We present to you a simple and neat newsletter from Saelstrom Marketing. The Canadian web design and search engine marketing company have built a compact newsletter template that is pleasing on the eye, simple to read and fairly light on graphics.
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Does @font-face work in email?
Published March 03, 2010 by David Greiner
We recently did a round of testing with the help of the Typekit team to see if there was a viable way to get @font-face working in popular email clients. Given the rate of image blocking in email, @font-face support would be an awesome technique to style the text in your email without the need for images.
Imagine sending an email like the one above that rendered like this in popular email clients even with images disabled.
How we tested
For testing purposes, we tried the following @font-face techniques:
- Traditional method of declaring the @font-face and the element to use that font family in
<style>in the<head> - Declared the font-face in
<style>in the<head>and then called it inline usingstyle="font-family:..." - Declared the font-face in the
<style>in the<head>and<body>using encoded data URIs and used the 2 combinations above to tie it to an element.
Because of the syntax of @font-face, there is no way to embed a font inline using
src: url("...").The results
Desktop email clients Result Apple Mail 
Font rendersEntourage 2008 
Fallback font displayedLotus Notes 6, 7 and 8.5 Fallback font displayedOutlook 2007 Fallback font displayedOutlook 2003 Fallback font displayedThunderbird Fallback font displayedWindows Mail Fallback font displayedWeb-based email clients Result AOL Web Fallback font displayedGmail Fallback font displayedHotmail Fallback font displayedMobileMe Fallback font displayedMySpace Fallback font displayedMobile email clients Result iPhone Font rendersUnfortunately, the embedded font only rendered in Apple Mail 3 and 4, plus the iPhone. None of the other dektop email clients came to the party. On the web-based side, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail stripped the @font-face CSS from the email automatically. Because it isn't possible to actually move @font-face inline, and all email clients strip JavaScript by default, it looks to be impossible to get @font-face to render across all the popular email clients.
We'll be keeping a sharp eye on how @font-face and other style rules shape up in the future - until then, it's better to stick to the web fonts you love and know. Of course, if you use our email client reports and a large percentage of your subscribers use Apple Mail and the iPhone, this might be a cool way to add some extra flair to your next email design.
Leave a comment › Posted in: Observations & Answers
- Traditional method of declaring the @font-face and the element to use that font family in
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Plus+
Published March 02, 2010 – Designed by Crafty Corp
Although this campaign for Plus+ has a lot of images, it is still made really well. Structurally it is solid, and doesn't look too bad with images turned off. The design is quite modern and very appealing with colorful game graphics and icons that leap forward from from the tranquil gray background of tiny shadows and textures.
Leave a comment › Posted in: Two column, Newsletter
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Using YouTube Previews to display video in Gmail
Published March 01, 2010 by Ros Hodgekiss
Immediately after Gmail Labs announced that you can now preview YouTube clips from within Gmail's reading pane, we started pondering on how our customers could make best use of this feature. As a few of you have expressed interest in segmenting subscriber lists by email client, lets talk about how to create a segment for Gmail users. Finally, as with many email techniques, there's an important caveat - targeting subscribers by email client is certainly not an exact science.
Previewing video in Gmail: The basics
With Gmail's new YouTube Previews feature, Gmail users can now view YouTube videos from within Gmail itself, instead of clicking away from the Gmail inbox. If an email is received with a text-link to a YouTube video, a preview is shown directly after the message. Recipients can then click the play button and view the video, as if it were embedded in the footer of the email.
This is great for senders with Gmail users subscribed to their lists, as it means one less reason for folks to navigate away from your email. However, as we'll discuss later in this post, targeting Gmail users certainly isn't a foolproof tactic.
How to target Gmail users in your lists
In this example, we will be creating a segment for Gmail users by targeting subscribers by the domain, "@gmail.com".
In your account, navigate to the subscriber list which you wish to segment. Click, 'Segments', then create a new segment. The first rule of your segment should be, 'Email Address'. Add rule. On the next screen, select 'Contains' from the drop-down under the header, 'Email Address' and type, "@gmail.com".
Click 'Save and refresh count' to view the number of active subscribers in the segment:
You can now send your campaigns to this segment, just as you would any old subscriber list. Learn more about creating and using segments.
Why this technique may not work
As Mark Brownlow pointed out in his excellent article, "Video in Gmail", segmenting by domain isn't a particularly accurate way to pinpoint who actually reads their email in Gmail itself. Commonly, folks use other email clients like Outlook to view emails received by their Gmail accounts; I personally have my Gmail account forward messages to another address, which I then view in Apple Mail. In these instances, the YouTube preview will not display in your alternate email client.
That said, it is certainly more likely that you will be sending to folks who will view your newsletter in Gmail, so it's certainly worth an experiment to see if a Gmail segment responds to your message differently from the rest of the pack. You could create a Gmail segment and a non-Gmail segment, send a campaign with a YouTube Preview link to each separately, then compare results.
A second consideration is that the YouTube Previews section of an email is both fairly subtle and after a few paragraphs of text, quickly disappears under the fold. If you want to make your video one of the focal elements of your email, be sure to go light on the content. Secondly, don't assume it's going to display - adding a call-to-action like "View video below" is certainly a recipe for confusion for any subscriber using a client outside of Gmail.
Mark also has some useful observations regarding embedding YouTube links in email (for example, our tracking links will disable the preview in certain circumstances), so visit his blog for the full story on YouTube Previews.
Hopefully this move by Gmail will apply pressure on other email clients to support the playback of video internally. Embedding video in a secure, non-destructive manner is a positive move and will hopefully lead to a richer, more interactive email experience for everybody.
Have you given the new YouTube Previews feature a shot in your campaigns? Please share your impressions - positive or negative - in the comments below. We'd love to know whether video in email is something you and your subscribers find to be beneficial.
Leave a comment › Posted in: Observations & Answers
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Saelstrom Marketing
Published February 26, 2010 – Designed by Saelstrom Marketing
Leave a comment › Posted in: One column, Newsletter
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Small downtime scheduled for this weekend
Published February 25, 2010 by David Greiner
We'll be performing a database upgrade this weekend which will result in a 2 small downtime periods for Campaign Monitor. The first period will be a quick 30 mins this Saturday, 27th February at 11PM EST (see this in your own time zone). The second window will be for an hour this Sunday, 28th February at 2.30AM EST (see this in your own time zone).
What will happen when my account is unavailable?
This maintenance period will have the following effects:
- You and your clients will not be able to login to your Campaign Monitor account. If your client does try and log in they'll see a non-branded "Down for maintenance" page letting them know when they should come back and try again.
- Campaigns scheduled to be sent during this period will not go out, but will be sent automatically as soon as the application comes back up. However, subscribes, unsubscribes and bounces will be captured during the downtime and processed into your reports afterwards. Images will continue to load in emails, and clicks and opens will also be recorded.
We will update this post once the application is back up and running and we'll also be updating our Twitter status during the maintenance to keep you in the loop. Thanks in advance for your patience while we complete this upgrade.
Leave a comment › Posted in: Observations & Answers
