We spend loads of time talking about coding and sending email campaigns, so today lets look at how to build your lists effectively. Conveniently, our friends at MarketingSherpa did some research into the top 3 tactics you can use to build your campaigns, so I thought we'd cover these, as well as a couple of other ideas for growing your newsletter's audience.

First up, lets look at what they uncovered to be the most effective list growth tactics:

Source: 'MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report', MarketingSherpa

How many of these have you ticked off already? If you've vowed to get more people signing up to your lists this year, read on for practical advice on how to make it happen.

Tactic #1: Catch new subscribers at checkout

If you're selling a product or service on your site, providing the option to join your email list during the purchase stage may seem like a bit of a no brainer, but it's often overlooked. Web apps like Lemonstand and Digital Delivery App make it super-easy to prompt paying customers into signing up, as do these e-Commerce integrations for WordPress, Shopify and more.

Considering that "90% of email marketers say adding an opt-in request to the purchase process is at least “somewhat effective” at growing email lists", shouldn't it be a tactic to make sure you have place in 2012?

Tactic #2: Offer valuable content, get email signups in return

If you send or receive business-to-business (B2B) campaigns, you're probably aware of the power of the webinar when it comes to educating customers and making contacts. MarketingSherpa's research backs this up, with 90% of email marketers saying they are at least “somewhat effective” at building lists and 41% saying they are “very effective”. For the rest of us, offering great online content can substantially lift email subscribe rates. In one A/B test, it was shown that featuring a video demo on a contact page could result in 80% more responses!

Keeping in mind that not everyone is a webinar or YouTube star waiting to happen, there's always the option of having your customers sign up for exclusive content, or a sneak-peek of an upcoming product.

Tactic #3: Slap a subscribe form on your site

Thankfully, one of the most obvious and easy-to-implement tactics is also one of the most effective. It's no surprise that "75% of email marketers" use a subscribe form on their, or their clients' site to collect new subscribers. They don't have to be as subtle as the customary 'subscribe to our newsletter' in the corner of a page, as this round-up of inspiring subscribe forms illustrates.

To get started with adding a subscribe form to your site, grab our ready-to-use code in your Campaign Monitor account, or check out our collection of subscribe form plugins. We've even got a neat little AJAX subscribe form which you can use!

What else can I do to grow my subscriber lists?

As you can see from MarketingSherpa's results, list-building isn't limited to the 3 tactics above. Collecting signups in-real-life through events or in-store promotions still ranks highly in the effectiveness stakes, as does collecting email signups through a Facebook page.

Don't forget that the cornerstones to growing your lists are to stand out, offer value to subscribers and respect permission - once you have these sorted, the sky's the limit!

What list building tactics do you, or your clients use? Which have been the most effective and why? Let us know in the comments below.

While it's annoying that Gmail should make this rather arbitrary change, thankfully there's an easy fix. Cool customers Wilbert Heinen and Benjamin Kinzer both came up with the same solution - use a link color that's black, but not quite black. For example:

Alternately, you can use color: #000000 !important;, which oddly enough, doesn't get stripped out of the code.

In wondering what Gmail holds against the color black, we turned to Spinal Tap for answers:

When it comes to links in Gmail, anchor links can be 'none, none more black'.

Thanks to Wilbert and Ben for these fixes to a rather kooky new email rendering issue. If you see any further changes in Gmail, be sure to get in touch with us.

Images on:

Images off:

Given the amount of work put into this fallback, Becs at Email Fail is right to ask:

"I wonder if the general public will ever appreciate this as much as us email designers?"

Perhaps this is a clever shout-out to folks like us - an easter egg to those who intentionally turn off images in the inbox, a maker's mark amongst makers. To the Mac email designer, we tip our hats to you. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed.

For those wondering, this fallback is achieved by adding carefully cutting the image, assigning the pieces to individual table cells, then adding a bgcolor="" to each cell. Style Campaign has a free app for automatically converting images to HTML pixel-art to create a similar effect.

Thanks to Email Fail for sharing this full-of-email-win newsletter design with us!

"If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like phishing attempts."
-'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail', Lifehacker

Soon after a customer mentioned seeing one of these scary messages, Lifehacker posted an example, explanation and fixes in their post, 'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail'. While this information is relevant when sending from a regular email client, there's only really one way to avoid these warnings when sending from an email marketing service like Campaign Monitor. That is, use an address other than an @gmail.com address. Or any webmail address, for that matter.

Walk away from webmail addresses

This warning is only one example of how webmail clients are trying to protect their customers from spam and web threats. After all, phishers very commonly use fake From: addresses / spoof mail headers to masquerade as legitimate senders. Gmail has good reason to look dimly upon email that's labelled as coming from them, but isn't being sent from their own servers.

We encourage our customers to avoid using a webmail address as their From: email address. Undoubtedly they will trigger warnings like this and potentially, deliverability issues in the future. Instead, we highly recommend purchasing a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap and setting up a you@yournewdomain.com -style email address. It's still okay to have this domain forward inbound mail to a webmail address, or alternately, you can use Google Apps to send and manage email from this domain directly. Note that Google Apps domains have also been known to throw similar warnings - to avoid this, it's a good idea to setup email authentication, which we'll go through in the next bit.

Don't forget to set up email authentication

Finally, we'd like to remind one and all to authenticate their sending domain in their accounts, especially when using Google Apps to manage their email. In essence:

"All the large ISPs are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up this system as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox... Many ISP's like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened."

It only takes a few minutes for you, or your technical team to setup email authentication, but ensuring that your subscribers and ISP's know that your campaigns are definitely from you is well worth the effort.

Finally, If you have any questions about email authentication, get in touch with our team - we're here to make sure your campaigns not only look good, but make it into as many inboxes as possible, too.

I know what you're thinking - just as we're coming to grips with optimizing our email newsletters for mobile, suddenly we have tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire to make things interesting again. So here's the good and the bad news. The good: if you've already created a responsive design for the iPhone, then adapting this for the iPad and similar devices is dead easy. The bad: it still requires extra testing, coding and sooner-or-later, it's going to be what all your clients are asking for.

Before we provide any solid answers on whether or not we should all be optimizing our email campaigns for tablet devices, lets look at their uptake and some basic techniques for adapting your design for small, yet not-so-small screens.

Why optimize for tablet devices?

The skinny is that tablet devices are getting popular. I'm sure you know of more than a few people who begged for Kindle Fires for Christmas, then got slipped a Motorola Xoom by Santa instead. Or snapped up an iPad 2 the moment they were launched. Our friends at Return Path collected the hard numbers in a recent report, citing:

"In our last study we reported a 15% increase in iPad use relative to iPhone use... What we find is that the use of iPads has exploded – with an increase of 73% in email views on iPad devices between April and September of 2011. Email views on the iPad jumped by 12% between March... and April, then continued the steady climb upward."
- 'Mobile, Webmail, Desktops: Where Are We Viewing Email Now?', Return Path, 2011

In June 2011, we found that iPad usage accounted for almost 15% of opens tracked on mobile devices and 3% of email opens overall. Given Return Path's recent findings and our own observations, this is rapidly growing and potentially cannibalizing iPhone market share while it's at it. We'll be sure to provide usage stats for other tablet devices as they come to hand, so watch this space.

Adapting mobile code for slightly larger screens

As mentioned earlier, if you're already in the habit of optimizing your campaigns for mobile screens (or have exported a template from our template builder), then you've already done most of the legwork. What's remains is the addition of a slightly different @media query, targeting the display dimensions of tablet devices. Here's a typical @media query for mobile devices, followed by the adapted equivalent for the Kindle Fire, iPad and Xoom:

The good team at Email on Acid have a brilliant summary of all the different @media query combos you can use to target specific tablet devices (and orientations), however for the sake of brevity and maintenance, it's probably worth focusing on 2 generic ones like in the sample above.

If the above is a bit of a mystery, I highly recommend reading our 'Mobile Email Design in Practice' post, as well as creating and exporting a template from our template builder to see how it all clicks under the hood.

So, should I rejig my email design for tablet devices?

Ultimately, this decision should be made by consulting the email client usage report in your Campaign Monitor account. For example, 4.9% of all opens for our recent December newsletter originated from an iPad. In March (when the iPad 2 launched), this figure was 2.7%. In 9 months, the iPad's share of opens has nearly doubled. That indicates to us that even if the iPad is a minor player in the email client scene at present, it's probably not going to remain that way for good. Either way, having the know-how when it comes to optimizing your email campaigns for tablet devices is going to become an increasingly sought-after skill in an email designer's stable, so it makes good sense to test out these techniques now, before your clients force you to.

Do you optimize your designs specifically for tablet devices? Do you have any great tips? Let us know in the comments below.

Cabedge: Putting personality into it

A few months ago, our great friends at Cabedge launched a radically new company site. So radical, that they decided to send this proactive campaign in anticipation of what their subscribers would say. They're a funny gang and know it - the 'Top 5 beefs' does as much in the way of sharing their identity and brand of humor as inducing people to visit their site. Ten points for personality, a lovely layout and nice use of type, I say.

Alertful for Business: Graceful in all conditions

Talking about uplifting, here's a great example of a launch email that sure may look detailed, but comes back down to earth gracefully when images are blocked. The use of 'backup' calls to action (note the red 'Click here to try the service for free') is a technique we don't see enough of - but undoubtedly does its part in pushing response rates sky-high. Great work by the Email Spring team!

Flexibits: Focused on one task

When it comes to email designs, we've always said, 'keep it simple'. The Flexibits campaign designed by Komodo Media is a perfect example of this in practice, with its easy-to-skim message and a single call to action ('Grab a Free Trial!'). There's absolutely no visual clutter, or confusion as to what the email recipient should do after receiving the message - which I'm sure was their goal to begin with.

Different Projects: Picture this

Now, I know what we say about images in email (ie. be careful, they often get blocked), but this campaign by Different Projects has added some really eye-catching ones to great effect. The text-boxes tacked on top of the illustrations give visual depth to the design. As they contain actual text, won't disappear when images are turned off.

All around, a great way to announce a move, while wowing clients with a little creative flair.

Virb: Getting the message across

Finally, I wanted to showcase a corporate-style campaign. One that carefully balances copy with visual elements to communicate detailed information. If only to prove that such a thing exists. Duly, I came across this email announcement by Virb, which has a serious side, but doesn't forget to have a little fun while it's at it.

In appearance, it's totally austere - all clean lines and shades of business-like blue. But the text is full of personality, easy-to-read and is complimented by images of their upcoming product. It's almost the opposite of what many of us imagine a corporate email to contain: stodgy layouts, stock photography and endless columns of teeny-tiny text.

Hopefully you've enjoyed our brief round-up. If there are any particular themes you would like to see us cover (eg. emails for hotels, charities etc), let us know - we'd be happy to shine the light on some great examples for you.

What’s better, the Digital Delivery App team offer fairly comprehensive support, via both their site and email. We took a moment to set up an account, upload products and get both Campaign Monitor and PayPal integration happening. Now, if only we really had something fancy to sell...

Add a 'Buy Now' button to your site in 10 minutes

The loveliness of Digital Delivery App is that it asks for so little, yet gives so much in return. Upon creating an account (free for the first 30 days), you are run through initial setup process that sorts out the fundamentals of selling content online - namely, selecting a payment gateway and adding something to sell. The fastest way to get up and running is to have a PayPal, Google Checkout, AlertPay or Stripe account already linked to the email address you signed up with... And of course, to have that ‘something’ either ready to upload, or already hosted somewhere.

What we found particularly generous is that the app offers to host your sellable digital content. Once you upload your files to the app, simply take the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Cart’ button code it generates for each product and add it to an existing site. It even generates license keys to prevent software products from being looted.

Alternately, you can host everything yourself and only use Digital Delivery App to handle the transaction side of things.

Once you’ve gotten to this point in the setup process, you probably would have noticed how all-encompassing the app is. It unfurls like a flower as you click on top-level options, revealing the facility to offer discount codes, create referral codes, send post-purchase order emails, sell packages of products and view detailed reports. There’s even an API and web interface for webhooks. While Digital Delivery App shares much in common with the big-name shopping cart and e-commerce apps out there, it does so without feeling bloated, or requiring you to install anything on your end.

Automate your post-purchase email marketing

Digital Delivery App scratches two little itches that we’ve had for a while now, being the sending of transactional email and pushing email addresses from checkout to subscriber list. As mentioned earlier, the app handles the sending of customizable, plain-text order emails, with a link to the digital item the customer just purchased. As a template already exists in Digital Delivery App for this, the app will automatically start sending these personalized emails from the very first order.

Secondly, once you’ve set up Campaign Monitor integration, you can count on Digital Delivery App to add the email addresses of new customers to an existing subscriber list in your account. All you need is your account’s API key and a List ID.

As a result, you can start sending a series of autoresponders upon purchase - for instance, polling new customers for feedback - or simply add email addresses to a ‘Paying customers’ list to receive relevant updates (taking into account permission, of course). Digital Delivery App also offers subscription-based transactions, meaning that you can offer paid newsletter subscriptions, access to exclusive tutorials or similar paywalled content for a recurring fee.

No win, no fee

Just like those legal practices you see on late-night TV, Digital Delivery App doesn't charge unless you make a sale during the monthly billing cycle. So if you take a few months off selling things, you don't have to cancel your account. All accounts come with a 30 day free trial (during which you don't have to commit your credit card/PayPal details), after which your plan comes into effect. With monthly plans starting from $9 USD per month, it's not exactly a wallet-burner, either.

After spending a few entertaining moments setting up a faux store for Minecraft maps, it was fairly clear to us that this will be a useful integration to customers who would like to offer paid content without having to use a fully-blown eCommerce platform. If this sounds like you, swing on over to their site, take a tour and give it a try. After all, good content sells - just ask Louis CK.

As you (and probably your wallet) know, this is the season for giving, as well as reflecting. So while the tinsel gets taken down for yet another year at Campaign Monitor -sponsored Xmas events like WebBlast Sydney, lets look at some of the events we've supported via our Giving Back Program and hopefully, get you involved in the year ahead.

Our Giving Back Program has supported dozens of web design and development events for close to three years now, plus offered free accounts to select email senders. So if you're running an event in the new year that you think could benefit from pizza, beer, a tweet-out and free email credits on us, it's a great time to get in touch.

What kind of events do you support?

Since our first event in 2009, Campaign Monitor have powered our email newsletters and helped cover our running costs. We don't advertise, so it's only through word-of-mouth and email that we can spread the news. We wouldn't be able to run Ignite Sydney without their support.
- Stephen Lead, Ignite Sydney

Our Giving Back Program is all about returning the favor to the web designers and developers who have stood by us since Campaign Monitor's humble beginnings back in 2004. Since the Program's launch, we've had the pleasure of getting behind events that resonate with us and our customers, including Semi-Permanent and both Refresh and Ignite internationally. We even power newsletters for SXSW... And attend!

That said, you don't have to run a high-profile conference to qualify - smaller design-focused gigs like BAMMD and user groups like EEUK very regularly get a hat-tip from us.

How can I get involved?

If your event could benefit from a free Campaign Monitor account, a modest bar tab (like our friends at the Portsmouth Freelancers Meet, pictured) or email credits as a door prize, let us know and we'll be sure to give it a look. We're especially keen to visit your website and get the lowdown on previous events, so be sure to pass on those details, too.

Finally, a huge thanks to everyone who has invited us to support their gathering, or attended an event that we sponsored this year. As the Giving Back Program continues to gain momentum, we're looking forward to enlivening more design nights, dishing out more pizza and giving more to people like you.

We're keen to explore other meaningful ways we can give back to the web community, so if you have a suggestion as to how we can make a positive impact on what you do, from providing more design resources, to getting the word out about your design meetup, pop us a line, or let us know in the comments below. All of us here are looking forward to making 2012 an awesome one for you and your clients!

But that's not all - we've also got an easy-to-use 'Season's Greetings' email template, free to use and tweak. Plus, if you send a holiday-themed campaign in December, you will also go into the running to win our annual holiday email competition, so hop in your sleigh and go!

Nine inspiring Christmas email designs by our customers

From animated GIFs to pixel art, here are some of our old and new favorite Christmas email designs, including a template builder creation by Tangelo, tees by Threadless and image-free pixel art by Style Campaign. Click to view these campaigns:

Thinking it may be too late to send your own design? Up next, we have an email template that you can load up in your account to share the love.

Send a sprinkle of snow with our holiday email template

Last week, we added a charming 'Seasons Greetings' design to our collection of 100+ free email templates. Featuring pure CSS animation and rock solid email client support, it's great for sharing a sprinkle of holiday cheer!

Even if you caught it back then, it's worth getting the refreshed version for the recent updates, including smoother snow in Chrome and snow in Firefox. With hardly a day to lose before Christmas, it's time to get started on your holiday campaign!

Finally, our holiday email competition for 2011

As is our tradition at this time of year, we've got a sack-load of goodies to give to our customers in our annual holiday email design competition. One lucky winner will receive a:

• Kindle Fire *
• FitBit Ultra, or ~ $100 to back the Kickstarter project of their choice
• 50,000 email credits

* For non-US customers, we can arrange an alternative prize

In addition, 3 runners up will receive a prize of 10,000 email credits each. That's a lot of free emails to kick off 2012!

How to enter win

To go into the running, simply send a holiday-themed campaign during December - if you have already, then you're in it to win it! Our team will be sifting through and shortlisting Christmas campaigns as part of their regular review process, then selecting our winners in early 2012. If you've got an outstanding campaign that you think should make the cut, you're welcome to send us a link, too!

Finally, we're not looking for Hallmark card tackiness, just technically and visually awesome HTML emails. If your email campaign displays nicely across the major email clients, has a few mobile optimizations and is an actual email design, not an awkwardly resized website, then there's a great chance that it will be shortlisted. Image-only emails may look nice at first glance, but aren't likely be chosen by the guys and gals here.

Now we've got you inspired, templated up and motivated, it's time for you to crank out those end-of-year campaigns - good luck and happy sending!

A preheader (otherwise known as a 'Johnson Box', haw haw) is the the short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox. Many mobile, desktop and web email clients provide them to tip you off on what the email contains, before you open it. Here's an example in Gmail:

Generally this line of text (in this case, 'Wishing you a safe and merry holiday season!') is borrowed from the first text found in the email campaign. On mobile clients in particular, the preheader can mean the difference between someone opening your email and archiving it - so you generally want it to be something meaningful. Like a summary of your offer, not your campaign's webversion message or the remnants of social sharing links. Because believe it or not, they work. From our friend, Elliott Ross:

"In my experience we’ve implemented it (preheaders) on a number of campaigns and it’s raised open rates, click thrus and reduced spam complaints."
- "The Perfect Email Preheader/Johnson Box", Email Design Review

A lot of designers make their preheaders very visible by adding a short summary to the very top of their designs, but personally, I like to hide my preheaders and forget about them altogether. Lets go through the nitty gritty of how to do this.

Adding a preheader to an email campaign

The first thing to ask is if you have to worry about a preheader at all. For instance, if your email already cuts to the chase and the first text that appears does a good job of summarizing what's to follow, then you may not have to add one. But for the rest of us, a little bit of text just after the <body> tag in your HTML email code usually suffices:

If you're like many senders that add a nice visible summary, you can stop here and style it up all you like. But as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to hide mine:

The above still displays in Lotus Notes - if this is an issue, try adding font-size:1px; to the .preheader styles, and/or using the same color for both the text and background.

Automatically adding a meaningful preheader with our email editor

The major downsides to using the above preheader technique are:

1. It's easy to forget to update the preheader text
2. When using templates, customizing the preheader for each campaign is a lot of hassle

Cool customer Mark Shingleton came up with an ingenious way to ensure the preheader in his campaigns looks good each time - adding a table of contents to the top using our template tag language:

Not everyone can make the design decision to place a table of contents at the top of their campaigns, however if you or your clients are using the email editor to build campaigns, you can use the text that is automatically generated by a combination of repeatertitle="true" on headings and <tableofcontents> in our template language to fill the <span> tags we were using earlier:

What you'll end up with is a preheader consisting of headings from the articles in your email campaign (pictured).

The beauty of this is that it's totally set-and-forget - your clients can take a template and add articles in the email editor, while being totally oblivious to the whole preheader thing. But the downside is that you can only add one table of contents to your campaign (sorry!), so you either feature one in your design, or use it for the preheader.

Update: It turns out that we posted about an alternative method for adding preheaders - using the alt attribute in a 1x1px image - back in 2006. You can't use this method to autofill the preheader with template tags, but if you're manually adding one, check it out.

Now, I'd love to know how you use preheaders - are they important to you? Do you have a particular technique that you use in your email campaigns and templates? Let us know in the comments below.

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

Cheerful in (almost) any email client

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

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

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

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

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

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

As customizable as it is forgiving

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

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

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

Learn timely email techniques for 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to prescribe before you unsubscribe

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

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

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

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

When throwing the spotlight on an awesome customer like Eugene Tan, it's hard to imagine that we're somehow brightening his already luminous position in Australia's photography and surf communities.

As a chronicler of all things Bondi Beach and beyond for Aquabumps, he's developed a following both locally and abroad - boosted by the Aquabumps gallery, site and in no small part, a near-daily email newsletter.

We shared a few moments with our favorite surf dude (sorry, Dave and Ben) to find out how he's used email to get his wickedly good photos into the wild, plus pass on some of the marketing lessons he's received along the way.

Hi Uge, many of our long-haul customers are creatives like yourself - what is it about email marketing that you and presumably others find so valuable?

"Everyone is on email. It just makes sense to use it as a delivery platform."

Using email is a great way to push out your photography. I like the fact that I push my photos, rather than put them up on website and pray for people to visit – I have the control. People love looking at images... Beach images even more so. Email is simply a great platform to pack a little 30 second beach escape into busy working inboxes, especially now that most email clients can display HTML emails.

Oh, via email you just have access to so many people – everyone is on email. It just makes sense to use it as a delivery platform.

Aquabumps' email newsletters are delivered pretty much every weekday, but your subscribers never seem to lose their interest in them. How do you keep your readers wanting more?

"Our open rates are very high as we are 95% content and go easy on the sell."

We send 5 newsletters per week – Monday to Friday. Our open rates are very high as we are 95% content and go easy on the sell. You need to build trust with your audience by just showing stuff they want to see or read about. Pick a niche too, preferably something you are very passionate about. Mine is the beach.  

We noticed that two of your recent campaigns linked back to surf videos via an image of a video player - how did this affect response?

"Click-through rates were huge on the campaigns where I linked back to my videos"

Video is new to me, even after many years of talking about it. So many photographers are switching over to the 'dark side' since the inception of the DSLR HD video capabilities. Personally, I’ve found video to be a compelling way to engage my audience - I broadcast escapism and as you can imagine, video is a great way of taking my viewers to another place... Outside the office cubicle, anyway.

Click-through rates were huge on the campaigns where I linked back to my videos - the best they’ve been in a long time. Shame we can’t play video in the inbox, though (Note: In some instances you can play video in the inbox - view our latest results).  

Finally, what is your advice to other folks who are considering, or have just started using email marketing to promote their work?

Use Campaign Monitor! Far out their tools are good, intuitive and basically just work – so you can spend more time creating content... They didn’t ask me to say that!

Many thanks to Uge for taking the time to answer our questions. To see his surf photography and sign up for the newsletter, visit the Aquabumps site.

While it’s still early days for Daisy, designers are welcome to generate images for their live email campaigns, for free. As any custom field can be used when personalizing an image using Daisy, its applications go beyond the gimmicky. For example, you can use it to generate personalized tickets to an event using ‘Name’ and ‘Ticket number’ custom fields in your subscriber list. In a similar manner, you can also create truly bespoke reminders and email invitations. Before we launch into the details, here’s an overview:

Powerful personalization for designers

If you’re a confident Photoshop user, then you’ll find that creating an image for use with Daisy is a snap. Simply create a PSD featuring an editable text layer and enter the name of your custom field (pictured).

You can convert this text layer into a smart object to apply effects like blur - Daisy will still be able to detect it as long as it remains editable.

With your masterpiece ready and at hand, it’s time to upload your PSD file to Daisy. Upon import, you will be issued an AppID (like an API key), which you will need to access your images. You’ll also get a chance to verify that your text layers have been detected.

At this point, it’s time to use your newly-minted AppID, plus Campaign Monitor API key and Client ID to create magic. Swing over to Daisy’s Campaign Monitor page and go through the prompts to create a new custom field in your Campaign Monitor account and a unique image for each subscriber in a list. The latter may take some time if you’ve got a large subscriber list, so Daisy helpfully sends you an email once this is complete.

Once your images are ready, you can go to your subscriber list and subscriber snapshot to see the new custom field you created earlier. For each subscriber, this custom field includes a URL which, as you’ve probably guessed, you’ll use to source your images.

Take note that this new custom field will be visible in your preference center by default - you can hide it in ‘Manage custom fields’ in your subscriber list.

From here, it’s all fairly straightforward. In the email above, we simply added <img src=”[chocolate-pic]”> to our HTML email code and sent a personalized email test. You can also set a fallback image URL, pointing to a non-personalized image - recommended, if you plan on sharing your campaigns.

Pretty as a Daisy?

To be honest, the Daisy interface may not be the prettiest in its ‘Experimental’ state, but it’s thorough, stable and full of possibility. Toying around with your own images brings a renewed wonderment towards email marketing - “How can I make my campaigns more exciting? Will my subscribers react to personalized campaigns?” - which I’m sure you’ll feel the moment you start sending wedding invitations for “*|firstname|* ♥ Justin Bieber” to your entire office. Either that, or you’ll be mobbed and killed quickly.

Not wanting to stop there, Motobias have also rolled out a well-documented API for dynamically generating images for both email and the web.

Down the track, Daisy will probably get rolled into their Visage service. But in the interim, try it for free and if you have any feedback, get in touch with the Daisy team. They’re keen to hear how they can make it even awesomer for designers… And Justin Bieber fans.

Thanks to Michelle Klann at Email on Acid, we've got an answer - 102kb. In a recent blog post on email size, she explains:

'If your email exceeds 102K, Gmail will display the first 102K and then it will clip off the remainder with a few different variations depending on the device.'

Listed are the consequences for exceeding this limit in Gmail, the worst case being:

"(after reaching 102k) the mobile version of Gmail for the iPad does not appear to offer any links for viewing the entire message, instead the email is simply cut off."

Thankfully, images do not count towards this total - just the initially-downloaded HTML content. Of course, an email would have to be pretty long (or code heavy) to clock in at 102kb - which is a usability challenge in itself.

The bottom line is that if your HTML file size is nearing 102kb, your email is too long. Think about how to better refine the email message and/or placing your content on a landing page for easy reading in the browser instead.

If you or your clients administer company Facebook pages, today’s a happy day. We’re pleased to finally reveal our new Facebook app for Campaign Monitor subscribe forms, in white-label and Campaign Monitor-branded flavors. Both make it possible to add a subscribe form for an existing Campaign Monitor list to a Facebook page. If you administer multiple pages, you can add one subscribe form per page.

The subscribe form apps support custom fields and can be managed using designer and client login credentials alike. While they’re fairly simple, we’ve made it possible to change the introductory text, subscribe confirmation message and tab name on your page’s sidebar.

Setting up either the Campaign Monitor or white-label app for your Facebook page takes less than 2 minutes. All you need is your Campaign Monitor account login details and a subscriber list. You can see it in action on our Campaign Monitor Facebook page.

Yes, there’s a white-label version, too!

As we figured that a lot of our designer friends would be keen to offer this subscribe form app to their clients, we’ve created a fully white-label version. It works just like its’ branded counterpart, but with no mention of Campaign Monitor. High five!

Issues with adding the app in IE8: Due to a weirdo browser issue, some customers haven’t been able to add the app to their Facebook pages when using the Internet Explorer 8 browser. Please try using another browser for now and hopefully we’ll have this sorted soon. Once either app is added, it’s totally fine to use in IE8.

Making changes to the app

As mentioned earlier, it’s possible to change the introductory text and subscribe confirmation message. In addition, you can change the client/list the form is linked to in an account. To do so after you’ve initially setup the app, go to your Facebook page, then click the ‘Edit page’ button. On the next page, click ‘Apps’ in the sidebar, then under ‘Campaign Monitor Subscribe Form’ (or ‘Subscribe Form’), click ‘Go to application’. You can then go through the setup process again.

To change the default ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ tab name on your page’s sidebar, go through the steps above, but instead of clicking ‘Go to application’, click ‘Edit settings’. In the ‘Custom tab name’ field, add a new name.

To remove the app, go to your Facebook page, then click the ‘Edit page’ button. On the next page, click ‘Apps’ in the sidebar, then click the ‘X’ alongside ‘Campaign Monitor Subscribe Form’ (or ‘Subscribe Form’). Then, go to Account Settings in your Facebook account (pictured), click ‘Apps’ in the sidebar and click the ‘X’ next to the app again. All Campaign Monitor account data stored in the app and forms will be deleted and most certainly won’t be stored by Facebook. If you re-add the app, you will be asked to login and create your forms from scratch.

At present, only the page admin who added the app can make changes to a subscribe form (apart from deleting it). If you would like another admin to take control, then you will have to remove the app and all forms first, as per above. Same goes for using the app with another Campaign Monitor account.

A huge thanks to everyone who requested this app, added their suggestions and egged us on during its development - we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for future updates! Also, extraordinary thanks to James Dennes for bringing it across the line while skateboarding in Cambodia (no kidding), plus Matt Farag and Buzz Usborne for putting Facebook to shame the sweet design. All of us hope you’ll enjoy using the Facebook app as much as we have on our Facebook page!

When getting caught up in the code, it's really easy to forget that good mobile email design means providing a great experience for recipients. A lot of this flows from usability decisions like ensuring that links are large and spaced out enough to be tapped by big fingers, or the call to action is immediately obvious and requires no scrolling to see.

Our friends at Litmus summarized these mobile design guidelines and more in their recent post on the 'Anatomy of a Perfect Mobile Email', featuring an infographic that you can cherish for all time. Also listed are common mobile email pitfalls like choosing a color palette with poor contrast - admittedly a trap that we all fall into from time to time.

What really grabbed us by the coattails was how Litmus put their lessons into practice with this especially fetching email campaign.

We usually pop top-notch email newsletters into our email design gallery. This time however, we really wanted to highlight how they translated the aesthetics of their infographic into email form, while never relying too heavily on images to do so. The code is definitely worth a look, as instead of using a @media query, they've paired a simple, one-column layout with large fonts to produce a design that is near-bulletproof on any device. At the top of the email, the "Email client market share and mobile design infographs" summary text also ensures that the email's purpose is made clear in Gmail's inbox, on the iPhone and on other mobile clients.

Of course, if you're after a quick and code-less way to optimize your email campaigns for mobile, give our template builder a try. Come on, I had to sneak in a cheeky plug!

A huge thanks to Litmus for sharing their expertise. If you're into mobile email design, we recommend visiting the Litmus blog, which is a goldmine of clever nuggets like these.

In our recent update, we've made a few usability improvements to the template editor. Most of these are so subtle that you probably won't notice them, but in a way, that's the point. For starters, we removed the distraction of having the sidebar slide in and out of view when editing the various parts of a template. Instead, we've made it sticky and constantly present. You didn't notice this, because you were focused on your work instead.

We're also about making the editor more forgiving, so we've ensured that any content that gets entered into the sidebar is auto-saved. Consequently, this has eliminated the disruptive 'save changes' prompt when you move on to editing something else. Another prompt that we've given the flick is the one that appeared upon deleting an editable region. Instead, we've added an 'undo delete' link (pictured), should you change your mind.

These three changes have been directly guided by your feedback, so we'd like to extend a warm 'thank you' for all your tweets, forum posts and emails. Recording and acting on your suggestions remains a priority even at this busy time of year, so if there's something you feel we could improve about the editor (or the app in general), be sure to get in touch with our team, or leave a note in the comments below.

If you send in a language other than English, we want to make things right by providing an easy way to have terms like 'Unsubscribe' and 'Web version' translated into your language. The thing is, we don't want to rely on robots or second-guessing, especially when there are great people like you who know what's best when it comes to email campaigns.

For this reason, we would like to ask for your help in translating some of the default words and phrases that appear in our templates.

Filling in the form below will only take a minute or two, but it will massively benefit designers and clients across the world. Once we've collected a variety of translations, we'll look towards adding a simple language selector to the template builder and taking the hard work out of localizing your campaigns.

Finally, a big thank you for your feedback and for helping us improve. We owe a lot to our international customers and hope to return the favor by building a better app for everyone.

New methods: Deleting subscribers and unscheduling campaigns

First up, the big one - you can now delete subscribers from a list using our API. Unlike our existing method for unsubscribing subscribers (wow, a mouthful), a delete request results in an email address being marked as 'Deleted', but not added to the account's suppression list. This is particularly useful when a subscriber is to be re-added to a list at a later time, say, when 'pausing' a subscription for a few weeks. Of course, a little discretion should be used when deleting a subscriber via the API, rather than unsubscribing them.

In tandem is a new method for getting deleted subscribers for a particular list. Results can be narrowed down by date range, ordered by date and more.

Finally, we've added a new method for unscheduling a campaign, which moves a scheduled campaign back to the account's drafts. This sure beats deleting the campaign, as was previously done.

Getting social: Forward, Like and Mention stats for a campaign

In the spirit of the social sharing reports in the app, we've now made sharing stats available via the API. Using the new parameters in our existing campaign summary method, you can pull forwards, likes and mentions for any given campaign, alongside the regular metrics. This is a timely addition for all you folks with dashboard apps (or ahem, 'information radiators'), not to mention other app adventures in analytics.

Clearing custom fields on subscriber updates or bulk imports

Last but not least, we've added a parameter for clearing custom fields to our existing methods for updating a subscriber and importing many subscribers. This allows you to clear one or more options on multi-value custom fields and totally clear other custom field types.

Our API wrappers, updated and ready to use

To reflect the new methods described above, we've updated all our official wrappers for v3 of the Campaign Monitor API. We've got wrappers for Ruby, PHP, .NET and more, so chances are, our API speaks your language!

A huge thanks to Paul Duran and our development and testing teams for this sweeping update. Most importantly, thanks to you - all of the above happened because developers stepped forward and provided us with amazing feedback, so if you have any any suggestions for new methods or improvements, get in touch with our team. Alternately, hustle with our lively API developer community and post questions, get the word on updates and most importantly, cut some darn good code!