Adding photos to your stylish emails can now be a walk in the park with the help of Picnik, a free online service that allows you to edit, crop, & re-size your photos.

Services like Picnik can add a lot to the look and feel of your email newsletter design. Do you have any large or oddly-sized photos lying around that you’d like to include in an email campaign? With Picnik, you can easily pull those photos from your desktop, scale or crop them to the perfect size and save the new and improved image. Having a consistent image size throughout your campaign will improve the overall aesthetic and increase the readability of the content, not to mention all the positive feedback you’ll receive from your audience members! For an example, check out Ad Age’s email.

Still not convinced? Here’s another good reason to give this site a try. For those of you who simply want to pull the header from your website and resize it for use in emails, Picnik’s got you covered. In addition to editing photos from your desktop, Picnik enables you to edit them directly from any website (including sites like Photobucket or Facebook ). Type in the URL to your personal or business website and, like magic, all of the images hosted there will appear on Picnik. Just choose the header image & scale it down! We recommend keeping the width of your email header between 600 and 650 pixels.

After using a tool as fabulous as Picnik, you’ll be able to create visually stunning emails in no time. You might even have time for a real picnic…

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This week, I took a moment to ask my fellow comrades in Emma’s design department to share some web goodness with the rest of the world and share where they go to get inspired. What are some of their sites to live by (or at least design by)? Here are a few gems:

For some good design talk, Jessica never passes up a good read at Speak Up.
“There is always a hot debate about a new design or theory. Reading everyone’s feedback is not only entertaining, but very informative. There are often good tips and tricks mentioned throughout.”

Taylor keeps her homepage locked on goodmagazine.com.
“They’re always really interesting and informative, but usually more on a positive note. I love the design of both the magazine and the site. And they have a blog too.”
This is a great resource for information on topics such as creative ways to do good in the world and the extinction of bananas.

As for me, I like to get my daily dose of inspiration from Design*Sponge. With an average of 6-10 posts a day, the site covers everything that is design, from modernistic chandeliers to typography to where to find a good art gallery in Denmark. Also, the D-I-Y section can bring out the creative in anyone.

What design site keeps you coming back for more? Please leave a comment & inspire us.

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Or would-be superheroes, anyhow. We just posted our latest Ask Emma Q&A newsletter, featuring three quick ways to be the office email hero with our latest recent audience activity feature. The cape is entirely optional.

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If you often peruse email marketing statistics (which is perfectly fine, by the way, but maybe the kind of personal information you’ll want to gloss over at parties), you may have run across a fair amount of research on the length of subject lines. MailerMailer reported that shorter ones perform better than longer ones. Then MarketingSherpa’s research just came right out and said that 35 characters was the magic number. But we experimented with subject lines here at the Emma shop and found just the opposite - our longer subject line boasted both higher open and clickthrough rates than its shorter counterpart.

So I was thrilled to see some new research on subject lines hit the wires this morning, from Mediapost’s Email Insiders’ Summit. One of the conference speakers, Dala Quist, presented his own research about subject line length. He reinforced the idea that shorter subjects - 50 characters or so - garner better open rates, but he didn’t stop there. His research showed another spike in performance for subject lines around the 80-character mark. The slump in open rates happened in the middle range (60-70 characters).

From the article at MediaPost:

Research culled from 250 million messages sent over the past two years, with 660 different subject lines, has led him to believe that a 50-character subject line touting a “powerful” offer is appealing (30% off Spring Getaway flights to Florida on Delta).

And a longer 80-character-plus line describing a newsletter in enticing fashion works (Find out Secrets to Spice up your Barbecue this weekend and all Summer Long and enter to win a New Weber Grill.)

It’s great news for a couple of reasons - one, it helps me feel better about our own longer subject lines, of course, but second, it recognizes that the ideal subject line’s length depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your campaign. If it’s an offer you’re promoting or a particular call to action you want people to take, shorter’s better. But if you’re using your email newsletter with an eye toward retention, relationship-building and content, a longer subject line will give you more chances to tease the content that’ll get your readers engaged with your email.

Not sure what’ll work for you? Try splitting your audience in half and try two different subject lines for the same campaign, and let us know how it goes…

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For all you designers out there, here’s a friendly reminder that the folks at Create are accepting submissions for this year’s Create Awards. If there’s something stylish in your portfolio this year that you feel particularly proud of - whether it’s advertising, photography, print, interactive, or something else - you can submit it to Create for, you know, prizes and stuff. The early-bird deadline is May 31, and the final cut-off for submissions is July 7. Good luck!

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Back in August, I spent a quick thirty minutes surrendering my email address to a handful of presidential hopefuls. I wasn’t picking sides, mind you - just hoping to learn something about email’s place in our political process.

Today’s observation happens to focus on Barack Obama’s email strategy with From Names. Over the last eight months, his emails have appeared in my inbox with several different names in the From Line. Here are seven unique ones worth mentioning and some quick notes on why Obama’s marketing team chose to use ‘em instead of the standard ‘Barack Obama.’ 

Sen. Ted Kennedy - An endorsement from a member of one of the most prominent political families of all time. 

Michelle Obama - A personal message from a family member. 

John Kerry - An endorsement from a Senator and well known presidential candidate of recent years. 

Jennifer Buck Wallace, Tennessee State Coordinator - A quick primer on early voting in *my* state. 

Bob Tuke - A locally known name for folks in Tennessee (Former Chairman of my state’s Democratic Party) with a message that encouraged voting in the Tennessee primary. 

David Plouffe, Campaign Manager - An insider’s message about the campaign. 

Chelsea Kammerer, Ohio Field Director - A message about Obama’s status in a key primary state.

Even though many of these names are brands in their own right, there may be an application for your own From Name strategy. Take a few minutes to make sure yours is making the strongest connection possible with your audience. Would changing the From Name better suit the message or grab the attention of the particular audience you’re aiming to reach? For example, your emails to stockholders might come from the CEO while your newsletter sticks with the standard company name in the From line.

Of course, on the other hand, there’s a real benefit to keeping a consistent From Name,* and it’s possible that some readers overlooked emails from the Obama campaign because they lacked instant name recognition. Why not divide up your audience and do a little experimenting? Put your trusty default to the challenge by mixing it up. If you do, please let us know how it goes…

*In case you’re curious, the *From Email* was pretty consistent throughout the eight months. A few messages were from state-specific email addresses like tennessee@barackobama.com, for example. Our recommendation for you, though, is to stick with one address, since your audience may already have it stored in their address books.

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A couple of weeks ago, we sent an Emma APB to our customers letting them know about a new feature in their account that gives them more control over their monthly email sending plans. Just for fun, we sent two version of that campaign - one with a screenshot showing the new feature in action and one without it. At the bottom of each version, we let everybody know there were two versions of the campaign, adding a link to a blog post that featured both side by side.

We were curious to see what impact a screenshot had on people’s involvement with the campaign, and most of us figured that the campaign with the screenshot would boast higher clickthrough rates than its image-less counterpart. After all, a lot of email marketing research and best practices will tell you that images help to grab your readers’ attention and draw ‘em into what you have to say.

To our surprise, though, the overall campaign results for open rates and clickthrough rates were statistically identical between the two versions, almost to the decimal point. At a glance, it looked like our campaign would have been just as well off without that beautiful screenshot. But we also took an in-depth look at the link-by-link breakdown, and that’s where we learned something interesting about what people responded to.

There were two places in the campaign where you could click to log into your account to see the changes in action - one near the top and another in the very last sentence. In the version without the screenshot, the clicks were divided fairly equally between the two, with 55% of clickers opting for the top mention and the remaining 45% preferring the bottom mention.

With a screenshot, though, those numbers changed dramatically. In that case, 80% of people who logged in did so through the top link while 20% used the lower option. It’s not that the screenshot had no effect it all. It’s that it galvanized people to click sooner, having already seen the feature, rather than bother to read through the whole campaign to understand how that feature might work. It didn’t help us get *more* clicks, really, but it did help us encourage people to click sooner.

It’s so important to read all the best practices out there - to see what other organizations have found to be effective for their email campaigns and to learn what your fellow email marketers are talking about. But if you want to answer those burning questions like when to send your campaign, or how many images to use in it, or how long that subject line should be, why not just try two options and see how it goes? If our tale of two APBs has a moral, it’s that the best research you read may be your own.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, a/b test, a/b split, myemma.com, emma apb

*This is all the French I know.

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Or will you assume that this is actually a blog post from 1996 that was somehow mistakenly sent to the future? As great as the mid-90s were, you can’t think about web development in that era without also reminiscing about frames, guestbooks and, yes, animated gifs. Lots and lots of animated gifs.

Those of us in the email marketing industry appreciate mid-90s web development techniques, since a lot of what was in vogue then is really what’s best suited for email now. We still, ahem, know how to use tables. We still code our styles inline. We wouldn’t think of using rollovers. Thanks to Outlook 2007, we don’t even get to use background images. Oh, and adding Flash will get our content blocked and our messages filtered, so if we want animation in an email, it’s gotta happen with the animated gif.

But much like those of the 90s, a lot of the animated gifs I see in email today don’t seem to do much to enhance the content of the email itself. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see this great-looking email from the retailer Lands’ End. They used an animated GIF to show off their new bathing suit top, which can be cinched up or tugged down, depending on whether you’re in a cinching or tugging mood.

Cinched:

Tugged:

Using an animated GIF here was intentional - it actually helped to actually illustrate how the product worked, with each frame alternating between the two adjustable options. I think it’s a great example of intentional email design, a principle to which animated gifs are not immune. If you’re thinking of using animated GIFs in your next campaign, here are a few ideas and suggestions:

1. Keep your animation simple. If you can say the same thing in 4 frames that you can in 8, opt for the shorter sequence.
2. Make sure your animation reinforces a major point of your campaign. If it’s just for show, it’s, well, just for show.
3. Consider combining animated GIFs with Flash. If you’ve got a compelling Flash presentation on your website, put together a simpler version as an animated GIF. Include the GIF in your email, but link it to the fancy Flash page.
4. Try a simple test. If you’re not sure whether animation will help you make your point, try sending an animated version to half your audience, and send a regular image to the other half.
5. Watch your file size. We recommend keeping your entire email’s size to under 40K, so it’s easily managed by servers and inboxes. Plan your animated gif accordingly, and opt for simpler colors and graphics in your frames to keep the gif’s file size in check.

Technorati Tags: email design, lands end, email best practices, animated gifs

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Earlier today, we announced a new feature to the Emma community, letting our customers know they now have a bit more flexibility when they upgrade and downgrade their monthly email sending plans. As a part of the release, we wanted to include a screenshot of the new feature in action (people *love* action, right?). But to actually quantify the screenshot’s impact, we decided to create two versions of the campaign - one with the image, and one without it - and divide our audience list randomly between the two versions.

The twist: at the bottom of each email, we let people know that they were receiving one of two versions of the campaign, with a link to compare the two (it points to this blog post). So take a look at the two campaigns, let us know what your predictions are, and check back in a few days for the exciting conclusion.

Update: the RESULTS are in, and they surprised us. Read all about it, won’t you?

Version 1, without the screenshot (click the image to see the full campaign):

Version 2, with the screenshot (click the image to see the full campaign):

Technorati Tags: a/b test, a/b split, email marketing, myemma.com, emma apb

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You might imagine, since I work in the email marketing industry, that I would have a little compassion on the retailers whose emails fill up my inbox every morning. But most days, I’m just a typical consumer, rolling through about ten emails from Barnes and Noble, Circuit City, etc. in under two minutes.

Included in that batch this morning was the first edition I’ve received of the Priority Rewards Club newsletter from the IC Hotels Group. It, too, got the ol’ delete button after a momentary glance, but something I noticed in that momentary glance made me drag the message out of the trash and take a closer look:

That something I noticed was just my name. So vain, I know. And sure, we all understand it’s nothing fancy with databases these days to drop in a first name or other personal information. In fact, so many emails contain the “Dear Bob” style of personalization that it can be easy to overlook. But this newsletter gives the whole idea of personalization a bit of a fresh twist - first, by making it more of an “account profile” style of personalization, and second, by devoting some prime real estate of the newsletter to it. The fact that my name was strategically placed in the upper left hand corner is probably why it’s the only thing I saw in my momentary glance. It’s certainly something to consider if you use email as a loyalty-building and retention tool - it clearly worked on me today.

Now if I can just get the Carly Simon song out of my head.

Technorati Tags: email newsletter, email marketing tips, personalization, myemma.com, IC Hotels

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