Webjam 2008 Session - Email Design 101
October 7, 2008 – 1:17 pm
Last Friday I spoke at WebJam Session 2008. My session was “Email Design 101.” I was a little nervous talking about anything “101″ to a group of experienced web designers, but fortunately, email marketing is still fairly nebulous. So it seemed to be new material for a lot of people. The session went well, except for two things:
- I ran out of time, and
- Someone chimp-napped our lifesize MailChimp sign from the lobby of the conference center, and is now posting ransom messages on twitter.
Re: the MailChimp sign, I *wish* we had the foresight to plan this kind of “gorilla marketing,” but we’re not that smart. Someone actually stole Frederick von Chimpenheimer IV from the event. Of course we don’t mind, but it’s fun playing along.
Anyway, I promised attendees to my session that I’d post some resources here on the blog, so here goes…
Here are a bunch of resources I discussed in my Email Design 101 presentation:
Spam filters:
- Spam Assassin Criteria (the kinda stuff spam filters look for)
- Learn how spam filters think
- MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector (used to generate screenshots of email rendering in preview panes)
Server Filters:
- Server filters, IronPort, Barracuda, etc (”spam filters need spam filters now“)
- Sending from “malicious” IP address
- An interview with Lisa Harmon (smith-harmon) on email design and “pre-headers”
- Cloudmark’s “fingerprinting”
- Is my server’s IP on SpamCop?
- Check your email reputation with ReturnPath
Email tracking, performance, ROI:
- MailChimp’s integration with Google Analytics and ROI tracking
- How open, click tracking works in email marketing
- Subject line comparison study (tell what’s inside, don’t “sell” what’s inside)
- Chimp Charts (email marketing stats, metrics by industry)
To all the attendees, I’m sorry my presentation had to cut off so soon. I rehearsed a million times for it to be exactly one hour, not realizing it was supposed to be only 45 minutes. I’m schedules-lexic that way. My biggest regret is that nobody got to see my truly awesome slide transition towards the end. Oh man, the fade in was sooooo cool.
So I’ll be posting my entire presentation online for you shortly. Hmm, maybe I’ll go in and insert transitions into all the slides before I post. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
4 Responses to “Webjam 2008 Session - Email Design 101”
Update: Ken Seals has posted some very compelling evidence as to who chimpnapped freddie. If you read the comments, you’ll see there’s possibly a Bronto and CampaignMonitor tie-in here:
http://www.kennethseals.com/2008/10/onwired-has-the-mailchimp/
By Ben on Oct 8, 2008
Some useful links in there, even for those of us who didn’t get anywhere near the WebJam session. (Boy, I wish we could get some of these kinds of events going in Western Canada!)
A quick question that came up when reading your “How open, click tracking works in email marketing” that I’ve been wondering for awhile and to which I haven’t been able to find a definitive response.
If a recipient opens an email with image display disabled, they will not register as an open. But what if they click on a tracked link in that message? Obviously the click will be counted, since it’s tracked, but will the click also trigger an “open”? (Since obviously the message had to be opened to click.)
I realise the open couldn’t be attributed to that click, (since there’s no individual user ID associated with the click tracking) but would MailChimp have a way increment the open rate for that campaign?
Paul
By Paul on Oct 8, 2008
@paul - Yes, you’re exactly right. We count it as an “open” if someone clicks a tracked link in the campaign. This also works if you track clicks in your plain-text email (altho few people actually do this, because tracker URLs are in plain sight in plain-text emails). If you have the A.I.M. add-on module installed in your MailChimp acct, we can tell you who it was that clicked.
By Ben Chestnut on Oct 8, 2008
Thanks for the response, Ben. I’m just about to setup and start playing with a test account to try out the things I’d need to do with our lists as I look for alternatives to our existing provider. This saves me having to actually run through that part of the testing process!
And no, we don’t use link tracking in our plain text, for just the reason you mention. Although with the proliferation of people reading text-only on their handhelds, I’m starting to think I may be missing a significant number of “opens” compared to when nobody read their email on Blackberries.
Is there anything in the works to provide an alternate tracking method for text-only?
By Paul on Oct 9, 2008