Tag: tech

Scenario

When you test your email you notice that your image rich designs are loading very slowly. You also notice your website is loading slowly after a large email send.

This is more than likely because you are using your normal web-hosting for images used in your emails. Bear in mind that the majority of opens and clicks on marketing emails occur within the first hour. This concentrated blast of image requests to your server results in performance issues and provides a poor user experience.

Solution

Use an image library feature that allows you to host and manage your images in the cloud. Images will download quickly when a recipient opens an email. Hosting your images in the cloud you can expect a reduction in bandwidth consumption during large campaigns. This will ensure your website performance does not suffer.

Images can be automatically added to the image library when you upload your email creative. You can also add files on an ad hoc basis using a simple manual file upload interface.

Image library’s tagging feature allows you to assign key words and categories to your images. This means that you can search for, organise and filter images easily and visually.

With an Image Library you can be confident that your hosted images are delivered rapidly to recipients without affecting your website bandwidth.

Moving from one email service provider (ESP) to another can be a daunting experience.

At GraphicMail we offer a managed service with dedicated Implementation Manager to make sure the migration moves without any hitches. Here are some of the things to think about when moving ESP.

1. Moving your data – ALL of it

It isn’t just customer records you might need to move. Don’t forget the following:

• Unsubscribes
• Bounces
• Spam Complaints
• Open and click data

You need all of your data in order to make sure you don’t have delivery disasters when moving ESP. Sending to email addresses that have unsubscribed from your database or have complained about your emails will lead to a further spike in complaints. Keeping your bounce data is also essential as this list may contain spam traps, which you obviously don’t want to be sending to.  Essentially if you get this wrong it could be months before you can rectify your sending reputation and get good inbox placement.

Also if you want to improve delivery rates consider suppressing those people that never open or click on your marketing email. This will help reduce your complaint rate, and with ISP’s looking at engagement rates to determine the quality of your sender it will give you an improvement in delivery without loss of any actual opens and clicks.

2. Past Campaign History

Include all historical campaign data ensuring you don’t lose any of the value in the reporting you have built up. This includes your past campaigns and all associated open and click data.

3. Signup Forms

Existing forms will need to be customised so your new ESP can pick up where the old ESP left off and continue to send the welcome emails connected to the form. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to do, so isn’t a huge job. Some platforms can actually do a ‘double post’, so the submission goes to 2 places.

4. Sub-domains

You will likely need to create new sub-domains for pointing to your new ESP. These are usually used so you can have friendly from addresses and tracking links. You can switch your existing sub-domains to your new ESP but that means any click-throughs on old emails will cease to function. If you have a DKIM record for a sub-domain, ensure your new ESP signs emails with it, this allows you to maintain your sending reputation that you build up with your old ESP. It is a complicated subject area to discuss in this blog article.

5. Transactional Emails

One of the key reasons why marketers switch ESP’s is to integrate marketing and transactional emails more closely. Transactional emails are of course mission critical so switching on your new ESP needs to be handled carefully. Look for an ESP with a simple integration option of SMTP gateway, where your system administrators can simply change the connection details they send through rather than having to require complex programming resources.

Need help? Get a dedicated Implementation Manager through our contact form.

If you use any of the three major webmail email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo). You’ve probably come across an email that appears to have
lots of gaps between the images.

In the email below, the image of the Houses of Parliament has been sliced up in order for text to be
inserted in two places. The image is then stitched together using several table rows. As you can see,
Gmail has inserted gaps between each row, breaking our image into several sections. The same thing
happens in Yahoo and Hotmail.

In order to remove these annoying gaps, we simply need to add a small bit of code to the image: style=”display: block”.

<img src="image-url.jpg"; style="display: block" />

Once that code has been added to the offending images, the email renders correctly.

Simon Says…

Don’t be tempted to take the shortcut of adding the display: block CSS code to the head of your email:

<style type="text/css">
img{display:block}
</style>
 

Firstly, some email clients will strip that away and the gaps will return. Secondly, there will be instances where you don’t want the display: block to be applied. If you have text running alongside an image in one table cell for example, the display: block would push the text underneath the image. It’s best to add the code to each individual image, that way it can be removed if necessary.