a Premium user - Goodsie handles all this for you behind-the-scenes. After sending, it also provides sales analytics so you can measure the impact of your email campaigns against your bottom line.

Another nicety is that mailing lists are handled for you in your Goodsie account - simply create a list and let the app's shopping cart and order database integration populate it with subscribers. Targeted email campaigns can be sent, based on customers' order history, purchase amount and geography.

Email marketing support is only available in Premium accounts, which are a flat $40/month. Considering that this includes email delivery and list management (alongside a growing list of extra features), Premium accounts make for bloody-good value.

The best of both apps

What I really like about the Goodsie / Campaign Monitor matching is how it cleverly draws the strengths of both services. Goodsie offers a stylish, streamlined, code-free store experience - building and managing a store feels effortless. We've worked towards offering a professional, white-label service to designers, backed up by robust infrastructure. Silently linking the two services via our API makes things almost too simple. When sending campaigns from within the app, I couldn't but help feel that I was missing a step or two - wasn't Goodsie going to prompt me to enter my details? Hold on, my newsletter is sending... Wow.

Overall, Goodsie gives us the good vibrations. You can trial a Premium account for free for 30 days, then continue for $40 a month, or step down to a Standard account for $15 USD a month. Find out more at their site.

Animated GIFs are going through a renaissance. In the last few months, we've seen them resurrected from the cringe-worthy virtual graveyard of 'Under Construction' banners and funny profile pics, to be redefined as fine art. This trend is particularly relevant to email design, where GIFs and CSS animations are the only way to add moving images, given the poor video support across the most popular email clients.

But why use them? As Paul Boag quotes in 'It’s time to look at animated gifs again':

"Animated gifs can breathe some much needed life into the imagery on your website. They grab the users attention and act as design delighters, making your site stand out from that of the competition."

The same can be said for email, in which the 'stand out' -ness of a button or call to action can make a considerable difference to campaign results. Anna Yeaman at Style Campaign demonstrated how an animated video preview lifted her campaign's click-rate by 26%... And there's no reason why you can't achieve the same.

Support for animated GIFs in email

The great news is that animated GIF support is pretty much universal across the major email clients... Except Outlook 2007 & 2010 (you guessed it). In Outlook, only the first frame displays - which means that if your animation contains any important information, it has to feature on the first frame or risk being lost. Here are the full results:

Desktop email clients	Result
Apple Mail	GIF plays
Lotus Notes 6, 7 and 8.5	GIF plays
Outlook 2003, Express	GIF plays
Outlook 2007, 2010	First frame displays
Outlook for Mac 2011	GIF plays
Windows Live Mail 2011	GIF plays
Web-based email clients	Result
AOL Web	GIF plays
Gmail	GIF plays
Hotmail	GIF plays
Yahoo! Mail	GIF plays
Mobile email clients	Result
Android (default)	GIF plays
Android (Gmail)	GIF plays
Blackberry	GIF plays
iPhone	GIF plays
Windows Mobile 7	First frame displays

Support for animated GIFs is rock solid. Compare this to support for video or CSS3 animation and you'll see why the alternatives are seldom used.

Examples from our customers

We couldn't wrap up this post without a couple of great animated emails from folks like you. Click through on the images to see them animate:

iart interactive ag

Clarity Communications

Hungry Castle

Superbrothers

Style Campaign has a great selection of animated emails in this blog post, not to mention a solid tutorial so you can get started on your own animation creations!

We're really looking forward to seeing animated GIFs take off, both on the web and in email. So now, we'd like to hear from you - do you feature animated GIFs in your campaigns? Have any favorite examples? Share them with us in the comments below.