Technology moves fast. Today’s buzzwords include phrases like HTML5, responsive design, social media, and mobile first. If you’re feeling left behind, don’t worry – it’s hard to keep up, especially when technology seems to change overnight.
At Email Broadcast, we take pride in being at the forefront of modern technology and design.That trait emerges in our client work – ensuring they are equipped with the best tools to reach every single person in their target audience.
So, what does a modern HTML newsletter contain these days? That answer varies depending on your target audience and your goals, but here are a few points that apply to most businesses that should help push your newsletter to the top of the in-box:
1. Go Viral with Social Media Integration.
With Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest all the rage, you’ve probably wondered how you could use those platforms to your advantage. First, you must have amazing content worthy of sharing. Then, if someone reads your awesome newsletter and wants to share it or send it to their social network, you must give them an easy way to do it within your own newsletter.By adding social media icons that integrate with each platform, you create the opportunity to extend the reach of your publication and engage even more readers! Someone shares your newsletter on Facebook and then one of their friends tweets it on Twitter to their network, and then someone decides that they want to “Pin It” on Pinterest– you’ve just amplified your message several degrees! Make it easy for your reader to help you go viral.
2. Go Mobile with Responsive Designs.
Have you ever tried reading an email on your mobile device that had tiny text and images, forcing you to pinch and zoom around the email to try and read it? Frustrating, isn’t it? This is where responsive design and imaging comes in. The word responsive means an element (like a photo) can be resized on the fly, based on that device’s screen size. Many websites have started creating responsive websites so people on mobile devices can enjoy an optimal user-experience, even if they visit with a mobile phone. The same thing can be done for email, and it should be.
At Email Broadcast, we implement CSS code into some of our newsletters so that as you resize your browser, your images render the appropriate size, depending on the screen size of the mobile device. Here’s a tip on adding responsive support for your images:
Say your newsletter is 600px wide, and you want your images to be responsive (automatically shrink for smaller screens), simply add the following CSS rules to your images, and they will comfort.To test that you have it right, try resizing your browser window. As you resize your browser, you’ll notice your images will never exceed a 600px width, while always being 100% when the window is smaller than 600px.
3. Go Glam with occasional Animated Graphics.
Watch the tower in our logo very closely. Pretty neat, huh? When you see an email with moving images, do you wonder, How did they DO that? The trick is as old as a web browser dating back to the 90s, when the first HTML browsers were born. These animated images are known as GIFs, and contain a series of photos that rotate at a given speed and then repeat. Using the wonderful gift of GIFs, you can now show multiple images to extend your message with limited real estate. Keep in mind, however, that you want to keep your messaging short and simple, so readers can quickly read it and move on. Less is more, in this sense, so don’t overdo it. There are also some major email clients like Microsoft Outlook that don’t support rotating GIFs so you need to know how to handle that.
Hope that helps!
Hopefully the above tips will help you deliver a stellar email marketing campaign.
If you’re now more intimidated than ever – that’s understandable. Getting all this stuff exactly right isn’t easy. Maybe it’s time to give us a ring. Email Broadcast specializes in all of the mentioned tips, plus we have many more tools in our belts, ready to put to work for you. Ask us how we can help your newsletters stay on the forefront of modern technology. Call us at 206-714-4767 during business hours or use our contact form.
