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I can just imagine Print Marketing and Email Marketing standing 100 meters apart in a dusty one-street town.  The Old Sheriff and Johnny-Come-Lately with his shiny new hat ready to mix the town up.  Though, Johnny’s not so ‘lately’ and he already has mixed the town up.  And seeing them standing there I realise they each serve important purposes and neither has yet found it’s time to leave so the bullets miss, or never leave, and a strange peace prevails.  As long as different people access information in different ways, some on a screen and some on a page, some both, bedfellows they will remain.  But similar they are not.

While perhaps this is an exaggeration, we do know that on the web, people approach communication very differently than they do print.  This is obvious.

Even the same people.

Different expectations, different opportunities. So the challenge is being aware stepping into the different opportunities and expectations?

In light of this I was dwelling on a few thoughts this week and I hope these might be of interest:

• More ‘touches’ can be allowed online than offline, but expect a number of these to be user-initiated. Facilitate that
• There is an expectation of discourse over broadcast
• Don’t keep making the same pitch. Don’t send something you wouldn’t want to receive yourself
• Narrative is powerful.
• When it comes to print people appreciate that you’ve taken the time to mail them something that looks good. Yet no matter how ’shiny’ your campaign, email is a perceptually lower-value item with a different set of typical responses.
• We expect propaganda in our mail-boxes however people feel a type of ownership over their email in-boxes. Respect that.

Now, if you’re Coles or Clint’s Crazy Bargains, I would feel very weird if I received anything other than a simple ‘here’s our specials’. But most of us are not involved in selling groceries and two-dollar tools. We have important relationships with key customers. Where is your value to them? Can you provide more of it via email? That’s a good place to start.

Some thoughts I’ve been chewing on recently anyway.

~ Rob

We create a lot of emails for people, brochures, newsletters, once-off invitations and more.

Usually these have a unique look and feel and require some kind of customisation, but with the world of html emails, consistency and display reliability is a hard thing to achieve thanks to the wide variety of archaic email clients being used.

This article here provides a handy little checklist of CSS items that are available to you, but it doesn’t not list the new hotmail “Live Mail” and as there are differences in the way CSS is handled we must press on.

The best article we’ve come across is written by the fantastic guys at Campaign Monitor right here. What are some of the main points we took away? We’ve distilled it way down for you anyway.

As with many things coded for cross-client compatibility the weakest link becomes the greatest determiner in what you can and can’t do in an email design. Especially as it’s extremely difficult, nigh impossible to segment your recipients based on what client they’re using. So, when it comes to sending through those shiny HTML emails Gmail and Outlook 2007 become those weak links that imform the way most of your design is hard-coded into the email. Question: So what do you do?

Answer: Table based inline css, and check the list of inline-options that you wish to use are supported (do what we did and printed off the Campaign Monitor’s article and stick it on your wall/foreheards).

Sure, you may have to spend a few more minutes adding code and feeling like a Neanderthal coder, but at least it’s going to deliver consistent brand integrity and professional results to your valued publics. Onward Ho!

~Rob

P.S. I just found this super article if you want a more comprehensive checklist when writing those HTML emails. It’s pretty old, but gives you good info on how to satisfy GMail and has some good practices in there. You know, just in case you had the itch for some helpful extra reading.