Pinpointe - Business Email Marketing Blog » Email Design Tips

Dealing with CSS Styles in Email

Pinpointe — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:46:07 +0000

As an email marketer you have probably already discovered that getting your newsletter or email campaign to display as you intended across the main email clients can be a challenge. The most popular email clients in business for example – Gmail (including Gmail for Businesses) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 / 2010 are pretty restrictive and only support about 40% of HTML / CSS styles. Even more challenging for email marketers – HTML ‘Best Practices’ for designing Websites are unfortunately often ‘Worst Practices’ for designing email campaigns, so your most experienced website designer / coder is probably designing email campaigns that won’t display right in a lot of email inboxes. (Hint: Always use the Pinpointe email campaign preview tool to see how your [...]

Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes

Pinpointe — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:39:33 +0000

At Pinpointe, we see very smart customers make mistakes that cause their email response rates to suffer. Here are the most common mistakes we see our new customers make: Not running the SPAM checker Pinpointe has a built-in email SPAM checker that evaluates your email content using the popular spamassassin spam engine, gives you a spam score and provides suggestions to help get your email to the inbox. Wise customers use it before sending any email campaign. Yet some customers don’t run the spam check and confidently send their email campaign to thousands of recipients, only to learn that 25% of their emails were blocked or filtered by spam filters because their spam score was too high. In the Pinpointe [...]

10 Worst Performing Email Subject Lines

Pinpointe — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 04:39:21 +0000

We already covered the top 10 Best performing headlines – so read, review and emulate. Since no top 10 ‘Best’ list would be complete without the corresponding ’10 worst’ list, here are the subject lines associated with the 10 worst performing emails campaigns, along with our opinion of what the recipient may have thought when they skimmed through their inbox.. and decided to delete the email instead of open it. Join Us for a FREE Webinar on April 2 2011! - Webinar about what? Why? From Whom? Aren’t most Webinars FREE? Shop Early and Save! - Oooh. Yet another promotional email. I’ve only received 219 of these today. - What will I be shopping for? Early for what? Save how [...]

Embedding Video in Email – Overview

Pinpointe — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:28:35 +0000

Embedding Video In Email – Overview With over 15B emails being viewed online each month in the US alone, we’re seeing an uptick in email customers asking about embedding video in email. This led us to head off and investigate a few different questions: Can video be embedded in email? If Video can be embedded – how exactly do you do it? How / when to use video in email – will your recipients care? The future of Video in email We’ll cover each of these in a series of posts. Can Video be Embedded in Email? There are a handful of possible ways to embed video with an email – here’s a quick rundown of the possibilities: Flash. Flash [...]

Webinar: Tips to Improve HTML Email Response Rates

Pinpointe — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:00:08 +0000

This is the first in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. The interactive session demonstrates tips to improve delivery and email response rates for your well crafted HTML emails. We also cover tips to help ensure your email gets read once it actually makes it to the inbox. Email Marketing 101 focuses on email content and covers the following topics: Designing for the Inbox: Think "Above the Fold" 21 DOs and DON'Ts - Tips to Improve Email Delivery The on-demand version, accompanying slides and 10 page Q and A sumamry are included.

9 Tips for Writing Email Subject Lines That Work

Pinpointe — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:25:36 +0000

Every copywriter and journalist knows the importance of a powerful headline. The same applies for email subject lines, because as much as 40% of a recipient’s decision to open an email is based on the email subject (and sender). Despite that, many still underestimate just how important the email subject line is. So here are some anecdotes, facts, and guidelines that can help you write even better subject lines (and remind you how much you should focus on them.) The 50/50 Rule of Email Subjects According to some of the best copywriters of all time, you should spend … half of the entire time it takes to write a piece of persuasive content on the email subject. The same tip [...]

Using ALT Text Tags in HTML Email

Pinpointe — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:36:38 +0000

What is ‘ALT Text’ and why should you care? As most of us have now experienced, many email clients now DISABLE graphics images by default. We haven’t seen specific metrics on what % of email inboxes have images disabled by default but general consensus seems to be in the 50% range, and increasing. So, if your email includes images, the recipient will see only a box with a red ‘X’ where the image belongs, until they manually enable ‘display images’ in their email client. This has implications with respect to email design. To demonstrate exactly what we mean, here’s what your well-crafted, graphically pleasing email looks like in an Outlook preview pane when image display is disabled: This doesn’t exactly [...]