Some may say we have a bias towards Australian email designers and you know, they're probably right. This double-act with design by Toben and coding by Two in a Room Studios is comfortable in its own skin, with a limited palette, simple product photography and copy emphasizing the craftsmanship of Country Culture's lines.

Improvements we'd suggest would be to increase the font sizes and/or the contrast between the text and background color - on small screens particularly, the newsletter could become hard to read. But those tweaks aside, this is an elegant, thoughtful campaign.

For those of you less familiar with preference center's, they're a simple way to let anyone on your list manage their own contact details and subscription preferences. For example, if someone is finding your daily newsletter a bit much, you can give them the option to choose your weekly version, instead of them simply unsubscribing. It's also very easy to link to the preference center from any campaign you send. Here's a quick example of one in action:

Set the order and mark fields as required

Today's update now makes it easy to set the order in which your custom fields might appear in a subscriber's preference center. You can also set those important fields as required. These settings are located within the custom fields settings for any list in your account, and now look something like this:

A big thanks to everyone who requested this feature, it's been a long time coming and we appreciate your patience. This is one of a number of smaller but highly requested updates we've been working on of late, and we'll be sharing more soon.

Unlike the Subscribe button, or our copy/paste forms, which you need to integrate into your site and touch code, the Subscribe Page is just a simple, white label URL that you can easily share with anyone. Check out a real-world example of it in action.

Customize everything

We've made it easy to tweak everything on this page so you can keep it consistent with your own brand. Change the background color, choose from a range of font styles, or add your own logo.

Just like the subscribe button, you can also choose which fields you'd like to show, in what order, and even set certain fields as required. You can also customize the confirmation message when a new person joins your list.

By default, each subscribe page is hosted at a white label domain, but if you have a custom domain set up for you or a client, we'll default to that instead.

Looks great on mobile

Just like our Subscribe Buttons, we made sure every Subscribe Page looks great on any mobile device but still stays true to any customizations you've made.

Easily track signups

Just like we do for the Subscribe Button, we'll keep track of how many subscribers have joined your list via the subscribe page so you can see at a glance how it's been working for you.

Subscribe Pages are live and available in all accounts now. You can find them in the Grow your audience section in the sidebar for each of your lists. We can't wait to see how you guys start using them.

This may seem like a lot of chunky, technical stuff to cover in one short resource, but rest assured, we've tailored Landing in the Inbox to bring first-timers to email marketing up-to-speed, while including useful suggestions that experienced senders can benefit from. With chapters on how to improve your email content, keep your lists clean and get authenticated, there's lots of advice that you can apply to your campaigns, right now. Give it a skim - in minutes, you'll feel equipped to discuss email delivery with your tech team, colleagues, or even us!

To get into Landing in the Inbox, send yourself over to our Guides section, where you'll find a great selection of resources on mobile email design, campaign planning, permission and more.

Have a suggestion for a guide or can suggest some improvements? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.

Our metrics-minded friends at Bluewire Media recently decided they'd take the uncertainty out of their content strategy, by running a series of marketing experiments on what kind of content generated the most click-throughs. The methodology was simple - each week, they sent a newsletter to over 6,300 subscribers, featuring a useful resource, like a template, e-books or blog post, alongside their regular news. Following each send, they collected and compared the results, to determine which resource had been deemed most valuable.

Useful content comes out on top

While it's hardly surprising, the offers that generated the most clicks were templates and eBooks, being items that helped their subscribers (mostly marketers and content creators) with their jobs. They observed:

Resources like templates and tools bring the house down compared to any other email offers. Our most popular downloads are the Editorial Calendar Template with a click through rate of 34.5% and the Content Marketing Checklist at 26.2%.

While a common source of newsletter content, blog posts only attracted half as many clicks as the downloads that Bluewire included in their tests, attracting a 5-14% click-through rate.

Content marketing - is it worth the effort?

Of course, creating things like templates takes time, effort and expertise, so how do you justify such an investment? Potentially by having markedly better results than you would otherwise have, say if you were to put a just-passable amount of care into your campaigns. Again, from Bluewire:

"Industry-average click through rates are 4%... (our) click through rates range from 9.8% to 34.5% and typically average 20+%"

Receiving five times more clicks than other marketing-industry newsletters isn't too shabby a result, especially if lead generation is your thing. It's also worth keeping in mind that Bluewire's resources fit into a bigger inbound marketing strategy; by sharing their knowledge, Bluewire not only presents themselves as domain experts, but makes their site a must-visit destination for anyone who needs a helping hand with their own marketing. So in short, they're not only incentivizing engagement with their newsletters, but are also creating valuable resources for both keeping existing clients and roping in new ones.

Many thanks to cool customers Bluewire for sharing their results - if you're keen to find out exactly what content did and didn't work, check out their blog post. Finally, we're keen to hear about your content strategy - what offers, articles or giveaways have been successful in your newsletters? Let us know in the comments below.

To find out, we got in touch with Scott Wickberg at Wick Creative, to find out how RSS to Email has helped his other project, SlyVinyl, drive return visits and create a community for music enthusiasts like himself. In this interview, we not only got our hands on his strategies and results, but as a bonus, some excellent recommendations for the audiophiles out there.

Hi Scott, you've had some amazing results from your RSS to Email campaigns for SlyVinyl - an open rate hovering around 60% is almost unheard of for any email campaign. What is it about your bi-weekly sends that makes them so popular?

It's interesting because we started out with a weekly email, but our readers asked for bi-weekly so we switched. We were initially hesitant as our general rule is no more than one email a week to a single list, but they asked for it and we decided to give it a go.

Most sites have a "you come to us" mentality, this email switches the relationship to "let us come to you".The bi-weekly email has been so popular because it meets the casual website reader where they are. We've found this to be important as engagement levels are vastly different between readers - some readers find the bi-weekly email useless because they are on the site multiple times a day, but as the email isn't for them, they usually don't sign up for it. But for the casual reader, the bi-weekly email is 100% of the driver for their return visits. It allows us to switch the relationship. Most sites have a "you come to us" mentality, this email switches the relationship to "let us come to you". Our readers love this and therefore the emails have done so well.

How have you benefited from using RSS to Email on your site?

While catering to casual users is important, the true benefit we've found is in how RSS to Email has impacted our new user vs. return user traffic percentage. We've seen a 10-15% change in our return visitor numbers since starting and now, return users account for 58% of visitors, which is exceptional. We have another client that is using RSS to Email and their return user percentage has also seen a boost.

We look at return users as the golden geese, and we like golden geese.For those not familiar with return user vs. new users stats, we focus on return users as they are 2 to 3 times more likely to convert than new users. We look at return users as the golden geese, and we like golden geese. That being said, SlyVinyl isn't eCommerce, it's a community, but the rule still applies. Communities aren't built upon new users and so RSS to Email has been key to SlyVinyl's continual growth.

Was RSS to Email part of SlyVinyl's marketing plan, or did you just 'give it a go'?

I have to laugh when I get asked about marketing plans, as I truly have never made one. Don't get me wrong, they are great, but I personally just don't work that way on my own projects. In regards to SlyVinyl, no, it wasn't in the initial roll-out. The RSS to Email came about as I started hearing people say, "I love the site, I just don't get around to checking it, I'm so busy." I understand where they're at, I run 2 companies and feel that strain. Besides, why should they have to make the effort to visit the site consistently to stay up to date? As a result, I figured I'd give RSS to Email a go, and it's been a success. These readers can now see the stories in brief and if they are interested they go get more info, on their terms.

The growth of subscribers has been pretty consistent, I think it's now to around 30-40 new signups a week. For a site or company that's not even a year old, that's pretty impressive.

This has started us experimenting with all kinds of casual reader techniques, but nothing else we've tried has been near as successful. In half the time, email signups have outgrown our Twitter followers and are now double the number of Facebook likes we've received- very exciting stuff.

Finally, as the informant on all things vinyl, what's your favourite record? I'm gripping my copy of 'Marquee Moon' as we speak.

That's awesome. That Television record eluded me for quite sometime, but I finally got a sneaky repressed copy last year. It sounds so amazing on wax. That's definitely a gem. (Kudos! - Ros)

Hmm, fav record. You know I'd probably go with 'Live After Deaf' by Ryan Adams. This is somewhat cheating as it's a 15 LP box set, but it's gotta be this one for a few reasons.

Firstly, it's the record release that prompted me to start SlyVinyl. It was a super-limited release and sold out almost instantly; I had many friends that missed it and now the set goes for $600 - $1,000 on Discogs or eBay. Got me thinking about how much that sucked that they missed that opportunity, as they would have gotten one if they only had the information.

Secondly, Ryan Adams fights with The National and Sufjan Stevens as my favorite modern artist and I personally don't believe there is a better representation of his genius and raw talent than this set. It caught him at a tough time - being told his hearing might go, moving into his 30's and finally having settled down some. When recording this set, he played at small venues and laid it all out for fans and as a result, it's not only truly great music, but a snapshot of time and emotion for a truly great musician. It reminds me of Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall bootlegs - also one of my favorites. In Dylan's case, he almost died in a motorcycle accident, came back and brought a new sound. Similarly, 'Live After Deaf' captures a moment in history for one of my favorite artists and plays to the fact that I'm a sucker for a good story of triumph.

Thank you so much for sharing your results, plus indulging the music fans.

I wanted to personally say thanks again for all the innovation that Campaign Monitor continues to bring to the table. It helps us continue to bring smart and effective solutions to a multitude of clients with a variety of needs. It's a very valuable arrow in our quiver. Thanks again.

A huge thank you to Scott for the marketing know-how and helping us decide what to put on the turntable next. To get wise to the latest quality releases on wax, visit the SlyVinyl site, or signup for updates.

By Tuesday, all accounts will have been switched over to display our new header. While it's a fairly subtle change, it's likely something you or your clients will notice when you next log into your accounts. Don't worry - the theme colors and branding in your account will remain the same, so you won't need to tinker with anything.

A more consistent experience

The changes to the app aren't strictly skin-deep - as part of this header update, we've also reworked the client drop-down menu to make it a touch more responsive. Buttons across the app have also been given a refresh for consistency and to make the workflow a little more intuitive.

Updated screenshots for agencies and designers

If you sell email to your clients and use images from our app in your marketing materials, you can get a head-start on refreshing them with our up-to-date agency screenshots. If you haven't seen the new Agency Resources on our site yet, we've got white-label screenshots, guides, case-studies and more to rebranding just that little bit easier.

Overall, the idea behind this update was to revisit some of the elements in our header that were looking a bit dated and make them faster, cleaner and simpler to use in the process. Naturally, we'd be keen to hear your feedback when we roll out this new look, so feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.

Scope is the brainchild of our friends at Litmus, who are famously known for their top-notch email and browser testing tools. Faced with the issue of emails breaking when forwarded, not to mention the sheer akwardness of the earlier screenshot dance, they came up with this elegant service for bagging email campaigns with a single click of a bookmarklet. It's also totally free to use and you don't have to be a Litmus customer to give it a go. Here's a short video of Scope in action:

Desktop, mobile, text and source code, all in one

It goes without saying that we're excited to see folks like you use Scope. For example, lets say you've got our latest monthly newsletter in your Gmail account and are keen to see what responsive techniques we've tucked in. Using Scope, you can flick between desktop, mobile, text version and clean source code views. Then, you can share a link to the campaign with your loved ones, hopefully with some nice words about our newsletters. Or so we hope!

Scope works equally well with both preview and live campaigns, making it perfect for reviews.

Big love to Litmus for simplifying how we share our emails. They're currently giving away one of their plans in exchange for a shout-out, so find out more about that and Scope overall by swinging by the announcement on their blog.

Teaming up together to bring us this sassy email newsletter are two of design’s good guys - the team at Cog Design and Brian Thies. If the latter sounds familiar to you, it’s because we featured him in our blog the other week - and the tributes to his code mastery haven’t stopped flowing in.

There are lots of great things to say about Cog’s handiwork, too - the copy is so personable and the images simply pop. It’s a beautiful newsletter and reflects well on their brand and their work. Well done, Brian and Cog!

To the code-savvy and curious, our subscribe button must seem tantalizing - a quick peek at the source code reveals that, for the sake of simplicity, most of the magic has been safely tucked away. While there's never been anything preventing folks like you and me from rolling our own subscribe forms, having a solid template or example to play is often what it takes to move a task from the 'too-hard basket' and into 'getting it done'.

An example subscribe button modal - give it a try for yourself.

For those who like getting things done with code, Buzz's customizable subscribe form button is where it's at. Bringing together Twitter's Bootstrap Modal and our AJAX Subscription Form code (as well as your own creativity), it pretty much has all the functionality of our subscribe button, but can be adjusted to taste in its entirety. Buzz has even provided two versions - Basic and Fancy - to get you off to a flying start. As a bonus, the Fancy version's modal has been optimized for mobile devices, giving you one less thing to mull over.

To see the customizable subscribe button in action and download the code, swing by GitHub. Should you have any feedback, or just want to give Buzz a well-earned pat on the back, we'd love to hear from you in the comments below.

Developed by keen customer Jay Holtslander, MyCMSetup was designed to tackle a very real issue that he had when selling email marketing. As he explained:

"... I found that the process for adding new client accounts was far too time consuming for me. I wanted new clients to have a large variety of templates to start with and all of that uploading would take me 20-30 minutes every time, which could possibly be wasted time if the client never logged in again.... all that time adds up."

Knowing that our API could be used to automate common tasks like adding pre-built templates to an account, Jay got to work. However, once it became clear that other customers could benefit from having the account creation process automated, the focus shifted to creating an app that anyone could use - and thus, MyCMSetup was born.

Manage pricing and templates across multiple clients

MyCMSetup is a breeze to use, once you link the app with your Campaign Monitor account using your API key. In a few clicks, you can create a configuration, then upload a few default templates, ready to roll out across new client accounts:

New accounts can be tracked and deleted in MyCMSetup, which is great if you intend to create temporary demo accounts for say, client pitches. Enough explaining, here's a short video of MyCMSetup in action:

Pricing plans for MyCMSetup range from free, to $20 per month, scaled on how many clients you create per month. To find out more and start an account, visit their site.

Given that adopting a swag of newsletters 'built' in Word is the recurring nightmare of many an email designer, it's not surprising that we should have our suspicions when it comes to WYSIWYG apps. However, we were pleasantly surprised by equinux's Mail Designer, which not only comes with a simple drag-and-drop editor, but produces pretty clean HTML code. But, here's the kicker - once you've built a template, it's possible to export it directly to the 'Templates' tab of your Campaign Monitor account, then use it time and time again for your campaigns. All you need is your account's API key to set this up.

Our template tags, built into the interface

Memorizing template tags can be a chore, so it's nice to have many of our template tags available in the app, ready to drop into your template prior to export. This includes the unsubscribe tag, which you will need to include in all campaigns. Note that the repeater tag is not yet supported, but if you're feeling confident, you can export templates from your account and add them to taste.

As a special reader of this blog, you can get $20 USD off until 2014 via this link. Alternately, for more information and to download a free trial, visit their site.

Over the last few months, we've really knuckled down to make Campaign Monitor as friendly as can be for agencies, designers and folks who are rebranding our service as their own. In the wake of our partner program, team management and a white-label iPad app, we're pleased to unveil our new Agency Resources page, featuring guides, screenshots and more.

Since making our app rebrandable all those many moons ago, we've stayed on the pulse of what folks like you have needed to successfully sell email marketing to your clients. Consequently, we've amassed a fair few handy bits, bobs and downloads, but they've been scattered around the place. Well, that's all changed as of now - the Agency Resources page is your new one-stop shop. Some of the goodies it includes are:

• White-label screenshots for your site and marketing materials
• Links to our partner program, apps and other must-haves
• A 'getting started' guide to selling email marketing
• Case studies and examples, to get you inspired

We'll be progressively adding more resources to this page, so be sure to bookmark it if selling email to clients is in your future. What we've got is by no means a comprehensive list, so if there's something we can rustle up, be sure to let us know in the comments below.

It’s great to see responsive email design in action, especially when it’s wrapped in as pretty a package as this newsletter from MMT Digital. This is both a technically and aesthetically beautiful design, not to mention, absolutely unmissable in the inbox - and a favourable reflection on the overall quality of MMT’s work. A big ‘well done’ to the team!

While the Mail app that comes bundled with Windows 8 is a fairly fringe email client, having the 'mobile version' of an email display unintentionally was enough to warrant a forum thread and a couple of support tickets in fairly short order. Thankfully, there is a simple workaround, but it comes with a few quirks of its own.

Take a walk on the WebKit side

It's no news to any of us that a lack of media query support outside of the default iOS and Android Mail clients is what's cramping the style of many an email designer. That said, the vast majority of opens originating from a mobile device are likely to come from WebKit-powered clients like the earlier two... Unless you're lucky enough to have an over-zealous client who is hung up on their ancient BlackBerry.

We mention this because the workaround to having media queries resolve incorrectly in Windows 8 Mail is to ensure only WebKit clients use them. This may raise hackles amongst the two fellows on your subscriber list using Windows Phone 7.5, but it may be a risk you're willing to take.

Now, onto the code. There isn't much to be done - simply replace/append your existing media query expression with and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1). For example:

@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1) { … }

In short, the -webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio CSS property evaluates the display resolution on WebKit-powered mobile devices. As nothing has a device pixel ratio of < 1 (to our knowledge), it's essentially a catch-all.

But wait, we haven't forgotten your over-zealous client here - now that BlackBerry Z10's email client uses WebKit, he or she will be able to test your responsive email designs, too.

A big thanks to everyone who brought this to our attention so diligently. We love tips like this, so if you've seen something unusual in your email newsletter tests, be a good sport and let us know.

This perky email from Pencil Case by Inkreaser has it all - web fonts, a responsive layout, Retina-optimized images, an instructive animated GIF and best of all, good news! In fact, it’s likely that we’ll recommend our customers take a look at this campaign when applying these optimizations to their own campaigns. As this is an email for a service that recommends resources to designers, it’s funny that we’re recommending this as a resource. How very meta.

Overall, this is a technically and aesthetically brilliant campaign, for a service that well, we’re pretty partial towards, too. Two thumbs up!

While Cocoa developers have been doing things like adding email signup forms to apps for a while now, we've known that we could make life easier by releasing an official, well-documented Objective-C wrapper. Not only would one make our API simpler to work with, but we could ensure that the wrapper would continue to be supported and improved upon, for all time.

So, it's with great pleasure that we can now show you the nuts and bolts behind Enlist and white-label Enlist, so you can make full use of our API when building your own Mac OS X and iOS apps. With support for all our API methods and OAuth authentication, the wrapper is as up-to-date as it gets. Alongside comprehensive Readme docs, the Objective-C wrapper also comes with a sample iOS subscribe form app, so you can see how it can be implemented.

Keeping the focus on your app

When asking users to join a email newsletter or announcements list from within an app, linking to a web-based subscribe form may seem like the simple thing to do. However, this does have a glaring downside - as soon as a browser window is opened, the user's focus and your intended workflow are disrupted, especially when toggling occurs between apps on an iOS device.

By making a subscribe form part of the app itself, you can not only avoid unnecessarily hopping between screens, but also take advantage of the platform's characteristics to extend the wealth of data that can be collected. For example, imagine using iOS's Core Location Framework to add location data to a subscriber's custom fields, then sending a personalized autoresponder immediately after they register for an account with your service (spooky). Or beyond forms, imagine pulling reports into an analytics app, so users can check up on their email campaigns, alongside other business metrics. These ideas barely scratching the surface of what can be done; honestly, we're very excited to see how our API is going to be put to work from here on in.

If we've got you interested here, be sure to check out our new Objective-C wrapper on GitHub. As always, you're more than welcome to fork and contribute to our projects. Last but not least, if you do come up with an interesting integration, be sure to let us know - apart from sating our curiosity, we may even give it a solid plug!

As you’ve likely guessed this is a bit of a ‘fan girl’ entry - we weren’t simply going to let rock titans, Queens of the Stone Age, pass through our servers without a bit of a salute. But star-power aside, we love the animated image, that emerges from the black. The short teaser copy, promoting the first single off their new album. The social sharing links - after all, announcements like this are all about the sharing. Finally, the narrow width makes it ideal fodder for reading on mobile devices.

Overall, it’s a pretty postcard from the abyss - and well, we can’t wait to hear the new album.

If you've ever tinkered with displaying background images in Outlook, conditional comments in email code, or even needed advice on rebranding the app, then its likely that Brian has lent you a hand. As a commanding presence in our forums and a tireless activist for email standards, Brian was a unanimous choice for our first Community Champion.

Hi Brian, you're one of the originals on our forum, with a staggering 483 posts to your name. What motivates you to help so many other email marketers?

I think it’s a combination of the eagerness to solve problems, find better ways to execute the coding for a design, and overall help others overcome the adversities facing them when coding for compatibility. Since Campaign Monitor's forums have always been the leader in presenting the most up to date information on email marketing, I felt it was the best venue to provide coding assistance, as well as learning tricks of the trade from other coders.

You've always been on the cutting edge of email coding. Where do you find your inspiration?

I’d say I’m inspired by the need to develop perfectly compatible emails, as well as never accepting “no” or “can’t be done” for an answer. It’s also exciting to get to work on such a variety of projects for an unlimited number of end users, and the challenge each design presents keeps things fresh and always evolving. It also helps that I love my job!

Tell us what your average workday is like.

Email marketing is definitely a full-time job.I provide freelance email coding to marketing agencies who are looking for the service of an in-house email coder without the added expense. With deadlines in advertising being so critical, many companies have turned to me when needing same- to next-day reliable service that they normally wouldn’t receive from their internal teams or from other email coding services.

Email marketing is definitely a full-time job. I code & test anywhere from 5-10 emails per day, with each taking an average of 1-2 hours, so it’s easy to put in 8-12 hours a day depending on workload. Working with clients from around the world, projects can run into the night as well as weekends to ensure client expectations and deadlines are being met.

Briefly, what do you think goes into creating a great email marketing campaign?

I’d have to say the knowledge of the product, service or information being presented, the quality of the design itself, and the understanding of how the email will be built for desktop & mobile compatibility. If you’re missing any one of these, then you’re missing the opportunity to deliver top notch results.

Patience is also key, as a single email should never be viewed as the end-all for a good email campaign. Tweaking the layout, trying different font & image sizes, modifying colors, adjusting subject lines and deploying on various days/times - these are all things the pros use when trying to find the best possible combination to increase opens and click-through rates. Staying ahead of the game involves more than just the volume of emails you deploy. It’s all about trial and error.

What's your advice to those getting started with the 'black art' of email?

Research, research, research. The number of resources available from Campaign Monitor provides plenty of details, examples, and just about everything you need to get started. Utilize the forums for answers you can’t find in the materials, and never be afraid to ask for assistance. If the learning curve is too much and time is an issue, working with a dedicated email marketer or email coder can make your life much easier. Campaign Monitor provides a forum full of the top companies to utilize when looking for a professional email marketing service.

Many thanks again to Brian for being true Community Champion material - we've got a special thank you gift headed his way. If you've been proactive in helping others, we may get in touch with you in the months ahead. However, if you'd like to nominate a fellow customer, be sure to get in touch with details, including how they've helped you.

Hello, private label

While Enlist is perfect for anyone familiar with Campaign Monitor, it can be a tricky sell for our agency customers and resellers that might be pitching Campaign Monitor as their own app. Today we're happy to announce a sister product to Enlist that provides the same great functionality, but doesn't mention our service at all. You can also rest assured that we'll be keeping it updated behind-the-scenes.

Enlist, now with lots of nice updates

While we've put a fair amount of energy into bringing you a white-label version to use, we haven't overlooked a couple of improvements that were worth making in the original app. In fact, this release coincides with a timely update of Enlist, in which we've made some noticeable changes... And more subtle ones, too. For example, offline syncing is now rock solid, so you can confidently collect new subscribers, regardless of whether you're connected to the Internet. When you get connected after being offline for a stint, a nice "Syncing" message will display when any subscribers you captured are synced back to your Campaign Monitor account:

We've also made the 'unlock' icon much more visible, especially for those of you using darker backgrounds. Plus, if you've set up an autoresponder for new subscribers, it will now be sent to anyone who subscribed while you were away from an Internet connection - that was our bad and we're glad we got it fixed.

Across the app, we've squished a fair few bugs and generally made the app more reliable and hopefully, a pleasure to use. Of course, if you see anything that's amiss or can suggest an improvement, be sure to let us know about it.

If you've already added Enlist to your iPad, be sure to get the recent update to take advantage of these changes. Otherwise, get it for free from the App Store and start collecting subscribers.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in requesting a white-label subscribe form app, or helped us improve Enlist. It's always an exciting moment for us when we let loose with useful updates; now we have apps for everyone, we hope that we can share some of this excitement with both you and your clients, too.

But before we get to the beef, why even bother mentioning when things go right? While it's unlikely that many of you will rush out to remove existing workarounds in your HTML email templates and campaigns, those who are starting from scratch will likely save time (and a couple of kb's) by no longer having to code and test yet another 'email hack'. Secondly, we really want to encourage email client developers like Yahoo! to build the most user-friendly services they can - not just by knocking them when they miss the mark, but by recognizing their efforts when they touché. And last but not least, this is a sorely-needed glimmer of hope - Yahoo! Mail is a big player, with almost 10% market share - less than Outlook.com, but more than Gmail. When one of the biggies makes a move in the right direction, there's a chance that the rest will follow. So, without any further hesitation...

No more .yshortcuts

For years now, we've been advocating the use of the .yshortcuts hack to ensure your link colors aren't given the switcheroo by Yahoo! Mail. Well, it seems that .yshortcuts has taken a bow, at least for now. Brevity aside, leaving out .yshortcuts means one less strange class in your CSS styles to cringe about (and for your 'knows-enough-to-be-dangerous' clients to question).

Media query stylesheets are no longer applied by default

Around this time two years ago, it became very apparent to folks who we tinkering with responsive design that the 'mobile version' of their message was displaying in Yahoo! Mail. The workaround - using attribute selectors - reeked of desperation (at least to me), however it indeed solved the problem with few downsides.

After some recent tests with more regular-looking, non selector-fied CSS stylesheets, Yahoo! Mail seems to be correctly resolving commonly-used expressions like:

@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) { … }

As a curious side-note, Yahoo! Mail does appear to still 'support' media queries, however using a catch-all expression like @media screen { … } (as done in our tests) is really the opposite of device-targeting - a whole array of other email clients are likely to trigger it, too.

Now, this is likely to be old news - Yahoo! Mail was updated in mid-December, however it's hard to say whether these fixes were applied by their team during, or after that big push. But what we do know is that not only has the Yahoo! Mail team been listening to our feedback, but countless newcomers to the email design game have been spared from the hair-tearing hackiness that supporting their client used to be.

A strong pat on the back goes out to everyone at Yahoo! Mail for patching up these quirks. Now, it's over to you - which email client would you like to see improve, and how? Let us know in the comments below.

OAuth 2 has quickly become the de-facto way to authenticate users against an API. If you're ever connected something to Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, etc, you'd be familiar with the simple workflow. Up until now, connecting any kind of integration with Campaign Monitor involved using an API key with Basic Authentication. Now you've got another great option - here's all the documentation you'll need to get started.

A better experience for customers

One of the biggest benefits of using OAuth 2 is a nicer experience for customers. They no longer need to mess with hunting down keys, and in many cases you don't even need to enter a username or password. A couple of simple clicks, and your account is safely and securely connected to another service.

What you see when you're connecting Enlist to your Campaign Monitor account.

Using the example above, if you're already logged into your Campaign Monitor account, you can complete the connection with a single click. If your session has expired or you're on a different machine, we'll quickly ask for your username and password and then you can instantly connect.

OAuth also makes it much safer for a customer using multiple integrations. If you no longer want to use an integration, you can simply revoke access for that individual app rather than having to generate a new API key and break any other integrations. Control over who can access a customer's account is now very much in their hands, and not the third parties they are handing a key over to.

Granular permissions

Another big plus of oAuth is that you can set granular access scope for your integrations. Consistent with our current range of permissions for users within your account, you can easily set exactly which parts of their account your integration will have read or write access to. This is a great way to transparently say exactly what your integration can and can't do. The current permissions we support include:

• View reports - Access to basic reporting data from any campaigns you've sent
• View subscriber data in reports - Can access campaign reports down to the individual subscriber level
• Manage Lists - Can access all your subscriber and list data
• Import Subscribers - Can add/import subscribers into your account
• Create Campaigns - Can create draft email campaigns
• Send Campaigns - Can send campaigns to your subscribers
• Manage Templates - Can add, remove or update email templates
• Administer People - Can add, remove or modify the people under a client.
• Administer your account - Can add/edit account administrators and access billing information.

The beautiful thing about this approach is that we'll look at the permissions anyone has in your account when they're trying to connect something. For example, if you have a person that can only create campaigns but not send them, they won't be able to connect an app to your account that will have the ability to send campaigns.

Libraries are updated and good to go

One thing that was very important to us was making sure it's as easy as possible for developers to work with our API. With that in mind, we managed to update our Ruby, Python, PHP, .NET, Java and Perl libraries to fully support OAuth from day one.

We're also very happy to announce a brand new Objective-C library for those developing for OS X and iOS. There are lots of nice surprises in that library which we'll be sharing more about in the coming days.

See all the apps connected to your account at a glance

Another big benefit of using OAuth is that we'll now show you every single app that currently has permission to access your Campaign Monitor account. If you head into Account Settings and click on Manage connected apps, you'll see something like this:

This is an account-wide view of all the different external applications that have permission to access your account in one way or another. You can very easily see which clients are using that app, what permissions it has and importantly, revoke access altogether.

For developers, this section of your account also makes it easy to register your own applications with us. Here you can provide a description of your app, plus a web site and icon if one is available. Once registered we'll give you the private details you'll need to make an OAuth connection work.

Getting started

We've put together some simple documentation on getting started with oAuth, and don't forget every one of our client libraries have been updated to make using OAuth as easy as possible.

Supporting OAuth is an important step in our plans with the API. As you can see from some of the screens above, we've got some more ideas on how we can make our API easier to work with, and also to encourage more developers to create apps for the Campaign Monitor platform. I'm looking forward to sharing more details on this soon. And of course, if you have a question about oAuth or anything API related, head over to our API Developers forum, or drop us a line.

We consider ourselves very lucky to be the focus of a wide variety of integrations. The vast majority of these are developed and supported by app makers and keen customers, who see the value in leaving the email marketing side of things - from creating campaigns, to managing deliverability - to us. Since launching our API, we've listened to feedback from said devs on how we can make Campaign Monitor easier to work with and the ability to embed an account in a 3rd-party service has been a regular ask. We may have even heard it from you.

With our powers combined...

Off the bat this may sound a bit odd, but we reckon there are good reasons for making us part of your workflow. First of all, the app can be easily be rebranded as your own. You can even customize what's on display - from the entire interface (like you were viewing an account in your browser), to an interface with just tabs, or no navigation elements at all. Secondly, you can remove the need to toggle between apps to get tasks done (or share data) - with single sign-on, users no longer have to login to both apps separately.

To see this in action now, look no further than the Salesforce for Campaign Monitor integration, which allows users to manage all their marketing via a single interface:

All up, we think this is pretty exciting if you're working on CRM software, a CMS plugin, or even a white-label agency portal for clients. When our clients are also your clients, making work between web apps as frictionless as possible is simply good sense.

So, how can I get started?

To embed our app into yours, what you'll need first is an IntegratorID. Simply get in touch with us and we'll run through the details.

With an IntegratorID in hand and a few extra details provided by us, you'll be able to embed our application in an iFrame and use our session method to skip the login process for end-users. If you have any questions along the way, our devs are always available to lend a hand, plus there's our API Developer forums for sharing notes and getting your pressing questions answered.

A big thanks to everyone who requested support for embedding Campaign Monitor into their own projects. We're really hoping we've made this process as straightforward as possible, but if there's something extra we can offer to make it easier to work with us, be sure to let us know, either by getting in touch or via the comments below.

Makes everything client branded

The great thing about setting a custom domain for a client is that it localizes everything for that client. This means they can login into their account at that domain. All the links in each campaign they send will use that domain for link tracking. If anyone shares their campaigns on social networks, that's the domain they'll see.

How to set one up

Head into Client Settings for a client you'd ike to enable this for, and on the right you'll notice a new option to "Set a custom domain". From there you simply follow the simple DNS instructions, we'll verify everything is set up correctly and you're good to go.

What if I already have an account-level domain?

We've designed the new client-level domains to work in harmony with your account-wide domain. This means a client can still log in using your account domain, but we'll still use their client-level domain for any link tracking, etc.

This feature is live and available in your account now, and if you run into any issues setting one up, we're always here to help.

For those just dabbling with HTML email, or needing a few bite-sized lessons for the train ride to work, this Pocket Guide makes for easy, entertaining and concise reading, for about the same price as a cup of coffee (£2). As well as a lot of the stuff we like to wax lyrical about (eg. email design and code), the Pocket Guide also covers topics like transactional email and copywriting; if you're developing a comprehensive email and content strategy, this is a great place to start.

It's evident from reading both Andy's blog and the Pocket Guide that email campaigns, like the one we featured in our gallery for his company, ImpulseFlyer, are moving parts in a grander, more detailed marketing plan. That said, the Pocket Guide remains a high-level primer, the rendezvous point for a grand adventure ahead. If you enjoy where his whimsical narrative takes you, then there's plenty to further your email marketing knowledge in our free guides, including titles on planning email campaigns, optimizing for mobile devices and more.

The Pocket Guide to HTML Email is available as a digital download (PDF, EPUB & MOBI) from Five Simple Steps. To find out more about what's inside, swing by their site.

To provide a bit of background, the central issue when hiding content is Gmail's lack of support for the display CSS property. Gmail strips out display: none; from HTML email code, thus resulting in today's trouble. So, while it's been possible to 'trick' this email client by using display: none !important;, this makes it impossible to use display to toggle an element's visibility in a media query for mobile devices. As Chris here puts it, !important is like the sledgehammer of CSS - use it with care, as nothing can stop it when it's swinging.

Why hide content in desktop and webmail clients?

There are a couple of inventive reasons why you would want to do this, including:

• To display links for mobile-specific content (eg. a "Download from the App Store" button)
• When using responsive email techniques, like progressive disclosure

Both use cases have been cause for lengthy speculation in our forums, so it was no surprise that the solution was to be found there, also.

An elegant workaround

After months of to-fro, we combined a couple of approaches to hiding content in mobile and desktop clients and finally came up with a fairly lightweight solution. Lightweight, until you realise that all this is to compensate for the lack of one lousy CSS property:

<style>
/* Media query for displaying content in mobile email clients */
@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) { 
   .hide { max-height: none !important; font-size: 12px !important; display: block !important; }
}

...

/* CSS for hiding content in desktop/webmail clients */
.hide { max-height: 0px; font-size: 0; display: none; }
</style>

<!-- Content to hide in desktop/webmail clients, display in mobile -->
<p class="hide">Download from the App Store</p>

Hiding images makes for a more interesting scenario. Applying the .hide class to the <img> tag isn't enough - you also have to surround the image with a <div> or <span> to ensure this technique plays along with both Gmail and Outlook. For example:

<!-- Image to hide in desktop/webmail clients, display in mobile -->
<div class="hide"><img src="..." class="hide" /></div>

Terrible. However, it does the job. There are two caveats, the first being that this technique does not work in Lotus Notes 6 & 7, however if you've been around the traps for long enough, you've likely realised that nothing CSS-related does. The second is that media query support is required in mobile email clients to make elements visible. So while this technique works in iOS Mail and Android Mail (which make up the vast majority of mobile opens), you likely won't have much luck in Gmail for iOS.

Finally, a big thanks to LandoCalrissian for getting the conversation started, jeremypeter for providing a great code example and everyone else who contributed to this fix. If you have any questions or observations, be sure to share them with us on the forums, or in the comments below. And hang on to your vinyl, okay?

The hype surrounding Mailbox has been impossible to escape. There's been breathless commentary on geek blogs. A six-figure waitlist. Numerous side-by-side comparisons with Gmail, which also has its own stripped-down mobile email app with push notifications. Even parodies, thanks to MailappApp. However, what's been missing from the conversation is how Mailbox is bound to impact HTML email designers and senders, like you and I. So, we took the first opportunity presented to run this mobile email client through our barrage of CSS support tests, to find out if it was as trouble-free for our crowd as it aims to be for email recipients.

What's in the 'box?

Everyone, breathe - the great news is that Mailbox is going to be the least of your worries when designing email for mobile devices. What became immediately clear during our initial tests is that it's powered by WebKit - or some variation thereof. As a result, it breezed through our CSS2 and CSS3 tests, just as other major WebKit clients - iOS Mail and Android default Mail - have.

Likewise, Mailbox supports media queries, which opens this client up to the responsive email techniques that we know and love. Even Google Web Fonts get the nod. This is in stark contrast to Gmail for iOS, which suffers from CSS support that's on par with its parent webmail client, including no media query support. Mailbox also displays email messages wall-to-wall (at least, when the email hasn't been threaded in a conversation), which is in contrast to the weird padding Gmail adds to the sides of each and every message. I think you get the idea - from a sender's perspective, Mailbox and Gmail for iOS are in no way comparable.

For enquiring minds, it goes to show that it isn't something in Gmail's opaque cloud that's disabling incoming HTML emails, it's the Gmail client itself that's selectively stripping out CSS.

Other niceties that set Mailbox apart from other mobile email clients are no email truncation over a cellular connection and that images are displayed by default. See? We can all rest easy now.

Does send time matter anymore?

A well-publicized part of Mailbox are the options it provides to 'snooze' or 'postpone' an email message (pictured above). It's a clever idea - often, not all of the messages in your inbox need to be responded to at once and having a seemingly-full inbox of 'things to-do later' can be an unwelcome mental overhead. What makes this idea particularly interesting to senders is that it undermines theories on the importance of send time to the success of an email campaign. While we've never considered send time to be a critical factor, to those who see the science behind sending at 9am on a Tuesday, the ability to postpone email must seem like a potential quandry. However, it's an unstoppable shift - now email clients have grown from being humble message buckets, into fully-fledged productivity and collaboration tools too, it's increasingly likely that email recipients will choose to read email on their terms, not when senders personally feel they have the best chance of getting their messages read.

Time will tell if we start seeing subscribers frequently opening their emails in the hours, or days following a send, especially if this idea gathers steam amongst other clients. More than ever, email creators should focus on generating engagement; on creating messages that are compelling enough to be responded to now, not filed away for later (or, forever).

We invited the Mailbox team to comment on the state of mobile email and how they hope to influence reading habits, so there may well be an update to this post in the days ahead. But in the interim, we'd love to hear your experiences with Mailbox.

Have you given this new mobile email client a try? Will it change how we read email? Let us know in the comments below.

Simply, Guided Access is a great little feature that can be found in 'Settings' on devices running Apple iOS 6. Using Guided Access, you can limit your iPad to one app, disable buttons and have a passcode prompt display, should someone try to break out of the restrictions in place. This means you can start a Guided Access session, run Enlist, then leave the iPad on a counter to quietly do its thing. Or do the same and hand around your subscribe form at an event.

For the parents out there, we've also been told that GA works great as a "kids mode", preventing the littlies from firing jibberjabber emails to the boss. To find out more about what Guided Access can do and get started, check out Apple's walkthrough.

We hear you - a whitelabel app is on its way

We've had a lot of passionate requests for a non-branded version of our iPad app since Enlist's release in November, particularly from our agency and reseller friends. Well, here's some good news for all of us - a whitelabel app is most certainly in the works. Like Enlist, it will hook up with subscriber lists seamlessly, but you'll be able to give it to your clients.

To be one of the first to find out when it's released, you can subscribe to this blog using our new Subscribe Button to the right. We really can't wait to get this app into your hands, your client's hands, plus new subscriber hands, too!

Now that mobile email clients account for over 40% of email opens, it's time we looked at what we're serving our subscribers, post-click. After all, if a campaign doesn't result in conversions due to a clunky mobile web experience, then there's likely not much point in sending it.

Bringing down the bounce

If you've got an attention span like mine when browsing email on your iPhone or Android handset (ie. a short one), you too likely have little patience when a non-mobile optimized site appears after you click through on a newsletter. While a good offer may get left in the inbox for re-visiting later, more often than not, anything that involves more than a little resistance in the mobile browser results in the page getting closed and initial email getting deleted.

Reducing resistance is vital to reducing landing page bounce rates. The first thing worth considering is whether the landing pages we're linking to from campaigns are provide an inviting mobile experience, for example, by using responsive techniques to display mobile-tailored content. As Google cited in an earlier study:

"...we found that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they had trouble accessing from their phone, and 40% go to a competitor’s."“Mobile”-ize your business with Google Sites, Google Mobile Ads Blog

If you don't have the resources to build and optimize campaign landing pages from scratch, don't give up. Our friends at Unbounce have an intuitive responsive site builder that makes creating, testing and hosting responsive pages a breeze - here are some examples of their handiwork. If your site is powered by a CMS like WordPress, you'll likely find that there are oodles of themes available that have been designed to adapt for mobile devices.

The second thing is site speed - and this doesn't just affect whether a mobile user makes it to the landing page, but how long they stay there. Subscribers are likely to give up on even the best-designed sites if they take more than a few seconds to load (and cellular data connections don't help). Using a load time test like Pingdom or even your browser inspector tools can help determine what could be holding up your pages.

As you can imagine, mobile browser bounce rates will almost always be higher than desktop browser rates, but the more you can do to close that gap, the more successful your campaigns will be at converting clicks into more page views, purchases, or whatever your end goal may be. If you still need convincing as to whether giving your landing pages some love is worth it, I recommend taking a look at a MarketingSherpa's case study in which an iPhone-optimized landing page was shown to increase conversions by 40%. That's a big leap.

Finally, do you test your landing pages on mobile devices? Have you had any big wins with mobile optimization? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.

As they say, better late than never. Thankfully, this invitation by FREE retains its quirky, illustrated charms, regardless of what season it is. The careful use of typography, color and fun copy means that it's sure to be a welcome sight in any inbox, even after the tinsel has been packed away. Oh well, I just hope we all get invited to next year's event!

If you haven't heard about Turnstile already, lets say it's pretty much what it sounds like - a prompt to give a little something, prior to going through with the show. In the context of Wistia's email marketing support, Turnstile allows you to display an email subscribe form at any point during the playback of a Wistia-hosted video, then have the resulting new signups automatically pushed to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list. It's an elegant way to collect subscribers, without having to fiddle with forms, popups, passwords and other obtrusive content gates.

For example, lets say you have a 10-minute presentation hosted with Wistia. What you can do is have the Turnstile subscribe form appear after a few minutes of play, prompting the viewer to sign up to your newsletter if they want more content like this. Alternately, you can just display the form at the end. This is what Wistia have done in their ever-excellent Turnstile demo video:

The love between Wistia and Campaign Monitor runs deep. Once you've uploaded a video, this integration can be set up within Wistia's SuperEmbed Builder, so you can start collecting new subscribers in a matter of moments. Then, with our autoresponders, you can hook up a 'thank you' email to be automatically sent to your viewers, featuring an introductory message and perhaps even links to other resources they may like.

As you can imagine, there's a bit of give and take with your viewers when using something like Turnstile to collect email addresses. Having a "We want your email!" message pop up mid-video is likely to annoy some folks, so instead, we recommend being a little more informative and customizing the subscribe message to state what they'll get as a subscriber. For example, something like "To receive more marketing tips like this, subscribe to our newsletter" and providing the option to skip the prompt will ensure that you're only collecting engaged and happy new signups.

Wistia already have a unique solution for tracking who watched a video after clicking through from your newsletters, so be sure to check that out, too.

Many thanks to Wistia's Turnstile for making content marketing even simpler for folks like you and me. To find out how you can stay in touch with your viewers via email, swing by their site.

A Subscribe Button with optional subscriber count

We developed the Subscribe Button with a particular purpose in mind. Forms can be clunky things. They take up a lot of space on the page and can often be tricky to get looking great in all browsers. The Subscribe Button replaces that complexity with a simple, customizable button you can drop anywhere. It's especially perfect for your sidebar, footer or any page with limited screen real-estate.

Just copy and paste the code anywhere you like, and once it's pressed a simple subscribe form instantly appears. Here's a quick demo you can check out showing it in action.

An example of the customizable form that loads as soon as the button is pressed

Customize the button

We've put a lot of care into the polish of these buttons, which are available in two colors and sizes. You can use your own button text, and also choose to show or hide the number of subscribers in that list. Just like the number of Twitter followers or Facebook Likes, this is a nice way to promote the size of your list and encourage others to join.

Tweak the form to suit

We've also given you lots of control over the subscribe form. You can choose which fields you'd like to show, and in what order. We've also added the ability to set some fields as required, and you can add your own title and introduction at the top of the form to provide more context. If that's not necessary, simply delete it and the design of the form will automatically adjust to suit.

Available now

The Subscribe Button launched a few moments ago, and is now live in all accounts. You'll find it under a simplified sidebar for each subscriber list in your account. Just click on Grow your audience option to get started.

We're not done on the subscriber focus just yet. I'm also very excited to announce a private label version of Enlist is now under review at Apple, and we've also added lots of new features to both it and Enlist based on your feedback. We've also got some other ideas on ways to make it easier to attract more subscribers that I'll be sharing very soon. ]]> 2013-02-20T23:16:53+00:00 David Greiner http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3935/one-person-can-now-access-multiple-clients http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3935/one-person-can-now-access-multiple-clients The release of team management mid-last year was kind of a big deal. It was one of our most requested features, and the fact that more than 700,000 accounts have been created shows how well it's been received. Since it's release, there's been one request in particular we've been hearing a lot. Today I'm happy to share that it's been knocked off the list and is live in your account.

A quick recap

If you missed it, our team management update made it so you could add an unlimited number of people under each client, all with different levels of permission. You can also create an unlimited number of administrators, too. Here's how it looks:

Team management makes it easy to add multiple people to each client

The one big limitation of this new feature was that each person you added under a client had to be unique. So, if you added Ron Burgundy to the Eyewitness News client, you couldn't add him to the Evening News client as well (although, that would come with it's own set of problems).

This made it tricky when someone needed to access multiple clients, but couldn't make them an administrator because they'd have access to all clients, plus billing and other sensitive information.

One person, many clients

As of today, you can now add the same person to as many clients as you need. Just follow the same workflow you always have, and be sure to use the same email address each time you add them. You can even give them different permissions for different clients if you need to be that granular.

Now, whenever that person logs in, they will have access to the switch-between-clients tool that an administrator sees. The only difference here is that it will only include the clients they have been given access to. Here's how that looks:

The client switcher is now available for people with access to multiple clients

So, no process changes or additional complexity. Just follow the same steps you always have when adding a person to a client, and we'll do the rest.

Subscriber Notifications provide a beautiful, flexible new way to keep up with the people joining your subscriber lists. We've given you and every person in your account complete control over what details you'd like to know about and when.

Instant Notifications

If you're interested in learning everything you can about each person that joins your list, you're going to love our instant notifications. You can activate them on a list-by-list basis, and every time someone signs up, we'll send you something like this...

A sample instant notification with custom fields

Each email will include all the data they might have supplied when subscribing. Plus, we'll show you exactly where they subscribed from and if available, what they look like. It's amazing how quickly this turns them into a real person instead of just another email address. These notifications can be set on a list-by-list basis, so you're only updated instantly when you need to be.

Daily, Weekly or Monthly Summaries

As well as instant notifications, you can also choose a daily, weekly or monthly summary that gives an overview of all the new subscribers across every list. We'll show you where they're from, which lists they've been added to and even pull out a few friendly faces.

A sample monthly summary showing new subscribers across multiple lists

How to turn notifications on

This feature is now live and available for all customers. You'll notice a new option in the sidebar of "Lists & Subscribers" like this...

From there you can select any lists you'd like instant updates for, and if you'd like to receive a daily, weekly or monthly summary across all of your lists.

Just like every email you send with Campaign Monitor, each notification will support a single click to turn notifications off, or change your preferences.

Private label notifications for your clients

First things first, notifications will not be turned on by default for you or your existing clients. But, if your clients would find these notifications useful, they can easily activate them from their own accounts and we'll send them a version that respects any branding you've made to your own account. As always, there won't be any mention of Campaign Monitor.

Here's how it might look if your company is called ABC Widgets...

These notifications are set on a per-person basis. As long as a client has permission to manage their own subscribers, they can head into their notification preferences and choose the types of updates that suit them. Please also note that while notifications are off for all existing people in each client, any new people that are added in the future with "Manage Subscribers" permission will have a weekly summary turned on by default, which they can change at any time.

A focus on the right people

One final point worth mentioning, these notifications are all about organic subscribers joining your lists. This means we won't notify you about subscribers you manually import yourself, only those that join from your subscribe forms, an integration you might have set up, Enlist or the API.

We're really happy to get this one out the door, it's something we've seen a lot of requests for over the years. A big thanks to everyone who got in touch and requested this - your feedback is what fuels these kinds of improvements. We've got another exciting subscriber related announcement coming in the next couple of days, so stay tuned for all the details soon.

Now, we're not talking about devolving into sending plain-text email here - although as far as consistency goes, nothing can beat it. What we have in mind is a greater emphasis on creating reliable, responsive experiences by taking a type-first approach to email design.

This thinking can be attributed to a similar trend that's happening on the web, where designers are foregoing fancy layouts for simpler, more device-independent designs. As James Young observes in his post, "The responsive web will be 99.9% typography":

"Looking at a string of recent releases from individuals, startups and agency clients it feels like there’s an emerging aesthetic that is very stripped back, focused on typography and blocks of simple content that can be easily moved..."- "The responsive web will be 99.9% typography", WelcomeBrand.co.uk

This aesthetic shift isn't being driven by some fluffy love of minimalism, it's being driven by both necessity and results. Necessity, because complicated and media-rich designs mean more testing for designers to do. Results, because successful responsive designs, both email and web, result in happier readers and greater engagement.

A type-first, hacks-last approach to email

While many HTML email methodologies have been long abandoned by the web (table-based layouts, anyone?), responsive design has resulted in the two disciplines sharing much in common as of late. Again, from James:

"We’re reaching the point already where there are more hacks... than there have ever been in order to make a site work on even a small range of devices. 12 months down the line, us, the designers of these sites will be maintaining an increasingly flaky set of templates and nested media queries to deal with screen sizes, retina displays and whatever appears on the device market next year.- "The responsive web will be 99.9% typography", WelcomeBrand.co.uk

More hacks... Flaky templates... Sound familiar? That's because email designers like us have had to put up with a lot of nonsense from email clients for a very long time now, as the hacks that fill our blog and forums will attest. As a result of this nonsense, we've had to design defensively for the sake of both current and new email clients - minimizing the use of CSS, while maximizing font-sizes and the use of 'bulletproof' HTML attributes. Now, instead of setting us free with reliable CSS support, mobile devices have forced us to ratchet this defensiveness up a notch, to cater for a myriad of display dimensions, too.

This email newsletter by Justin Veiga shows this text-first trend in action - it remains readable and beautiful in every client, at any zoom level.

Will the result of this defensiveness be a run towards big-type, only-type emails? For one, these require less hacks and less maintenance from designers, not to mention, less testing. Heck, emails like Justin Veiga's (above) don't even require media queries to look big on small screens. And you can forget about the injustices of image blocking altogether when images are secondary to the message in the text.

Then, for email recipients, there's the benefit of a clearer message, greater consistency between email clients and shorter load times. As they say, less is more.

Should email, like the web, become 99.9% typography? We'd love to hear your opinion, so please chime in with your text-only comments below.

First, I personally have to admit that I've always approached image embedding with a sour dollop of skepticism, given this technique's track record of:

• Sloppy support in email clients
• Producing large email file sizes, since the image data is embedded in the HTML file as a huge text string
• Adding attachments to the email message (when images are embedded as a data URI in MIME Multipart/Related content)
• Being a technique used by spammers (and penalized by spam filters)

Nonetheless, its popularity has endured, generally because of the promise that embedding is a legitimate workaround to image blocking in email clients. But is this still true now?

The lowdown on inline embedding

Before we go elbows-deep into the results, it's worth mentioning that we're going to look at support for inline embedded images only. Unlike the aforementioned MIME Multipart/Related content method, this is something you can try at home, in your Campaign Monitor account, without having to source your own scripts or specialized tools. However, if you're comfortable with rolling-your-own multipart messages, you're more than welcome to share your experiences with us in the comments below.

To get testing, we base64 encoded a JPEG image, as per the recipe described here. The resulting text string looked something like this:

<img alt="Embedded Image" height="128" width="128" src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD....snip..." />

Using this hot mess, we added the image to an email and tested away. Sadly, the results across the most popular email clients were almost as choppy as before:

The word is out - embedded images in email do not evade image blocking. In the case of 'the Outlooks'¹ above, not only were the images blocked, but they largely remained blocked, even when the other images in a newsletter were downloaded. The majority of email clients which reliably display embedded images (being Apple and iOS Mail) don't block images by default, making this technique redundant.

Now, it's over to you - have you used encoded images successfully in your campaigns? Why? Examples and lively discussion are welcomed in the comments below.

¹ By the way, 'The Outlooks' is my future indie-band name, hands off yuppies.

In my previous life as a full-time email designer, I had a big-name client who used to make all sorts of cross-client comparisons when reviewing email campaigns. Rounds of amends would commonly begin with, "Wow, the spacing between paragraphs is different between Hotmail and Outlook" and "Why doesn't the newsletter look the same in both Outlook and Lotus Notes?"

Of course, the client had the right to question inconsistencies like this, and if anything, we should have caught them first. So we'd explain that there were rendering differences between email clients, then do our best to rope these differences in (generally with the help of lots of tables). After all, we both had a style guide to live up to.

Situations like this used to make me wonder whether designers are too hard on themselves in regards to cross-email client consistency, especially when they're not answering to a corporate style guide. Just like it is in browser land, each email client has its quirks, its things it does and doesn't support, hard-coded in. Would it be healthier to accept this variation and design for an optimal experience in the most sophisticated clients, while ensuring any bells and whistles degrade gracefully for everyone else? After all, many of us are accustomed with the idea of a "mobile version" and a "desktop version" of an email newsletter - so why not an "Apple Mail version' and a 'Outlook version', too?

The argument for this is not just a fluffy matter of aesthetics - techniques like using web fonts instead of images for headings, or even animated GIFs can potentially have an impact on response rates. For example, making a call-to-action more appealing to 30% of your subscribers (and still decent for everyone else), is likely to result in more clicks than you would have had when aiming for a universally consistent design.

Secondly, unforseeable events like Outlook.com dropping margin and float support go to show that what may work one day, may totally be laid to waste another. When things like this happen, you can't be blamed for taking the defeatist line that 'consistency' is 'impossibility'.

Nonetheless, we can't be blamed for placing emphasis on consistency. In many aspects of our jobs, it's critical. However, given the rendering differences between email clients can be so great, perhaps it's worth occasionally thinking about how we can craft the best possible email experience, instead of levelling things simply to benefit those facing the worst.

Is consistency between email clients important to you and your colleagues? Why, or why not? Let us know in the comments below.

Naturally, it didn't take long for our email designer friends to notice that without margins, elements in their email newsletters were collapsing into each other like bros at a Twister party. Our forums almost immediately lit up with reports that spacing between paragraphs, images and articles had vanished with margin and its variants - margin-top, margin-right, margin-bottom and margin-left.

Our first response was 'well wait, there has to be a workaround'. So we proceeded to hack away with attribute selectors, !important and even the esoteric .ExternalClass. Every time, Outlook.com stripped all mentions of margin from our HTML email code, simply leaving tantalizing semi-colons, like prawn tails after a seafood dinner.

A world without margins

The ever-observant Email On Acid were quick to the scene, with an in-depth post on Outlook.com's lack of margin support. In the absence of a workaround, they provided a great nugget of advice:

Though it will never work in quite the same way as margin, the padding property can be used in many places where margin would have been ideal. Just remember that padding goes inside the border of an HTML element, whereas margin goes outside the border.'Emailology: Outlook.com Margin-alizes CSS Properties', Email on Acid

We also recommend going back to roots and using table cells and the cellpadding and cellspacing attributes where possible. These are the cornerstones to a truly bulletproof HTML email layout.

Float is a no-go, too

Although this will affect far less designs, it's worth mentioning that Outlook.com has also dropped support for the float CSS property. This has traditionally had fairly mediocre support in email clients anyway, so we've generally recommended using the align HTML attribute instead.

Finally, don't forget to test your existing email designs and templates again in Outlook.com/Hotmail. You may be in for a bit of extra work during what's generally a quiet part of the year! We'll be updating our CSS support in email guide very soon to reflect these changes.

Has Outlook.com's decision to drop margin affected you? Let us know in the comments below.

Like most of you, I'd rather undertake practical studies in Mayan torture than ever have to write a line of Microsoft's VML code. Same goes for testing background image support across finicky clients like Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail. So it's with much joy that we've embraced the latest from Stig's lab, a 'Bulletproof Email Background Images' code generator. And by joy, we mean the bitter memory of countless hours spent coding and testing by hand, when we could have been drinking PBR and swaying moodily to Ratatat. That's how I spend my free time, anyway.

As the techniques for applying background images to entire email campaigns vs. table cells are considerably different, there are options for generating code for both scenarios. A word of warning in regards to the former, though - Outlook 20xx has been known to crash when a background image has been deemed 'too big' (either in file size or dimensions), so make sure you test your campaign in a real, live copy of Outlook before going for gold.

... and bulletproof buttons, too!

Not satisfied with simply releasing one highly-useful piece of email kit, Stig has also come good with emailbtn.net, a code generator for creating bulletproof email buttons. These buttons are great for adding a call-to-action to your design (eg. Read More, Buy Now) and don't look shabby, either. Simply opt for plain-color buttons or use a hosted background image, tune up your styles and woosh, out comes the required HTML/VML code. If you have some HTML coding experience, you'll be adding bulletproof buttons to your email designs faster than a cat in freefall.

Hopefully you'll find these generators to be a big help when coding your next email campaign by hand. If you're a fan, why not give Stig a high-five in the comments below!

Now that a large percentage of us are managing our email using inputs other than a mouse and keyboard, it's likely time that we considered the ergonomics of email design. Luke Wroblewski's recent post on responsive navigation got us thinking that the same concerns with link placement as it relates to adaptive design apply to email as they do the web.

U Can't Touch This: The trouble with touchscreens

From a usability point of view, two features that regularly differentiate emails viewed on touch devices from those opened by the keyboard-and-mouse set are:

1. Viewport dimensions that are often on the small side (ie. phones)
2. Buttons, links and content that are not as easy to use on touch screens as they are on other displays

If you browse your email on a mobile device, you've likely come across email newsletters that are near-impossible to read and navigate. In most cases, its a matter of a wide layout, or a lot of content forcing the mobile email client to zoom out as to fit it all on a small screen. The result - content and links that are too small to be usable. As Luke's post mentions:

"...while big touch targets can be comfortably used with a mouse, small mouse size targets can't be used easily with touch." 'Responsive Navigation: Optimizing for Touch Across Devices ', Luke Wroblewski

Then, there's the ergonomic factor. Unlike screens which can be quickly manipulated using a mouse's wide range of motion, touch interfaces tend to be more or less usable, depending on the posture you assume (eg. thumb typing, using the device with the hand you're holding it with, or resting it on a table). Again, over to Luke:

"These common patterns of posture create easy to hit and hard to reach touch areas. The area toward the bottom of the screen is easy, whereas the upper corners are a bit of stretch".'Responsive Navigation: Optimizing for Touch Across Devices', Luke Wroblewski

Pictured above is Luke's diagram of what are considered to be 'Hard', 'OK' and 'Easy' touch areas on a mobile device, when used by a right-handed person in a variety of postures. If on opening an email, your primary call-to-action is in an 'OK' or 'Hard' area, could this have implications for your response rates?

Putting this into practice

Now, it would be silly to radically alter a perfectly good email layout based on this touch area hypothesis alone. However, as we covered in a previous blog post on email usability, aligning your content to the left does already have a proven advantage - being seen. To recap:

"...readers of left-to-right languages (like English) are accustomed to scanning from the top-left first. Keep this in mind when designing two- or more column layouts."'Email usability: The science of keeping it short and sweet', Campaign Monitor

This scanning-from-the-left behavior continues as a reader scrolls down a screen, which means links placed in the 'Easy' zone are optimal for both reading and tapping.

In the 'Design techniques' chapter of our Guide to Responsive Email Design, we make a couple of additional recommendations regarding touch target size and placement, so we highly recommend giving this short chapter a read if you're interested in making the most of your links.

Finally, we'd like to hear your take on this crazy idea. Should we consider device ergonomics when designing newsletters? Do you struggle to navigate emails, because links are out of reach? How could this affect your response rates? Let us know in the comments below.

A renewed focus on resellers

Let's start out with some of the things which we hope made things easier for designers and agencies. What comes to mind first is our team management and collaboration update, which gave designers the ability to provide multiple people with access to a client account, with permissions to do tasks like view reports, upload templates and more. This was something that had been heavily requested - and we were more than happy to get into your hands. After all, email marketing is a team effort, so making the app something that could be securely used by your client, your intern, your accounting guy and whoever else was a big step forward.

To sweeten the deal, we also rolled out new monthly plans and a 10% discount to our agency friends. It's all about offering a top-notch service to your clients at competitive rates.

Simpler ways to build your lists

Getting new signups into your subscriber lists as seamlessly as possible was a goal for this year, so it was with much pleasure that we rolled out Enlist, our very own app for transforming your Apple iPad into a subscribe form. Thousands of downloads later, it has proven itself to be a hit.

Just weeks previous, we also overhauled our subscriber import process. Alongside a new look and drag-and-drop interface, you can now also import Excel and compressed (.zip, .rar) files, watch how the import is progressing and weed out dud email addresses.

Fast track your campaigns with RSS content

Like the team management and collaboration update, the ability to send RSS-to-email campaigns was another in-demand item we let loose this year. Being able to automatically convert blog content into email campaigns was a big win for many of our customers, especially in light of Feedburner's uncertain future.

Not wanting to stop there, we also made it possible to add RSS content to regular email campaigns via the email editor. We call it one-click content and hope it saves you time when composing campaigns.

API updates

Developers using our service may have noticed some of the new methods we added to our API last year (and updates to existing ones). Useful additions have included the the ability to create campaigns from templates and transfer email credits between clients - our official wrappers have also been kept in step with this new functionality, too. For the latest, it's well worth keeping an eye on our API announcements forum.

A massive site makeover

If there was anything more thrilling than taking the wrapping off our new site in June, it was receiving your feedback. It was so good to not only receive a lot of constructive stuff, but to top things off, gems like this:

The new @campaignmonitor redesign is beautifully done. I'm a huge fan of the new identity.

— Andy Smiff (@Andy_Smiff) June 25, 2012

The response to our new design and branding was overwhelmingly positive. As was the response to a swag of new guides and resources that we added for good measure. In particular, our Guide to Responsive Email Design is worth a read if you're keen to get your head around 2012's email marketing hot topic - mobile email.

Now, this is only the skinny of what kept us busy behind the scenes in 2013. We wish we could do the proud parent thing and mention all of the smaller changes, like the extra design and spam tests and countless UI tweaks, but we won't bore you with the details. Instead, we hope that they've improved your workday, even if they often go largely unnoticed (that's okay).

On the home front, our team grew by 18 people this year. Now, we're no mega-corp, so that's kind of a big deal to us. With all these extra hands on deck, we'll be bringing you faster replies to your support questions, more useful features and a rock-solid service into 2013 and beyond.

What can we do to make your 2013?

Last but not least, we wanted to hear your take on what one thing you'd like to see added or improved this year. Is there a feature you've always wanted, or a topic you would like to see covered in a guide? As always, we're listening, so please let us know all about it in the comments below. And don't forget that you can always chime in on our forums, or say hi to our team!

If you cut your teeth on coding the '90s web, you probably remember things like auto-playing MIDI files with some perverse affection. Ah, the good times, when having the 'X-Files Theme' forced on you was the tell-tale sign that you were indeed visiting a Geocities page.

Well, you'll be pleased to know that you can play (and autoplay) music in HTML email, using the HTML5 <audio> tag. While this technique is only fully supported in Apple and iOS Mail (mind you, that's almost 50% of recorded opens), the faily-reliable display of fallback content in other clients makes it a possible addition to any email campaign.

Why add sound to email?

Putting sarcasm aside for a moment, there may be some pretty valid reasons why one would want to add recorded speech or music to an email newsletter. For example, lets say you're a musician and want to provide your loyal fans with a convenient way to listen to your latest single. Or a language teacher and like providing pronunciation tips to your students. For accessibility reasons, you may want to even feature a spoken version of your message, for those who can't see it.

Keep in mind that streaming music over a mobile data connection may end up being a costly exercise for those on metered plans, so this is certainly not a technique to use lightly.

Make some noise for HTML5!

Before we go headlong into the code, we'd like to point out that while the <audio> tag allows you to embed a media player into an email design, the audio isn't embedded in the email message. Instead, you will have to host and stream the file from your own server.

So lets say we have all this sorted out, adding a player is easy. Simply use the following code:

<audio controls="controls">
	<source src="http://yourdomain.com/widgetwiggle.mp3">
	<p>♫ Listen: <a href="http://yourdomain.com/widgetwiggle.mp3">Widget Wiggle</a> (mp3)</p>
</audio>

In Apple and iOS Mail, you should see an embedded player. Elsewhere, the fallback will be displayed:

The above snippet can be simply edited and pasted into the <source> view of any multiline editable region in our template editor, which makes things easy if you just want to add an audio file to an article.

Hotmail (and clients that don't support HTML5) won't rock with you

While this technique is fairly benign in most email clients, issues arise in Hotmail, where the controls are disabled, just as they were in our previous HTML5 video tests. Sadly, the Safari browser doesn't let you use the 'right-click to play' trick that we outlined earlier and Firefox doesn't display the player at all.

Likewise, we found that Postbox strips out the <audio> tags and content altogether, perhaps pre-empting the chaos that audio in email could bring. For both clients, your best bet is perhaps to feature a secondary fallback, such as a link to the file in the email copy, so subscribers have something other than the HTML5 audio content to work with.

Putting a stop to autoplay

We've said it before - please don't use autoplay. Yes, it works - even in Hotmail, where a lack of player controls will cause nothing but grief... And unsubscribes. There was a reason why historical tags like <bgsound> were deprecated and that's because everyone strongly dislikes having things play that they can't control.

On a related note, you may be interested in how Facebook uses sound files to track their email campaigns. It's an interesting idea, but not one we'll likely recommend implementing any time soon.

Well, that's the skinny on audio and email. If you try this at home, please do so for the happiness and convenience of humankind. Not to force everyone into reliving the 90's by listening to the X-Files theme.

Is adding audio to email brilliant, or simply a bad idea? Let us know in the comments below.

During the holiday season, we thought we’d feature a couple of the lovely festive designs that have slid across our desk. Now, if you’ve been following this gallery, you may have noticed that we’re quite partial to the animated GIF, so this e-card from Suka, an NYC-based creative agency was near-irresistable. After they explained the love that went into it, we were sold:

Every year, we send a Thanksgiving card to our clients to express our gratitude and appreciation. It is also a way for us to stand out from the many holiday cards they receive in December. This year, we decided to send it electronically, so we could incorporate motion to tell a story and track the results. Each member of the Suka team was assigned a character from the word “THANKS!” which he/she was required to create using three-dimensional objects. The results were very unique and quite stunning. After an extensive but supremely fun (and at times silly) photo shoot, we used the shots to create an animated GIF.

Nicely done, Suka - may you and yours have a great holiday season ahead!

Not a reskin, a whole new client

For those who haven't seen, or heard of Alto previously, it is a whole-new webmail client by AOL and not simply a reskin of the long-running AOL Mail. Important to note is that Alto itself doesn't provide users with an email address - at least at this stage, you will need an existing Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL or iCloud account to use this service. So the idea is to provide a much more attractive email experience to existing webmail users, over the traditional approach of getting people to sign up for yet another email address.

To compliment the browser version, mobile Alto is in the pipeline, too.

As far as providing a nicer email experience goes, Alto isn't doing too badly. The right-hand side preview pane is large and very clean-looking, as are messages in the inbox - very much reminiscent of iPad Mail. Plus, this idea of creating 'stacks', or essentially, filters for organizing incoming messages is appealing. A lot of this extra screen real estate is largely thanks to the fact that Alto is entirely ad-free (for now) - we'll be curious to see if the usual banners and contextual advertising are something that creeps in over time.

One unusual bug-bear we had is how text flashes when you scroll to read a message in the Safari browser. It's like the font-weight changes momentarily and as they say, once you see, you cannot unsee. But on the upside, we think the ability to 'snooze' (ie. selectively hide) messages for a set period of time is pretty neat.

Yes, on to CSS support already

Credit goes to Alto's engineers and designers, given that their idea of a good email experience also includes pretty robust CSS support in HTML email. Like AOL Mail before it, Alto didn't throw up any real curlies, much to our relief. Commonly used properties like background-image and list-style-image are supported, as are margin, padding, border and width. There's even fairly good CSS3 support, with -webkit-border-radius and box-shadow making the cut.

Another few 'good to know' items is that Alto displays images by default - in fact, I don't think there's a way to disable them, should you want to. Anchor links also work, as do animated GIFs and web fonts.

As Alto comes out of private beta, we'll look at adding it to our guide to CSS support. Until then, you can rest assured that it's not going to give your campaigns too much hassle.

Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow...

So, is Alto set to become a serious email client, any time after now? It's likely the skeptical will point to AOL Mail's tiny market share (and steady decline) when dismissing this email client, however we think there's a glimmer of possibility in it. For one, it does provide a friendly-looking, ad-free interface. It's also likely to appeal to both AOL's mom-and-pop userbase, as well as more sophisticated subscribers. We'll be sure to keen an eye on whether Alto gets steam after it goes public, so be sure to watch this space.

Finally, if you're lucky enough to have received an invite, we'd love to hear what you think about Alto. Is it to your taste? Do you find it makes it easier to say, work through your regular Gmail inbox? Let us know in the comments below.

Transfer credits to and from clients

For resellers that use our API to automate client management tasks, the ability to transfer email credits should come in fairly handy. For example, you can now allocate email credits to clients, say, as a welcome gift upon signup or as a bonus. Plus, now that we've added email credit totals to the existing methods for getting a client's details and your billing details, it's also possible to keep an eye on credits consumed, or automatically top up a client's credits with your own when they start running low.

On that note, you can also use the transfer email credits method to set whether or not a client account can start using your credits or payment details when they run out of credits altogether. Hopefully these more flexible billing options will come in useful for folks taking advantage of PAYG pricing for themselves or their clients.

Finding the from and reply-to email addresses, text-version URL

So, we've has a few requests to beef up the information returned when getting drafts, plus scheduled and sent campaigns. So, we've added details like From name, From email address, Reply-to email address and a link to the plain-text version to the mix. So now, you can grab URLs to both the HTML and text versions of a campaign, say, for accessibility purposes.

The Perl wrapper gets a refresh

Finally, we've brought our Perl wrapper up with the times, so it supports all of our API's current functionality. It now lives in our collection of official API wrappers, which we diligently update whenever new methods like the transfer credits one come along.

A huge thanks to everyone who suggested these updates to our API - we hope that we've made things a little easier for you and your clients. As always, if you have any questions or just want to pipe up about our API, you'll always get a warm welcome on our API Developer forum.

For those who are keen to style up their text, but aren't too fussy about using fallbacks in some clients, web fonts in email are a real win. For starters, using web fonts is by far preferable to say, using images for headings and other styled text, given that they'll display regardless of whether images are turned off in the inbox. They'll often look crisper than images, too. Secondly, if you would otherwise use images for textual content, web fonts can potentially reduce load times, as only one request for the hosted font file is required, regardless of how many instances you use the font in a design.

Adding Google's web fonts to a design

While there are quite a few providers of web fonts out there (like FontShop), we decided to use Google Web Fonts, given that their library is free to use and as a result, ideal for experimenting with. However, you can choose any vendor you like, as long as they support font embedding using @import or <link>.

Admittedly, the hardest part of the process is finding the right font for your design in Google's near-limitless library. But lets say you've chosen one called 'Merienda'. Once you've tracked it down, click 'Quick-use', then on the following page, scroll down to '3. Add this code to your website' and click on the '@import' tab. The following code should appear:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Merienda);

Copy and paste this snippet to the CSS styles in the head of your HTML code, like so:

<style>
    @import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Merienda);
   /* All your usual CSS here */
</style>

Now, you can use 'Merienda' as if it were one of the usual fonts available to us when designing HTML email:

h4 {
   font-family: Merienda, 'Times New Roman', serif;
   color: #444444;
   font-size: 24px;
}

And that's that. To double-check that all has gone to plan, preview your email design; here are the results in Apple Mail:

Alternately, you may see the fallback in some email clients, so lets move on to which clients support @import (and web fonts in general) and which don't.

Support for web fonts in email using @import

Display of web fonts in email clients is far from universal. However, given that many major clients do support them (including Lotus Notes 8, surprisingly!) and the rest gracefully use any provided fallbacks instead, it's fairly safe to use. So without any further introduction, here's what web font support across the most popular email clients looks like today:

At this point, you may be wondering why we've favored using @import over say, the traditional <link> method for importing fonts. Well, we tested both and found that support for @import was just slightly better - @import worked in the Android default client, while <link> did not. Comparatively, earlier tests of the comparable @font-face method were far less promising and we don't expect much has improved since.

So, should we be using web fonts in email? If you would like to style up your text without relying on images and are not too fussy about a fallback displaying, then there's no harm in using this technique. However, given the rather patchy support for @import, we'd suggest steering clear of their use when designing for brand-conscious clients, or when it's essential to maintain a consistent look under most conditions.

Naturally, we were very keen to give it a test drive and see if the changes to this email client were more than skin deep. In this quick review, we'll look at how it supports CSS in HTML email and outline a couple of other notable features that are relevant to both designers and subscribers alike.

CSS support - more of the same?

Well, we won't hold you in any further suspense here - Gmail for iOS's CSS support is just as variable as its peers and predecessors, both mobile and browser-based. After running our tests, we found that it's still very much comparable to browser-based Gmail, in that it still ignores styles in <head>, which rules out CSS selectors and yes, media queries. This means that those who have created responsive email designs may have little success in tailoring their layouts for this client, unless using fully fluid approach (which isn't always a bad idea).

To give you an idea of what impact a lack of media query support can have, here's a side-by-side comparison of our newsletter, in Mail and Gmail respectively:

While the newsletter content is easily readable in Mail from the get go, in Gmail you're forced to zoom to make head or tail of it. This can be a tad awkward, especially as tap-to-zoom isn't enabled, as is customary in native apps like Safari and Mail. It seems we're not alone in thinking this is pretty sub-par as far as email navigation goes.

Then there's the quirks...

Other things haven't changed, either. For one, images are still blocked by default, although you are prompted to display them, then consequently always display them on a per sender basis (pictured above). We found that these settings are synced across your Gmail account as a whole - if a recipient selects for images to display for a given sender on their iPhone, this will carry across to Gmail in the browser and vice versa. Pretty neat.

What you may also notice is that emails are truncated with a 'Download entire message' prompt. While this may be reminiscent of iOS Mail's truncation, it's woth making the distinction that this occurs even when the message is downloaded over a wifi connection. This seems to occur when a message exceeds 20kb in size.

That said, the app's clean look and yes, ability to rapidly search for messages your Gmail account does really make v2 an attractive email client for iOS; we'll be sure to keep an eye out to see if it becomes a popular choice amongst your subscribers. However, for email designers and those just wanting to make their email campaigns beautiful and readable, it's ultimately more of the same.

What do you think of Gmail v2 for iOS? We'd love to hear your opinion in the comments below.

The finishing touches have been applied to our new-look Preference Center and Forward to a Friend pages, ready to view via both new and existing email campaigns. If you've previously customized these pages, you'll find your logos and branding have been seamlessly carried over - you don't have to do anything in your account. But that's not all you can expect from this complete redesign.

A more friendly Forward to a Friend page

If you remember how this page used to look, you may agree that it was high time it got an update. To double the good news, we didn't do things half-heartedly. After looking at how this page was being used, it was clear that most people forwarded campaigns to a single person only. So we compressed the form down to one recipient (with the option of adding up to another five), making the form much quicker to fill in and far less daunting. There's also an image of your newsletter, as a nice reminder of what the subscriber is passing on to their friends:

As part of this overall simplification, some of the more fiddly customization like the font or button colour are no longer available when customizing this page in your account. However, you can you can change the page background colour and add your own logo as before.

A Preference Center that you'll prefer

Like the Forward to a Friend page, we've cleaned up the Preference Center, to ensure the form is more intuitive to use and less error-prone. Your logo and colors can still be added to make this tidy design really yours:

Made for mobile screens

It's no secret that an increasing number of people are reading - and sharing - email campaigns on their mobile devices. So as part of this update, we've also optimized both the Preference Center and Forward to a Friend pages for mobile devices. Here's the same Forward to a Friend page as the one we showed earlier, now tightened up and slimmed down for small screens (click to see a larger version). With luck, you'll see an uptick in shares as a result!

You'll see these changes now when you view your email campaigns, or visit the 'Client Settings' tab in your account. A huge thanks to everyone who nudged us gently for a refresh - as always, we'd love to hear what you think of these pages' new look.

If you test your email designs on an iOS device like the iPhone or iPad, you've likely seen the following message:

While having your messages temporarily truncated may appear to be a mild annoyance, it does bring with it a silent issue - unless the email is fully downloaded, the open may not be recorded. While Email on Acid wrote an authoritative article on this less than a year ago, it seems that conditions have changed since then.

What triggers this message?

From our tests, we were able to reliably trigger this message by:

• Making the HTML file size greater than 15kb. This total does not include images or the plain-text version, both of which seem to have no impact on whether this message gets triggered.
• Downloading the message over cellular data, not WiFi. In a way, this is to be expected, given the cost of data in some countries.

As you can imagine, it's fairly easy to make the 'partially downloaded' message display - all that's required is a fairly-long newsletter with a comprehensive stylesheet for good measure. Unlike EoA's determination that only POP mailboxes are affected, we found that this could be reliably replicated in clients using IMAP, too.

In addition, we tested on iPhones running iOS 5 and iOS 6 and found that both truncated messages that exceeded 15kb and were accessed over cellular data.

Trial, error and sometimes even a fix

What makes this issue so mysterious is that it's sometimes possible to send HTML file sizes that are larger than the prescribed 15kb limit without triggering this message. In one test, we were able to dismiss the message repeatedly by removing the opening <body> tag. However, when this fix was applied to another newsletter, the message appeared, much to our chagrin. While EoA suggests this can be remedied by ensuring that there are more than 1,019 characters before the closing </head> tag, in the case of our successful <body> tag tests, we were able to get away with far less.

To avoid this message, your safest bet is to keep all email newsletters short and sweet, thus steering well clear of the 15kb danger zone, wile keeping in mind that inlining your CSS may also bump up the file size. Removing line breaks using a tool like HTML Minifier can also help keep file sizes down, but it will also make your code relatively unmanageable, too.

But at the end of the day, if the upper portion of your email is engaging, it's likely that folks who come across this message will choose to download the rest of the newsletter. So if anything, the best remedy is to ensure your content is interesting and relevant enough to make readers want to read more.

Have you had your email newsletters truncated? Is there another workaround? Let us know in the comments below.

For such a common message, there's remarkably little guidance out there as to how to handle 'change my address' autoreplies. So while we're going to let you know our recommendation shortly, we'd love to open this up for discussion - you likely have a point of view that's just as salient as our own.

Escaping Planet Email

First of all, why do folks set up these autoreplies in the first place? Our top guesses are that:

• They're not savvy enough to set up email forwarding/a domain redirect
• Their ISP is holding them hostage
• They're trying to escape a deluge of unwanted email (see: inbox bankruptcy)

The final point is the one that bothers us the most about updating a subscriber's email address manually. How about if they don't want to hear from anyone but their nearest and dearest? If they are really determined to receive your newsletter, they likely can subscribe again - why make that choice for them?

On the other hand, these autoreplies are, well, a request to do something. An "I'm abandoning my inbox, please help me", of sorts. However, as they aren't explicitly asking you to add their new address to a mailing list, doing so doesn't really hold water for us.

That said, there is the option of emailing the subscriber personally to confirm what their preferences are. But for most senders, these autoreplies, like hard bounces, are an inevitable and statistically insignificant part of the greater wonder that is email marketing.

Do 'my address has changed' emails give you permission to send? We'd love to hear your opinion, so lets get the party started in the comments below.

After a discussion on billing and 3rd-party apps got started in our forums, I thought we'd run a straw poll on what designers, developers and other online-focused folk are using to invoice their clients for services like email and web design...

Update: Poll is now closed, thank you for voting, everyone! Here are the results:

Don't forget that when clients send for themselves, we happily handle invoicing for you. But if you take a more hands-on approach to billing your clients for email marketing services, or charge for more than just email campaigns, then an invoicing app is likely to play a big part in running your business.

Why is this app your weapon of choice? We'd love to hear your thoughts, so let us know in the comments below.

It’s great to see creative companies promoting their Kickstarter campaigns and this newsletter for Eyetoons, by Ian Traynor at Six Creative isn’t anything short of pleasing to the eye. The use of bright colors and large text makes this campaign unmissable in the inbox, while the balance of text and imagery means that it’s a lovely campaign with images on, but just as readable when images are blocked in the inbox.

Our only advice would be to use a darker color for the links - the bright yellow may look great surrounding the content, but is just a little too light when applied to text. But overall, this is a newsletter that deserves your backing!

PS: Make sure you view the newsletter to see the super-subtle animated GIF.

Mistakes happen. When you're collecting email addresses, say, through another app or a paper list, spaces and typos may not get caught until you try importing these details into a subscriber list in your account. So, immediately after you add new subscribers, you'll now find that any invalid addresses can be viewed and edited in place. Once fixed, addresses are marked as 'Updated' and automatically added to the list:

This is certainly a sure sight better than going back and editing your .csv file, before trying to import it again.

Last month, we were keen to get the new subscriber import process into your hands as quickly as possible, then find out what you liked and what could be improved. As it played out, quite a few of you regularly fixed email addresses inline and saved a lot of time doing so. So, a big thank you to everyone who commented, tweeted and emailed us to request this - not only for your passionate responses, but for working with us as we brought this up to speed with the rest of our new subscriber import process.

Finally, if there's anything we can do to improve the subscriber import process, please let us know below or get in touch with us - we're listening and doing our best to get things just right.

Featuring results for 18 different email client/device combinations, our new 'Which mobile devices can you design for?' chart is the definitive resource for finding out whether your media queries are to be supported, or passed over by some of the most popular handsets and tablets on the market. Hopefully it will give you more confidence when testing your template builder creations, or a solid answer when a client asks if they can view the mobile version of a newsletter on their Blackberry. Jump into the guide to get in the know:

View the media query support chart

On the topic of tablets, whether emails should be optimized for displays exceeding 600px is a controversial topic, which we'll be covering in a blog post shortly.

Joining us in the fight for more mobile-friendly email newsletters is Anna Yeaman at Style Campaign, who laboriously tested many of the devices in the chart. We highly recommend checking out their blog for tips on providing a great experience for your mobile-weilding subscribers.

Have questions about support for a specific device? Throw us your biggest curveballs in the comments below.

Email client usage, now yours to play with

Since adding the email client usage report to the app, we've regularly received requests to make this data available via the API. Now, we've finally made it happen, with the introduction of a new method for returning email client usage for a campaign. In addition, when you retrieve a subscribers' details, the email client they last used will be returned, too.

The addition of email client usage data opens up some interesting possibilities when working with our API. For many, the big win will be the ability to graph this data in a dashboard, or add it to subscriber records in a CRM app. However, there's nothing stopping you from using it to create interesting segments, say, when sending campaigns specifically targeting iPhone users (iPhone app release, anyone?). Or perhaps someone could try cross-referencing email client usage with subscriber geolocation data as part of an interesting Maps mashup.

Subscriber management, made simpler

Another big-ticket item was the addition of a new method for returning unconfirmed subscribers. If you have confirmed opt-in lists, this ultimately allows you to add a count of these subscribers to a dashboard, or similar. On a related note, we've also now got a method for adding email addresses to a client's suppression list, which may come in useful if planning to exclude email addresses that may or may not be on any lists. Given that we also have an existing method for unsuppressing email addresses, this method may come in handy for tasks like pausing email subscriptions, excluding competitors and more.

Finally, it's now possible to access spam complaints for a given campaign via yet another new method; we've also added spam complaint stats to campaign summaries. Good times for those wanting to access more complete reports from outside of the Campaign Monitor app.

Alongside these updates, we've also tweaked our existing methods to allow campaign confirmation emails to be sent to multiple email addresses, plus, when creating a draft campaign, providing a plain-text version is now optional. Sometimes, the little things make all the difference.

Many thanks to Jimmy on our team for pushing through these changes - you can receive the latest news from him and the team by subscribing to our API Announcements forum. Rest assured that we've also updated our wrappers, so you can take advantage of our new methods straight away. As always, if there's something you would like added to our API (or improved), you can contact us directly or leave a comment below - we're keen to hear what you have to say!

As someone who's worked in an agency setting (and not just an office that smells of rich mahogany), I and likely you have heard all of the above. Sometimes, it's just hard to justify the time and effort that goes into a responsive design, just as it's hard to justify refactoring an otherwise image-heavy design, or even spending an hour on testing.

However, after reading this recent blog post by Email Design Review, I felt compelled to chip in with a little pep talk, a word or two to say, yes, it's really worth it.

For starters, as EDR pointed out:

"I think that it’s a no-brainer to look at providing a better experience for those users opening your emails on a mobile device. In fact, personally I find it a bit weird that we need stats before we think about this, but there we go."'A note on Responsive Email Design', Email Design Review, October 22, 2012

Nonetheless, the questions remain - are enough people going to benefit from a 'better experience' to make amending our stylesheets worth our time? Secondly, does a better experience actually lead to tangible benefits?

Your subscribers, now mobile

If you saw our earlier blog post on email client market share, then it won't come as a surprise that mobile now dominates. Not only do we now see iOS devices accounting for 35% of client usage overall, but Android usage growth clocking an impressive 90% increase over the course of just over a year.

The bottom line - a lot of people will benefit from a responsive experience now and more will in the future. In addition, the most popular mobile devices have native mail applications that support media queries, so support for responsive techniques is close to a sure thing.

Folks just like reading newsletters on their phones

The earlier email client usage stats tell us two things - not only are mobile clients commonplace, but people are increasingly warming up to using them. Jakob Nielsen's recent mobile email usability study recently observed a number of benefits that mobile users reported enjoying, the biggest being:

Mobile reading... (adds) one more super-benefit: the newsletters are always available. Furthermore, on a phone, interaction mechanics are substantially easier for email messages than for websites: scrolling through a newsletter is less work than navigating a website to acquire the same information.'Mobile Email Newsletters ', Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 22, 2012

Subscribers no longer have to wait until they return to their desks to get a message - regardless of your feelings on living in an 'always on' society, the pervasive feeling is that many people really like to read email anytime, anywhere. Providing a mobile-ready email newsletter multiplies this benefit, by providing an experience that requires 'less work than navigating a website to acquire the same information', by far.

Mo' conversions, mo' money

Finally, I know what you're all thinking - despite EDR's earlier opinion, stats speak. So, here we go. According to Jay Schewedelson at Worldata, email newsletters that are not optimized for small screens suffer from a '28% lower conversion rate' than emails that have been designed with mobile in mind. This is because of increased 'tap errors', or accidental use of links. As he mentions:

"Nearly one-third of all mobile clickthroughs are accountable as tap errors, and this can dramatically change the ROI of your email campaigns."'Email Trends: The Importance of Tap Errors, Alt Tags and Mobile Design', Chief Marketer, October 16, 2012

The short of it - eliminating mistakes makes for more successful campaigns. But the most juicy, client-pleasing bite of all?

"87% of C-level executives check the majority of their email via mobile. This means that both B2B and B2C marketers must make their emails mobile friendly if they want to succeed."

If you're not thinking about responsive email design, then it's time to get up to speed. We have a template builder for creating mobile-friendly newsletters in minutes - or, if you prefer a more hands-on approach, our responsive email guide is for you.

Have you seen an uptick in clicks since optimizing your emails for mobile? Or are you yet to be convinced that mobile uptake makes a difference? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.

This change is a big win for our frequent RSS senders, like those firing off daily updates whenever there are new posts on their site or blog. We think it's going to have a big impact on your open rates too. Here's how it looks in your account:

You'll see a new option in the first step of creating your RSS campaign

Make the change in 20 seconds

If you have an existing RSS campaign and you'd like to switch to using the title of your latest post for each subject, it only takes a couple of clicks. Head into the reports for your campaign,

Click "Edit this campaign" to change the subject for each RSS email

Still using Feedburner?

We often hear from customers using us for their regular newsletters and wondering if they should switch over to us for their RSS campaigns as well. Given the recent concern over the future of Feedburner, we've been hearing this a whole lot more of late. We even created a little landing page explaining some of the benefits of using us over the other options out there.

If you're interesting in moving across, we've put together a very simple switchers guide which walks you through the process of getting your existing subscribers into Campaign Monitor, switching your subscribe form over and then using our template builder to blow the socks off your old Feedburner design. They'll automatically look great on a mobile device too, which is pretty important these days. Plus, if you're already on a monthly plan throwing your RSS emails into the mix is almost always free of charge anyway.

Carlee, our resident mo' sista has already donated half her head to the cause

All said, we're hoping to raise more than $10,000, specifically for prostate cancer and male mental health. We'd love everyone to donate, so head on over to our Movember page to see who's getting involved, track our progress and get behind a great cause.

Customize everything

When we built Enlist, the most important thing was that it could be completely customized to match your own look and feel. When it's sitting at the counter in your store, it should look like it was built just for you.

We've included 10 great looking themes to make it easy to get started, but you can throw in your own logo and background image, change the copy to suit, the button label, the fonts, text sizes and plenty more. To make this easy, we've gone for a live preview approach so you can see exactly how your form will look as you make changes.

Once you've designed your form, you can easily secure it by setting a passcode, ready for people to start subscribing. This means anyone can join your list, but they can't make any changes to the form or your settings. If you want to make any tweaks, just enter your passcode and you're good to go.

Works offline

Let's say you sell handmade goods each weekend at the local fair. Now you can take your Wifi only iPad with Enlist installed, set it up on the tabletop and hundreds of people can sign up to your weekly newsletter, all without an Internet connection.

After a successful day of selling, Enlist will automatically sync all your new subscribers straight into your Campaign Monitor account the moment it's connected to the web. This all happens seamlessly behind the scenes without you lifting a finger.

Beautiful, flexible forms

As well as looking great, we made sure Enlist was as easy to use as possible for your subscribers. We designed stunning custom form controls that looks awesome on a retina display. We also give you control over which fields to show, and what order they should be displayed.

You can also set certain fields as required, and we'll handle error checking for your subscribers to let them know if they missed something.

Available now, for free

Enlist launched in the App Store a few hours ago. It's free to download, all you need is a Campaign Monitor account. When you first run the app you can choose which list you'd like to connect it to, but you can easily change this to any other list at a later date.

We're really excited about getting our first dedicated app out there. We've got plans for more improvements down the line, so please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Any time a current or potential customer chats with our team, a reply will include a small link in the footer where they have the opportunity to give us feedback on that experience. It’s a simple, unobtrusive and totally optional way to get that feedback from customers who want to provide it. Here’s what appears in the footer, which is automatically inserted by our help desk software:

PS. Was I helpful today? Could you please leave some feedback here, it will only take a moment [link]

When the link is clicked, we show the following feedback form. Here they can select a positive, neutral or negative rating and leave a message about their experience.

We’d been using an out-of-the-box Nicereply page for a while. It did a reasonable job by displaying faces for moods and encouraging a message with a large text input area. However, the copy needed some work as did the colour and styling. The time had come for a redesign.

Starting with a design brief

As a new member of the Campaign Monitor design team, one of my first jobs was to rethink this workflow. Our Design Director Buzz put together a design brief and we ran through the usual questions a designer might have:

1. What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
2. What is the context of the current solution?
3. How do things look and work currently?
4. What goals are we aiming for?

For this particular task, the goal was to make small improvements to the usability and copy in order to increase conversion. We also wanted to re-design the existing user feedback form to be more inline with our new branding.

Sketching out ideas

When we make something at Campaign Monitor we always try to include a bit “personality” - adding that little something that makes the user's experience more human.

My first sketch had a focus on the support member who answered the ticket. It would include the support members profile and location in the centre with emotions floating around them. A user would select the emotion that corresponded to their dealings with the support member.


This solution was focusing on the support member a bit too much – and might result in feedback becoming too personal and mask the real problem at hand. We needed to change focus so I looked at another sketch.

My second sketch borrowed a similar, top-down layout but fell back to a more simple UI pattern. The user would scan a list of responses and select an option that fits. There would be some feedback to show the toggle was selected and they can fill out a message or be on their way.

The straight-forward nature of the large hit-areas started to make more sense. This design would also be leaner in size (and interaction) so it would be a win for all parties involved. This was the direction I settled on and would start to explore in more detail.

The design comes together

My first user interface design closely followed the look and feel of the existing page.

I found I was holding onto too much of the existing design here. Trying to match it closely to our website was also holding me back. Buzz encouraged me to move away from this entirely and try something new.

A quick search on Dribbble allowed me to hand-pick some dark-themed inspiration. I sold the team on this darker direction and moved onto laying out a new UI.

I started the design by trying to work in faces for moods. On review, we felt the titles of the responses should receive the primary focus and the faces were just distracting from that. In the second iteration, I replaced the faces with crosses – as if you were filling out a form with pen on paper. Presented this way, the crosses felt a bit too negative.

The third iteration replaced the crosses with a tick. This felt more positive than the last version, and would be visually more interesting than just using a radio button. I put it to the team that this is how our toggle should look.

The team were happy, but there was some discussion around whether or not having a positive icon for a negative option (in the third row) made any sense. We concluded the tick is for making a selection (regardless of the case) and it was decided we would run with it.

At this point, Dave also had the idea to customise the follow up question depending on which option a user selects. Theoretically, this would encourage a more targeted response than the standard “Do you have any additional feedback?” line. Here's what we went with:

I made further tweaks to the order, size and layout of elements. Here's the final design:

A 65% increase in feedback volume

The new feedback form was plugged in and and went live a couple of weeks ago. We've already had a 65% increase in users completing the feedback form which has blown us away! Taking the time to make the feedback process easier and more consistent with our tone is already paying dividends.

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes blog post. We’ll try and do a few more of these as we see fit. I've also been tasked with presenting this feedback data internally in a very exciting way, but I'll share more about that next time.

The Agency Partner program

We talk to a lot of creative professionals using Campaign Monitor for their clients, and in those conversations there were two pain points that seemed to come up the most. The first was that it was frustrating when we'd release new features and their clients would find out about them before they did. The second was that it felt unfair we were offering them the same rates their clients could get by signing up and using Campaign Monitor directly.

That all changes today, with the release of our brand new Agency Partner program, built exclusively for creative professionals using Campaign Monitor for themselves and their clients. Once approved, you'll get an instant 10% discount on all our prices, plus access to early announcements of new features before they are released to the public.

Pre-release announcements

In the past we've been hesitant to share any kind of product roadmap with customers. There are a lot of reasons for this - dates slip, features can change at the last minute. At the same time, it can be frustrating when a client asks about a big new feature in their account that you haven't even heard of.

As part of the Agency Partner program, we'll now be providing advance notice about any significant updates or new features before they are released and shared with the public. In some cases this might be weeks before, and in other cases days before, but we'll be doing our best to try and give as much notice as possible when we can.

How the discount works

We've been very careful to give you complete control over how the discount should be handled once you're accepted into the program. Depending on the billing settings you have in place for each client, you decide how the discount should be handled.

Here's an example of what you'd see the first time you logged into your account if you have clients paying for their own campaigns at our base rates:

No matter how your account is set up, you choose the approach that suits you best. You can pass the discount on to your clients, or automatically earn a profit. Either way, you win.

Creative professional? Apply now

This is a very targeted program built specifically for creative professionals using Campaign Monitor for their clients. You might be sending campaigns for them or they might be sending their own based on a template you've built. If that's you, we'd love you to apply.

We'll have a quick look at your account and web site to make sure you fit the bill before you're accepted. We're expecting a lot of applications over the coming days, so please be patient with us as we work through them.

First, the good news - it's very likely that you don't have to change a thing. As the iPad Mini has the same display dimensions as the iPad 1 and 2 (1024px x 768px), there's no need to adjust your existing media queries if you're already targeting these devices... Unless you're using device-pixel-ratio for really selective targeting (which we generally don't recommend).

But should you be targeting the iPad when creating a responsive email design? We'd like to argue, no - the 768px device width in portrait mode is likely enough to comfortably view most email designs in their regular, non-mobile state. If anything, iPad shares more in common with desktop clients like Apple Mail, than mobile clients from an email design perspective. So it's generally not worth narrowing down your designs as you would for iPhone or Android handsets.

For more design guidelines for the iPad Mini (and iPads in general), I recommend reading this post by Mobify. While it doesn't specifically cover coding for email, it's full of practical adaptive design tips and considerations that you can apply when designing with mobile devices in mind.

We'll take a look at how you can use PassKit's Pass Designer to create a simple coupon that can be delivered by email and saved to a recipient's iOS device. Now that over 35% of email opens occur on an iOS device, Passbook may well be the next big thing in retail and email marketing.

The brief

Lets say that you run a local restaurant called ABC Burgers. You have an active subscriber list of in-store signups, who love receiving special offers and discounts via email. You've also noticed that many of these savvy customers don't like bringing in printed coupons and clippings as much as they like using their iPhones.

When Apple released Passbook, they also released a great opportunity to not only reduce the amount of paper waste that coupons were creating, but market to customers in unique ways, with location-aware, limited-time offers.

The end goal - a coupon that can be emailed to customers, then brought in-store to redeem a 2-for-1 burger deal. You don't mind if your coupons are distributed freely as passes, so there's no need to lock them down with serial numbers or passwords. Imagine, after hitting send on your next newsletter, the queues for burgers will be wrapping around the block in minutes.

Adding passes to your chef's arsenal

So first of all, what is a pass? The skinny is that it's a 'virtual card' that can be used to replace conventional loyalty, rewards and membership cards, coupons, tickets (like Eventbrite does) and more. The idea is that designers and developers like yourself can create these passes, then distribute them amongst users with Apple devices running iOS 6 or higher. Unlike physical cards, you can also update and manage passes remotely. For example, you can automatically revoke passes from all devices, or update them as your terms and conditions change.

Passes are double-sided - on the front, you can add important details, like a promotion summary, customer name, or membership number. On the back, a physical business address is mandatory, but there's plenty of space for terms and conditions and any other legal mumbo jumbo.

The great news is that there are already services like PassKit or PassSource that do not require special development or design skills to whip together a simple, static coupon (although these always help). Both services allow you create free, highly customizable passes from your browser.

We'll be using PassKit's Pass Designer, as it makes understanding and editing Passbook passes just a little easier for first-timers like ourselves. This is just a demo - if you want to issue passes commercially, you will need purchase a certificate via an Apple developer account ($99 per year).

Cooking up a simple pass from scratch

First, a caveat - PassKit is undergoing heavy development, so a lot of what we're about to mention here is likely to change. But given that their Pass Designer is fairly straightforward, you'll probably find your way through just fine. So, back to the story - we have a pass to create for our 2-for-1 burger deal. Before we get started, we'll need:

1. An icon for our pass (at least 116px wide)
2. A logo image (at least 100px wide)
3. A 'strip image' to display on the pass (at least 624px wide)
4. The promotion's validity dates, plus any terms and conditions

With this in hand, it's time to visit Passk.it and follow the prompt to create Passbook passes. The editor will load and first ask you what kind of pass you wish to create. Select 'Coupon', fill in a meaningful name for your pass and a description (eg. '2-for-1 burgers'). Leave the serial number settings as-is - we won't be using the barcode, anyway. Finally, you can also opt to have the pass display on the lock screen at a set date and time - we'll cover how to trigger these notifications when the device is close to a specific location in just a moment.

Now, on to the 'Colors and Images' step, where we'll upload all the images specified earlier and set a color scheme. Here's what this looks like:

Once satisfied, we can move on to the 'Front Content' tab. Here, you can add some text for the front-side of your pass, like '2-for-1 Burger Deal', expiry dates and more. If you add any items, make sure they're set as 'Static', so they can't be changed by users. Keep in mind that the logo and any text at the top will be what's displayed when the pass is displayed in a deck of multiple passes in Passbook.

On the 'Back Content' step, the only mandatory item is a physical business address (as we mentioned earlier). However, if you have terms and conditions, this is the place to add them.

Things get more interesting on the 'Locations' step. Once you enter an address and find the corresponding latitude/longitude, you can create a short notification which will appear when a device with the pass is in range. A message like '2-for-1 burgers - come in now!' will do.

If you are creating a pass in English only, you can skip the 'Language' step. Otherwise, you can provide translated text and graphics for dozens of languages.

On the final 'Distribution' step, you can select to issue a finite number of passes, ensure they stop getting distributed after a certain date and most importantly, get the Pass URL for our email. Remember to hit the 'Save Pass' button before moving onto sharing this link around.

If all has gone well, your Pass URL should go to a pass like this one. Try downloading it to your iOS device and viewing it in the Passbook app - good times. You can update the pass in the editor and the share link will remain the same.

Sending passes to your subscribers

So, you're happy with your pass and have a Pass URL handy. Now all you have to do is pop it in an email newsletter.

The Pass URL is no different to any other link, so you can add it to text or an image in our template builder, to your HTML code, or to an autoresponder. Once done, test and send as you would a regular email campaign. With the coupon out in the wild, you can visit your PassKit account to view basic reports, or simply arm yourself with a burger flipper and brace yourself for the hungry hoardes!

A last bite

Well, this has been a simple account of what goes into creating a basic coupon for Passbook - to go large, you may still require a designer and you most certainly will need an Apple developer account. But if you think about it, we've covered a lot of ground here - not only have we created a coupon that can be sent to countless subscribers, but we've made it location-aware and easy to update at any time. With a taste for the creative opportunities that Passbook and email deliver together, we hope you're inspired to bring your own sophisticated campaigns to the table.

How are you or your clients planning to use Passbook? We'd love to hear about your ideas in the comments below.

To answer this question, we recently refreshed our popular email client popularity report by analyzing a sample totalling more than 7 billion emails to find out which mobile email clients had amassed market share in the past year, which clients we should keep an eye on and well, any other trends and trivia we could find along the way.

Mobile email, now in the lead

Earlier this year, our friends at Return Path predicted that mobile was to surpass web and desktop client usage by July, 2012. We found that this event happened as early as February, when mobile overtook webmail client usage. In April, desktop clients lost their top spot - and mobile has shown no signs of slowing down since. In the following graph, you can see how mobile market share has increased since we last updated our report in May, 2011, while desktop and web client market share has continued its shallow decline.

To clear up any misunderstandings here, both webmail and desktop email clients are far from dead. For example, over the same period, we recorded a 25% increase in opens originating from Outlook desktop clients. However, relative to both mobile clients and overall send volumes (which increased also), Outlook and company are becoming less significant.

Apple in the lead, but don't ignore Android

Given our earlier results in 2011, it came as no surprise that iOS devices had retained their clear lead as the mobile email client of choice amongst subscribers, accounting for almost 88% of opens recorded across all the mobile email clients we were tracking. In comparison, Android devices represented 11.7% of mobile opens, with all other major handset manufacturers playing a minor part in the results.

Before we ignore all but iPhone and iPad users, it should be noted that Android email client market share shot up from 2.49% in June 2011 to 4.74% by September, 2012. This impressive 90% increase makes it one of the fastest-growing platforms and definitely one to watch in 2013. Unfortunately, we couldn't distinguish between default Mail and other popular Android email clients (like Gmail), which have considerably different rendering capabilities.

At this point we'd like to address the elephant in the room, being underreporting amongst clients that do not display images by default - we'll touch on the technical significance of this shortly. As iPhone Mail downloads images without being prompted to, while Android Mail does not, the figures we've presented here will be inevitably skewed towards the former device. Later in the year, we are hoping to address this issue by comparing opens to other activity in order to address this bias, so please stay tuned to this blog.

A note on our numbers

Our methodology is pretty straightforward. As you may know, every time one of your subscribers opens an email you’ve sent or clicks a link, we record which email client they are using. However, if a link isn't clicked an open can only be recorded when images load in the email client. This means that clients that don't display images by default are likely underreported, while clients that don't display HTML email at all (like older Blackberry handsets) cannot be tracked.

While factors such as image blocking by default can affect usage stats, it doesn't impact market share change over time. So the skinny is that while email client usage / open rate figures may not be exact, the growth of individual clients is not in dispute.

With that out of the way, we looked across a sample of more than 7 billion emails including close to 1.3 billion opens, recorded between June 2011 and September 2012. One quirk we were quick to notice is that our email client market share percentages totalled over 100%, which suggests to us that subscribers are reading the same emails on multiple devices, say, on an iPhone while commuting to work, then later using their desktop email client. This is becoming increasingly frequent occurrence and is likely driven by the increased use of email-friendly mobile clients.

To get the scoop on which email clients you're likely to hear about in the year ahead, we recommend you check out our updated email client popularity guide. But don't let us tell you which clients to design for - you can find out what your subscribers are using in your reports.

Naturally, if you have any questions about the data above, or would like us to measure a specific something in the future, let us know in the comments below.