I thought I’d share a few articles and links I’ve found that are helpful for launching email campaigns.
Design and Build Email Newsletters Without Losing Your Mind (and Soul)
This is a great article written by Matthew Patterson from Campaign Monitor (a great email campaign system that I highly recommend) at Smashing Magazine. Matthew breaks down designing and building an email newsletter with 10 simple tips to make your newsletter effective and as hassle-free as possible.
Here’s the 10 points he goes on to explain in the article:
- Respect your reader. Don’t waste their time or attention.
- Ask nicely first.
- Focus on relevance.
- Design with a goal in mind, so that you’ll know if it worked.
- Make unsubscribing easy.
- Code like it’s 1999 (literally) and use inline CSS.
- Always include a plain text version.
- Don’t assume that images will be viewed.
- Follow the law.
- Test everything before sending, because you can’t take it back.
The over-arching theme of the article is: your reader comes first. Do everything you can to cater to your ideal reader for your newsletter and people will love to read it.
Video in Email
Campaign Monitor has a done a great service to email campaign builders everywhere with this article which surveys their research in using video in emails. They’ve covered a wide gamut of video formats and email clients and services to help you decide if using video in your email campaign is worth it. If you are thinking of using video in your next campaign you may want to think about hosting it external to your email. Campaign Monitor’s findings reveal that most email systems (like Gmail or Yahoo) will strip out most video formats so your readers probably won’t get to see the email right in their email.
Campaign Monitor’s Email Gallery
Campaign Monitor posts and highlights great email designs that come through their system. If you’re looking for some ideas for your next email template design or just want to see what other people are up to I highly recommend this gallery.
I hope you find these helpful. Happy emailing to all of you!
