Make email better

June 26, 2009 · Posted in email marketing · Comment 

digdigThis month’s Digital Digest went out this week. It’s just under a year now since we’ve been using the Newsweaver system and we are really happy with it. It was especially useful while we were organising Congress as we had different groups involved in different ways: speakers, shortlistees, demonstrators and, of course, delegates. It really helped smooth some of the processes of communicating important information about Congress.

So it is with dismay that I read in my Campaign Monitor ezine (and about 2 seconds later in an email from IIA Member Pixel Design – thank you very much!) that Microsoft are planning to go ahead with their plan to use  “the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010″ as Campaign Monitor and The Email Standards Project put it.

I think Microsoft are doing lots of great things and I love and use some of their products regularly and happily. But I also love my ezines. I’ve been writing ezines for about eight years now and trying to keep up to speed on what works and what doesn’t in email. I know that many of the beautiful email newsletters that we see today came about from painstaking developing and care for cross platform/ browser/ email client compatibility. Email marketing can be really effective but it has to be able to relate visually to everything else a company produces online. It must reinforce that relationship so that even if a subscriber signed up on your site a week, a month or more previously, they will instantly recognise your brand and style in their inbox no matter what email client they use. You can read another interesting perspective on this issue on Long Zheng’s Blog who points out that while Outlook 2010 may have problems there are other email clients that are equally questionable when it comes to HTML rendering. If you do any sort of communication with your clients via email you should care about this issue and if you use Twitter you should add your voice to the campaign at fixoutlook.org

And if you aren’t emailing your clients em… right. I don’t know what to say to you. Try this for starters maybe?

UPDATE: 29/06/2009 (Thanks to @denisecox) Microsoft respond to the FixOutlook.org Campaign and the Email Standards Project respond.

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Best behaviour

June 4, 2008 · Posted in Membership · 2 Comments 

Profile pic for Justin Cullen, MD Net BehaviourNet Behaviour were on their best behaviour last week when they joined the IIA. They attended the recent IIA Congress and I subsequently made contact with them as I did with many of the non-member delegates. To quote their own website:

Net Behaviour are online experts fusing established planning methods, bespoke research and extensive experience to create key insights into the digital consumer which enables us to provide clients with great digital marketing campaigns.

When I read this I immediately thought of all our members who contact me looking for facts and figures about the nebulous net and who attend our events aimed at increasing sector skills in the area of developing, managing, and measuring online campaigns and I knew Net Behaviour would be a good fit.

Normally I include a new member company’s logo but I hope you will forgive me for using a different element of their site which caught my magpie eye. Instead of profile pictures they each have a personalised robot image. The image above is Managing Director Justin Cullen’s profile image. We will all be assimilated :)

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