We asked three of our expert designers to share their theories on why horizontal layouts work, and what other best practices and tricks of the trade they incorporate into their creatives to bolster their performance.

Senior Graphic Designer Roald Ansano recounts his inspiration for the unique layout:

“The first time I realized the potential of horizontal designs I was reviewing a retail client’s summer campaign. It was designed like a wide postcard, with products you could scroll left to right to look at. If the same products had been laid out in a normal template, I would’ve just scrolled up and down, out of habit. But I was already doing something different from the norm, so it kept me interested.”

What’s the tactical approach in designing these emails?

“As with traditional vertical emails, you must concentrate on the 420 pixel “above the fold” area. But for horizontals, you stress the total viewable width of 720 pixels. This is the average measurement we use to determine when the user needs to start scrolling horizontally to view more content. The important information must appear there, but there can’t be too much to take in, or it becomes overwhelming. The most important thing is to use cues that get the viewer’s attention and indicate that there’s more to the right. You must encourage interaction with the viewer.”

Graphic Designer Riko Austria explains the process further:

“To entice the viewer to scroll to the right, we incorporate graphical elements that provide a horizontal “visual flow” to the email, such as a long header image, a call-to-action, a product description, or a lifestyle shot that is intentionally cut off until you move right. It’s like a visual ‘teaser.’ That convinces the viewer to scroll to see more.”

Riko enjoys the challenge horizontal emails represent.

“It’s something new to bring to the table; it’s something new to master and test. There are different methods to use when designing. And, it’s the perfect time for this to come out, now that most monitors are wide screen. It’s a perfect technological fit.”

Graphic Designer Kathy Jankovic has been busy redesigning vertical emails into horizontal versions for the last couple of months:

“We like to give the client both options, and we’re doing testing to see what performs better. I’m looking forward to seeing the testing data and working more with horizontal designs.”

With each project, Kathy feels she comes closer to perfecting the art of these designs.

“I’m always thinking about ways to make the initial presentation, and user interaction more engaging, such as using a continuous image, and making sure content doesn’t end before the 720 pixel mark. One of the challenges for me, as a designer, is that the horizontal plane can go up to 2000 pixels (standard total width measurement used by several email clients), so I have to know when to end the design. With horizontals, too much right-left movement isn’t good. Viewers lose focus and then interest. It’s very much about using your instincts, while letting the design define the horizontal end.”

Time and testing will tell if the horizontal approach is a surefire hit, but so far, all signs point to yes.

One of the most important issues for email marketers is making sure the message makes it to the “inbox” of the intended recipient. An often overlooked key aspect of mailing delivery — in addition to IP reputation — is the actual subject line of the email. Not only does the subject line play an important role in getting delivered, it is imperative to accomplish the main objective of getting your marketing message opened and read by the user and keeping your list active. As such, here are some subject line best practices to follow to ensure your legitimate email is not filtered as spam.

• A subject line should be as short and descriptive as possible. The subject line should be informative and true. If your from name and address are not branded, the subject line should also provide assurance that the email comes from a trusted source. A general rule of thumb is to keep subject lines between 30-50 characters.
• A strong offer can be put right in the subject line. Evaluate your content to understand the likelihood of your message hitting spam filters, particularly if a high percentage of your list is at corporate domains. Corporate domains rely more on phrases or words that have been “tainted” by the spamming community. The major web-based email clients focus on your reputation more than your content.
• The from name and address can be as important as the subject line. A strong offer can be put right in the subject line, but it is important to use punctuation and grammar carefully to ensure that you are not perceived to be a spammer by the receiving ISP.
• The ‘from’ name and subject line should work in tandem. The ‘from’ line should communicate who you are as the sender. Do your best to not change this entry frequently and make it recognizable so that recipients understand that the email was sent by a reliable source.
• If you are cross promoting a sister brand, use the subject line to introduce the sister brand and do not change the ‘from’ address of the originally subscribed-to brand. Any other ‘from’ address is likely to increase complaints. For more information on cross promoting sister brands, please see our recent post on promoting sister brands.

That said, spammers use various tactics to fool people into opening their emails. Spammers often use words that announce a big incentive or urgency. We suggest testing certain keywords or alternative words to optimize your subject lines.

• Some key words and phrases such as “act now,” “trial,” “quote,” and “guarantee” can be tested against “complimentary,” “estimate,” “be our guest,” and “giveaway.”
• While “Free” performs well in subject lines (see Experian CheetahMail’s Free Shipping Report) you might try using “our treat” or “on the house” to see what works best for your brand.
• Avoid excessive punctuation — exclamation points, multiple periods (…), dollar signs ($$), etc.
• In the past putting full words in ALL CAPS was considered equivalent to shouting. Using all caps is a practice used by spammers. Test the use of all caps and monitor any drops in open rates potentially due to filtering.
• Using ‘Re:’ at the beginning of a subject line falsely leads the recipient to think the email is a reply to a previous email. This is a misleading tactic. This tactic is not CAN-SPAM compliant and creates a poor customer experience. If the recipient feels duped into opening an email, you might see an increase in abuse rates or unsubscribe requests.

Just a few little words/phrases in your subject line can make or break the success of your email marketing campaign, not just by impacting open rates but affecting deliverability too. To learn what works best, test. Following these subject line best practices can save your client from losing both excellent reputation and good subscribers.

Some of the new features that should have a positive impact on email deliverability include:

• Trusted Senders Icon — Hotmail will now help visually identify ‘trusted senders’ in your inbox, particularly banks and other senders most commonly impersonated in phishing scams, by putting safety logos next to those senders recognized as legitimate. While the exact details on this feature are limited right now, it will most likely be based on a combination of authentication and a consistently positive mailing reputation.
• Tabs — Organizational tools will appear at the top of the inbox that will allow the user to display messages received from specific contacts, certain social networks (such as Facebook notifications), pre-selected email groups, or all of their mail. In addition, “Quick Views” will be available that will automatically sort four types of emails into their respective folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs, and Shipping Updates. These tabs can benefit senders by addressing inbox overload issues.

One of the new features that should have a negative impact on senders and deliverability as a whole:

• Time Traveling Filters — Microsoft’s filters can retroactively remove messages that were placed in the inbox if the reputation of the sender later turns out to be poor and the recipient has not yet opened the message in their inbox. That means there’s no longer a guarantee that a message delivered to the inbox will actually stay there until the recipient acts on it.

In addition to these two deliverability enhancements, there are also some new user interface features and ‘behind the scenes’ developments that can have either positive or negative effects on senders. These include:

• Preference auto-learning/prompts — Subscribers that delete messages without opening them multiple times will be prompted if they want to unsubscribe from that sender (assuming the sender is populating a ‘list-unsubscribe’ setting in their transmission header). This will have positive and negative affects for senders; it will undoubtedly reduce list size by some amount, however, it removes recipients who are no longer engaged which should improve open and conversion rates.
• Sweep — This feature allows users to clean out their inbox in one ‘sweep’ effort. In a single-click, a user can select a single e-mail sender, or multiple senders, and automatically delete or move every message from that sender out of their inbox. A positive byproduct of this feature is that senders whose mail is swept should not suffer any impact to their reputation since the number of unsubscribes and spam complaints should decrease as more recipients use sweep rather than unsubscribing, deleting or complaining. However, it’s important to remember that just because a complaint rate is low doesn’t mean that the sender’s reputation and deliverability is good. Hotmail will still check email quality, engagement and other relevant statistics to further identify legitimate messaging. Additionally, the sweep function remembers user preferences, so if a user sweeps a sender’s mail once, Hotmail is likely to continue to sweep that sender’s mail to the designated folder until the user intervenes.
• Delete all of them? — Upon deleting a single email from a sender, users may be prompted to “Delete all of them?” with the ability to block all future messages from that particular sender. This action should have the same positive/negative effects as the Preference auto-learning/prompts.

These enhancements to Hotmail can have both positive and negative effects on senders. These changes are primarily designed so that fewer true spam messages will appear in your subscriber’s inbox, which will allow the subscriber greater time to interact with legitimate messages from legitimate senders.

As marketers increasingly create niche brands or become consolidated within ‘parent’ companies, it may seem like the ideal opportunity to cross-promote products and services across ‘sister’ brands to reach prospective customers, expand subscriber lists and increase revenue.

Unfortunately, sharing subscriber data across brands has the potential to negatively impact reputation, which can adversely influence inbox placement for all of the sending brands. This practice may not only generate increased complaints but, if executed improperly, could also result in lower engagement and higher unsubscribes due to subscriber frustration or irrelevancy of sister brand outreach.

Here are some tactics to positively introduce subscribers to ‘sister’ brands:

• Implement a branded welcome email series that familiarizes current subscribers with related brands. This serves to boost interest as well as brand recognition of the sister brand. Furthermore, this association will begin the process of persuading subscribers to click-through and check out other content. Be sure to include all brand logos in the footer or elsewhere in standard messaging or cross-promotional messages as that will further increase awareness and credibility for all of your affiliated brands.
• Place the unsubscribe link at the top of the cross-promoted marketing message to encourage subscribers to opt-out of co-branded promotions rather than complain to their ISP or unsubscribe from all emails from that ‘sender.’* Complaints are the most important consideration by ISPs in their filtering decisions, so providing subscribers a highly visible unsubscribe helps to maintain low complaint rates and a good reputation.
• Utilize clear and conspicuous language at the point of email consent so that subscribers have realistic expectations of potential cross-branded communications.
• Refrain from changing the ‘from’ address of the originally subscribed-to brand. Any other ‘from’ address will surprise recipients and increase complaints.
• Direct recipients to a preference center when they join or leave your program and utilize it to expose subscribers to other brands’ subscription options.
• Ensure that the cross-branded emails include a significant promotion that provides value and encourages future receipt of these types of emails. Alternatively, use some existing space within an email to solicit subscriptions to an affiliated brands email list.

As a proud ‘parent’ brand, the desire to showcase the attributes and advantages of an entire ‘family’ of brands is not only natural, but a recommended opportunity. Guiding this introduction through best practices is vital in maintaining a positive reputation amongst ISPs in addition to fostering high-quality experiences with consumers.

*In our next edition, we’ll address some of the privacy and legal issues with managing co-branded and affiliate email campaigns.

I recently purchased two flower arrangements from FTD.com and noticed some pretty nice features revolving around their email reminders. The first mention of their reminder program comes during the checkout process — after the delivery information and before the payment options.

FTD does a great job with:

• Being clear that this is an optional form. A customer does not need to fill this out in order to complete their transaction. As a consumer, I know that I am signing up to receive email notifications by completing this form.
• The offer is clear and generous.
• The rules are clear. I need to enter 5 reminders in order to receive 20% off my next order. This information is listed twice in a small space.
• The form is easy to understand and simple to navigate.
• Reminding customers about the gift reminder service again once the checkout process is complete. Since I did not enter 5 reminder email addresses and dates on my first attempt I was given the option to enter them again.

Do you have any examples of Gift Reminder services? How have these performed for you? Do you opt-in for these types of services? Share your experiences with us!

A recent design trend that I’ve been intrigued by is the use of textures, uneven edges and off-kilter layers to create a more organic feel to email campaigns.

American Eagle has really been at the cutting edge of this trend. Their campaigns use all three of these techniques, plus handwritten fonts and drop shadows (rather than frames), to make their imagery stand out in the inbox. The innovative use of curled photographs and plaster background textures add even more intrigue to the design. I love the way the background texture blends into the white naturally.

Going one step further, American Eagle’s sister brands are getting in on the fun as well. 77kids utilize a linen-style background rather than a plaster one, along with heavily distressed photo borders and paper clips. It’s a unified look for the master brand and the individual brand, and manages to look home-made yet modern.

Taking a step back and looking at these designs through the lens of history, they remind me quite a bit of popular print advertising from the 1990′s, known commonly as “grunge” style. Grunge was not just associated with music and fashion in the 90′s, but was also made popular by designers such as David Carson. Even companies as straight-laced as Nike and Coca-Cola experimented with grunge visuals during the 1990′s.

If the fading retro-electro design trend of the past 10 years reminded us of the 1980′s, it makes sense that we should expect to see a renaissance of 1990′s style in email and elsewhere in the next decade.

For many years, the public impression of how email deliverability works has been shrouded in mystery. Most seem to assume that email service providers hire deliverability experts because they know some sort of ISP black magic — or even better, that they have a direct ‘Bat-Phone’ to call ISP postmasters whenever a problem arises. While ISP relations are still critical to ensuring high delivery rates, the days of relying solely on ISP phone calls or emails to fix delivery problems are a thing of the past.

It’s important to note these key issues about ISP postmasters:

1. They all work in a corporate cost center. During these tough economic times, many of them have had to cut back on resources, such as AOL’s postmaster group, whose team was severely downsized recently. As a result, these individuals have more work to do and less time to work with senders.
2. ISP filters have become much more sophisticated and no longer need (or sometimes offer) manual intervention. Unless there’s truly a glitch in their system, most postmasters today will require senders to look at their own data before trying to manually intervene. In some cases, the postmaster does not have a manual override mechanism if the delivery problem is tied to the sender’s reputation.
3. A postmaster’s typical response to a sender escalation is to look at whether users who receive the email in the spam/junk folder press the ‘not spam’ or ‘not junk’ button. This is a complicated situation because it’s rare that recipients actually read what’s in their spam/junk folder and feel strongly enough to take a remediation step on behalf of a commercial email sender. In other words, the sender must really be providing value to get that ‘not spam’ click.

I wish it were easy to pick up a phone or ‘just do lunch’ to get delivery problems fixed. Yet, as a former lobbyist whose previous trade also gets routinely confused by the media, I know that real changes aren’t made by phone calls or direct contacts, but by having objective research and constituent support.

Nine in ten U.S. adults today use at least one mobile device. Mobile phones have truly become an essential part of consumers’ every day lives, and email marketers can easily capitalize on this immense market if they plan and segment their campaigns strategically. Recently released consumer reseach from Experian Simmons reveals the following key trends that provide deep insight on the traits and characterstics of the mobile consumer today:

• The most popular mobile function today – aside from talking – is taking pictures, which 70% of mobile phone owners do each month.
• Adults under age 50 are the most likely to be mobile users with 93% owning a mobile phone today.
• Over 78% of adults over the age of adults over age 60 are now mobile.
• Fully half of cell phone users simultaneously engage with some other medium while on their mobile. TV is the most common media distraction with 21% of mobile phone owners watching TV while using the phone
• Thirty-one percent of mobile phone owners check personal email on their phone and 21% check their work email.

To learn more about what research by Experian Simmons has to say about today’s mobile consumers, we recommend reading the “Mobile marketing” section of our latest report, the 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report.

Source: Experian Simmons Fall 2009 Consumer Study/National Hispanic Study

Subject line testing is not a new concept to email marketing or to this blog. However, it is an important key to email marketing success. Subject line testing is easy to do and offers concrete results, but is often neglected.

Below is a typical inbox. Which subject lines best grab your attention? Which approach would work for your brand? Which one do you think is the worst performing? There’s only way to know – test it out!

Keep in mind:

• Best-in-breed email programs consistently test their subject lines.
• It is important to verify your past findings and current theories about subject lines instead of making assumptions.
• If you can increase your open rates even slightly by optimizing your subject lines, the potential to increase click and transaction rates increases.

Do:

• Be clear and direct.
• Be short – keep subject lines to 50 characters or less. (test this out to make sure shorter is better for your brand)
• Do tell subscribers what’s new in this message.
• Remind subscribers when sales/events are ending.
• Try wistful, fun or emotional subject lines.
• Test personalization, symbols (%, $) and capital letters. Also, I have seen pipes (|) used successfully.
• Set your subscribers’ expectations during the opt-in process about what kinds of emails they’ll be receiving.
• Try incorporating offer codes in the subject line.

Don’t:

• Be deceptive.
• Be too long-winded.
• Deviate from your brand voice too much.
• Scream (use words in all CAPITAL LETTERS).
• Test once and then make long term decisions.
• Be afraid to have fun!
• Don’t confuse newsletters with promotions. If your email is a newsletter, put the name and issue of the newsletter in your subject line. If your email is a special promotion, tell the subscriber what’s inside. Either way, don’t write your subject lines like advertisements.

Subject line recommendations and solutions are not a one size fits all solution. Discover for yourself about what works best for you and what does not work. Don’t forget to document both your testing failures and successes. You do not want to forget what worked and did not work as you perform more tests. Also, you do not want to lose any testing knowledge as employees come and go.

Some subject line testing scenarios include:

• Short versus long.
• Mentioning a product type (shoes, savings accounts, cars, travel destinations).
• Mentioning of brand or style type advertised (Nike, Cargo Pants, Harry Potter, Rolling Stone, Jolly Ranchers).
• Using and testing placement of free shipping, percent-off or discount offers.
• Using language indicating urgency (limited time sale, 3 days only, etc.).
• Using language evoking curiosity or inspiration.
• Using first name personalization
• Including the company name.
• Using capitalization and abbreviations appropriately or intentionally inappropriately (Di$count 4U!).
• Including offer codes in the subject line.

A sample subject line test scenario: The 10-10-80 split

1. 10% of the subscriber list received Subject Line 1.
2. 10% of the subscriber list received Subject Line 2.
3. 80% of the subscriber list received the winning Subject Line.

The winner is most often determined by unique open rate but not necessarily all the time. In the case of including an offer code in the subject line, the winner might be determined by the number of sales generated by that offer code. In this case the subscriber does not even need to open the email for you to make a sale because they can often see the code from the preview pane alone.

If you are having a difficult time deciding what subject lines to create, get inspired by the content of the email or by your web analytics data (to see which content is recently popular on your site and which popular keywords are driving traffic).

When it comes to email marketing, the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside. But don’t take my word for it – you need to test, test, test this for yourself.

To date, more than 21 million users have the ability to check their email on Apple’s iPhone, but how do these emails render? Here are some iPhone specific guidelines to consider the next time you’re designing an email with a mobile slant.

With a comparatively larger screen than most other mobile devices, the viewable area is still only 480 x 320 pixels in size. Compare this to a normal monitor, which measures at least 1280 x 1024, and suddenly your design has a lot less room to present itself. Since most emails are designed at a width of 700 pixels, the iPhone will automatically shrink the email down by 200% to display the content. This means that your hard-earned email creative has now been reduced to tiny colored dots. Of course, through a choreographed two-finger gesture all of your design can be seen up close, but do you really want your users to take that extra step?

When designing for the iPhone consider the following:

• Set the width of the email to anywhere between 320 and 510 pixels wide. This will ensure your content is clear enough to still be viewed without having to zoom in. If the campaign is geared specifically for iPhone users (e.g. where a new app is available for download), keep the width closer to 320 pixels.
• The above-the-fold area is the part of the email the user will see before having to scroll. On the iPhone, this space is measured at 240 pixels in height. As always, keep the messaging simple and direct with a clear call-to-action.
• Because the iPhone is a wireless device, the download time may vary. More often than not, the user will be inclined to scroll impatiently to the bottom of a current email only to realize it has yet to fully download. To ensure your email will be received in it’s entirety, without delay, consider keeping the graphics to a minimum and use HTML text when possible.