A co-branded marketing email from UCAS (the UK’s higher education admissions authority) and Hewlett Packard has caused a bit of controversy over the last few days. The mailing, with subject line “You have been accepted to receive big discounts on HP laptops!”, was sent before A-level results were announced yesterday, causing some students to mis-interpret it as a university acceptance letter.

In UCAS/HP’s defense, most A-level students should be intelligent enough to know their results are sent out by post, not email, and should really be savvy enough to recognize a marketing message, however it does go to show that marketers should ensure they never lose sight of the customer’s experience.

More in this Evening Standard article.

Sugru is a cool little product which lets you hack and repair everyday items. It’s similar to modeling clay, but once it’s exposed to air, it cures to a tough flexible silicone overnight using the moisture in the air. You can find out more here.

Their email has three exciting things in it (from an email designer’s perspective!)

1) A cool tiling whole page background – we don’t see enough of these, and in this case it looks really effective. It’s best practice that the content is max 600-700px, but the background can expand and collapse as required.
2) User generated content – tons of it, really engaging and helps build a community feeling – that’s especially prevalent here given the do-it-yourself nature of the product.
3) A youtube-screengrab-as-link module – a great way to simultaneously encourage click throughs and integrate engaging video content into the email experience.

Our main best practice recommendation would be to increase the prominence of links to drive to the site and/or online store. As the email may be going out to existing customers, it may also be worth looking at sharing functionality to allow people to virally share the email with their friends and social networks.

time for a quick round-up of email marketing news from the last week:

Interesting article from DJ Waldow over at Blue Sky Factory about how there is no one size fits all best practice, and in reality it’s all about finding out what works for your list.

Liz Lynch posted a nice review of recent tax day campaigns over at Email Precicely.

e-Dialog International, based in Central London, is still hiring! there’s lots of vacancies at the moment – view our list of email marketing jobs. There’s more to be added soon, so if you don’t see the role you’d like send in your details and we’ll keep them on file.

Over at The Email Wars Dylan Boyd posted some great tips on the mobile web.

Social Email Marketing posted some interesting thoughts on triggered event based campaigns.

And finally, Smith Harmon spotted a great piece of creative email from Diesel – check it out.

If you’ve got any hot tips for this week, or want a heads up on interesting things as we find them, connect with @iamelliot on Twitter.

aka How to provide perfect design PSDs to an HTML email developer.

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An all image email renders badly when images are disabled

More brands than ever are transforming their traditionally printed direct mail activity into email marketing campaigns, and as a result direct marketers and their designers are having to learn new skills designing for email. One of the most common ways that email campaigns lose their effectiveness is when they’re not designed for the channel, and they’re simply a DM campaign that’s been dropped into HTML, so here’s our tips for making kick-arse email direct mail campaigns.

Put down Illustrator

Whilst you may use Illustrator to create initial assets, particularly on cross channel campaigns, final email creative should be artworked in Photoshop (Or a equivalent bitmap based program) at 72dpi in RGB colour. When it comes to building the design into HTML, the HTML developer will require access to different layers, so ensure they’re not flattened. As a rule of thumb, emails should be maximum 600px wide. And don’t do everything in Illustrator and save it out as a psd, we’ll know!

Email rendering isn’t precise

Barring gremlins at the print house, when producing print assets we can almost guarantee how the resulting artwork will be displayed, right down to the smell of the stock. Unfortunately when designing emails we don’t have this luxury (although scratch & sniff is but a USB dongle away). Email code renders differently on different operating systems, different devices and in different email clients – Consequently the fold will move around for different recipients (it’s typically 400-700px), and the real estate that a paragraph of body copy takes up will vary due to differences in line height and font size rendering.

But, Email rendering is precise

Having said that, things like text and images are held within flexible tables, as opposed to more rigid text boxes and bounding boxes. So when changing copy and images for use in an HTML structure that’s already built, remember that any extra copy or larger images will stretch out and “break” the design. It’s worth setting precise image dimensions and copy limits, but also consider designing around this; common issues include two columns – one text and one image, when extra text is added there may be extra space created underneath the image to compensate. As a rule of thumb it’s easier to guarantee horizontal alignment and accept that vertically things may shift slightly.

Postman Pat goes postal

Whilst the Royal Mail and/or a postman chasing dog may sometimes get between us and the recipient, they don’t usually open each mailing, read it and either mark it as junk or just throw it out. Unfortunately email is different, and the chances are you’ll have to jump through some deliverability hoops in order to get to the inbox. Spam filters don’t look too kindly on all image emails, for example, so it’s worth getting some web text in your design somewhere (that’s standard web fonts like Arial or Verdana). Likewise some email clients will disable images by default, so think about how the message will look without images turned on – we can use alt-text to replicate in-image copy, but it’s not ideal – again, consider using web text and using things like the Johnson Box.

And Finally, Less Is More

I think this is the same in print and really it’s borne out of the client wanting to pass on too much information – but thanks to screen’s lower resolution and the recipient’s tendency to skim read or even skip large paragraphs, we have even less room for large chunks of copy than in print. We do, however, have only a simple click between us and the web, so it’s worth thinking about using the email as a teaser and putting your main/large content on a landing page. A good text size for body copy, by the way, is about 11 or 12pt, 10pt is ok for terms and conditions but don’t go any lower (also ensure point sizes are whole numbers, it breaks the internet if they’re not).

Follow @iamelliot and bookmark http://www.emaildesignreview.com/ for more hints and tips designing for email.

The subscription confirmation email is the perfect chance to welcome and congratulate new recipients of your email newsletter, but it’s often neglected. We’ve signed up for a ton of mailing lists so we can provide great examples of email creative, but we’ve found that marketers either miss a trick  or simply don’t send anything.

Yesterday we posted 11 great examples of engaging welcome emails – here’s our top tips to improve your welcome and confirmation emails:

Welcome your new recipients

“Thanks – you’re our hero” is what Lastminute.com told us in their great welcome email (back in 2007, and we’ve read their emails ever since).  Granted, that’s a lot down to their tone of voice, but it shows that there’s better and more friendly ways to welcome your eager new readers than just saying “newsletter confirmation”.

Add Creative

You’ll be surprised how many subscription and welcome emails are just plain text affairs, without even a basic link to the merchant’s website. Granted, there may be  deliverability concerns around sending full html to a new subscriber (although if you have a good reputation there’s nothing to worry about here), but this is a golden opportunity to introduce subscribers to your branding, and even encourage them to convert.

Give a reason to open your newsletters

Tell your new subscribers what you’ll be sending them, when, and why they should look out for your email. It’s an easy way to boost your open rates as your recipients will know to look out for your newsletter.

Add Personalisation

At the very least you now know your new recipient’s email address – custom publish it in somewhere to confirm you have the right address. The chances are you also know more of their data, so greet them by name. If you’re running any kind of membership club users are likely to archive the welcome email as it’ll contain useful information (username, password, preferences etc.).

If you have a preference centre then link to that so your recipients can tell you what they want to hear about.

Whitelist Instructions

Now’s the perfect time to ask your new subscribers to add your send address to their address book, contacts or safe list. This marks your mailings as safe and helps you avoid the spam folder. For any given webmail client, the aggregate of how many users do this will also boost your reputation across the whole service (ie. If enough people do this, it’ll improve your reputation even for people who don’t whitelist you).

An offer

If you’ve incentivized people to subscribe to your list with a discount offer, here’s where you should tell them about it and encourage them to engage with your site. Don’t go overboard, but there’s probably even scope to include a small sales piece.

Links to previous newsletters

Filling up your welcome email with products and offers probably isn’t the best way to go, but if someone’s just subscribed to your list the chances are they’re pretty engaged and want to know more. A quick link to your most recent emails will help them find out more, and might even help them convert.

Take a look at some of the examples we picked out yesterday for more inspiration!