Running The Ladder is the company blog of Bainbridge Studios, a tiny runt of a design practice based in lovely Tacoma, WA.
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RIM to (Finally!) Add HTML Email Support to Blackberry Platform
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
RIM has finally announced support for viewing of HTML emails on its Blackberry devices, via a press release last week. Given the percentage of business users regularly employing Blackberrys for viewing their email (back in October we discussed the latest numbers on mobile access as a primary means of email viewing for 37% of business users). This is a major step forward for those of us on the production side of email marketing, as RIM holds a significant share of the smart phone market and the addition of this feature set will make it easier for marketers to know they’re targeting Blackberry users with the full impact of the graphic/HTML campaigns.
Based on their release, it appears that the functionality will be added as a software/firmware update, meaning existing Blackberry users should be able to install the update and gain the functionality on their current devices, rather than necessarily needing to purchase a new Blackberry model.
(via Campaign Monitor)
Harry & David’s Holiday Inundation
Sunday, January 13th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
Click Z‘s Anna Maria Virzi highlights findings from a recent Email Experience Council report on holiday email marketing. Overall, retailers increased holiday emails by more than 45% in December, but the largest increase (among 109 retailers featured) was Harry & David, purveyors of fruits, gift baskets, and Moose Munch. Harry & David, which normally send out a marketing email to customers roughly once per week, increased that eightfold during the holidays, bombarding customers inboxes more than one per day in the run-up to Christmas.
We’ve been customers of Harry & David for years, as we’ve used them for sending gift baskets to many of our clients each December, and we certainly noticed the significant increase in emails this year, to the point that we began routing them straight to the junk mail folder. It’s a shame that they became such an aggravation for us, because their products are excellent and we’ve always enjoyed sharing their treats with clients and friends.
Email Standards Project Works to Improve Web Standards Support in Email Clients
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | Tom Carmony
Over the past few months, the fine folks at Campaign Monitor have been working on a new project to promote better support of CSS and web standards among major email clients (both offline and web-based programs). The new site for their Email Standards Project (ESP), has now launched and provides a range of helpful information for understanding to what degree various email clients support web standards.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, web standards is a general term for technical specs of website rendering that have been increasingly accepted in recent years. These guidelines, which focus a great deal of attention on support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, which dictate the look and feel of web page), are designed to help developers of web browsers follow a standard set of protocols for how web pages are seen by users. Long story short, browsers (and websites) that are web-standards client render essentially the same for all users, regardless of their operating system, browser, etc.
Most browsers offer varying degrees of support for CSS and web standards. Among the most standards-compliant browsers are Firefox and Safari. Most lists of the least standards-compliant browsers are typically headed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE5 and IE6 are particularly unfriendly to CSS and web standards — IE7 offers improved support, but still lags behind Firefox, Safari and others).
As much variability exists among browsers, the current state of standards-support in email programs is even worse. What does this mean for the average business? If you send HTML-based emails (emails featuring graphics, different fonts, trackable web links, etc.) you’re taking a bit of a crap shoot as far as how that email will render based on how the recipient is viewing it. HTML email rendering varies greatly, even between different versions of the same program. For instance, Outlook 2003 offered significantly better CSS and standards-support than Outlook 2007. The same email opened in each of these email clients will look different. This variability also extends to web-based email clients (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, .Mac Mail, and so on).
ESP has devised an acid test for comparing CSS and web standards support among email clients. This test outlines a limited sub-set of CSS tags and classes that would be most commonly used in HTML emails. The current results of these tests can be found on their website and are broken down by major email clients, including Outlook 2007, Apple Mail, Lotus Notes, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and more.
By highlighting both the strengths and the shortcomings of popular email programs, ESP hopes to call attention to the need for standards support, as well as actively promote such change among software developers.
Designing Email Marketing for Mobile Users
Thursday, October 25th, 2007 | Tom Carmony
Tamara Gielen of BeRelevant!, a blog focusing on best practices in email marketing, cited a range of statistics on business-to-business (B2B) email in a post this afternoon. The item that really caught my eye was the following stat:”The percentage of business people who regularly read business emails on their mobile devices (keyword “regularly”) was 37%, up from 30% just a year ago.”This is a significant percentage to consider for anyone sending marketing emails to customers, clients, etc.
Much has been made in recent months in garnering across-the-board support for CSS standards in HTML (graphic) emails, but marketers need to pay just as much attention to the mobile user. While some mobile devices fully support and render HTML emails (the iPhone is one such device that does an excellent job of this), others are very spotty in their support for such messages (my last phone, a Blackberry, regularly chewed up HTML emails into an unreadable mess).
What’s the solution? Well, ideally, implementation of HTML and CSS support in mobile email apps. That however, is a bit beyond the control of Joe Businessman. What you can do, however, is make sure you’re covering your bases with not only the graphic/HTML versions of your marketing emails, but pairing those with plain text versions. Email marketing services such as Campaign Monitor support and encourage the practice of sending plain text versions with all HTML campaigns; the idea being that mobile users (and customers who elect, on for perceived security reasons, to block/not enable HTML emails in their mail app) will be able to view the plain text version. Granted, it may not pack the visual punch of your snazzy graphic-based email, but at least the core message is getting through, right?
Here at Bainbridge Studios, we’ve begun pairing plain text versions with clients’ HTML emails in a number of cases, and are in the process of updating our workflow to implement this practice across the board. Our goal is to send both HTML and plain-text versions of all customer marketing emails before the end of the year, and we’re on track to complete that transition.
We feel that’s the best way to offer full value to our clients for their email marketing practices and to insure that their messages are read by the widest audience possible.
Does Spam Really Work?
Thursday, January 4th, 2007 | Tom Carmony
Eric Ogren of Computerworld detailed in one of his recent blog entries how stock market spam has exploded over the past two years, making up 15% of all spam messages (as of July 2006), compared to less than one percent of spam back in January 2005.
The reason behind this rapid increase? It works. To the tune of an average return of roughly 5.8% over just two days. Spammers buy up shares of penny stocks, distribute spam touting the particular company, then sell off their shares for a profit.
As hard as it may be to believe, there’s still a fair amount of folks out there willing to act on the investing advice of a complete stranger’s unsolicited email showing up in their inbox.
Pair these stats will Information Week’s recent analysis shows that 87% of all email is spam and you see why the trend continues; there’s still plenty of money to be made.