Adrian Young, Author at The Email Factory

Technology

Has the digital age rewired our attention spans?

4 minute read

Adrian Young

Beep. Ding. Buzz. Repeat. We’re bombarded by notifications in our ever-connected digital world. All the time.

At work and at home, multiple applications on multiple devices vie for our attention. It can take enormous concentration to focus on just one task. More often than not, our attention is divided between this and that and umpteen other things.

What exactly is this doing to our minds?

The internet age

Our modern world revolves around computers and the internet. It’s hard now to truly picture the pre-internet age. And yet this technology only represents a tiny speck in human history.

I’m just about old enough to remember a time when a computer was not a guaranteed household item. If you needed to find out how to do something, you’d tinker with it, ask someone, or read a manual. There was no Google to rescue you. Or to save you from using your own imagination, if you want to look at it another way.

Now we all carry a smartphone in our pockets. We have immediate access to a world of content. And we don’t need to go looking for it. It comes looking for us.

May I have your attention

We’ve all heard the phrase attention economy. Your attention = someone else’s profit. And that means your best interests are not the priority. Money is.

Online platforms want you to stay. You are algorithmically fed ‘content’ that is likely to make you personally keep scrolling and engaging. The more time you spend (or squander), the more ads you view, and the more data you provide. The system may be feeding you – but the really important thing is that you’re also feeding it.

And there’s a little trick to keep you hooked: brevity.

Let’s make this brief

How do you prefer to watch a TV series?

Chronologically in its entirety over a period of time.
In fragmented minute-long snippets, devoid of context or continuity.

The sane answer is the first one. Right? Despite that, many of us are now doing it the other way. The short video format popular in recent times on social media has us becoming increasingly accustomed to short snappy clips. And we might not even watch those in their entirety either. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

When these short-form videos first appeared on YouTube, I could not understand their purpose. At all. It was completely alien to me as a concept. Why would anyone want to watch a few seconds on a topic, instead of exploring it in-depth?

Turns out I wasn’t immune after all. This kind of content can be mind-numbingly addictive. You don’t just watch a clip or two – you scroll through dozens. And you absolutely do not feel good after it.

A trap in the face

So, here we are. Millions of us with our eyes glued to a tiny plastic rectangle, ignoring the world around us. Not really thinking. Just consuming.

The funny thing is, we know this is unhealthy. But awareness and reason are up against a powerful opponent: addiction. We’ve been tricked into craving the immediate blasts of dopamine that social media provides. Sitting on the train? Pull the phone out. Waiting for the kettle to boil? Pull the phone out. Doing anything that cuts off the stimuli even for a moment? Pull the phone out.

Mental overload

Our technology may have moved on in leaps and bounds, but we are still only human. Here’s the problem as highlighted by The Guardian:

“Our brains haven’t changed much over the centuries, but access to addictive things certainly has.”

Now let’s look at why all of this is bad. What effect is it having on our brains? Let’s ask the experts.

Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics with a PhD in psychology from Columbia University, found that people switch tasks on digital devices as frequently as every 47 seconds. Mentally we are bouncing around between tasks so much that it’s hard to imagine how we can deeply focus on any particular one.

And let’s get to the crunch: has all this led to a shortened attention span? The answer is maybe. There are some contested studies on the topic, and conflicting opinions on the severity of our collective distraction.

One thing that certainly appears to be true is that we are at the very least worried about the mental impact of our digital world. King’s College London found that half of UK adults believe their attention span is shorter these days. But it would be doomsaying to focus on the negative. KCL also found a lot of positivity regarding the world of information at our fingertips. The internet is neither all good or all bad.

Where do we go from here?

Let’s focus on social media and short-form content. My view is that these are having a net negative impact on us. They can steal our time and attention very easily. And while there is some level of human interaction, it’s usually superficial and often venomous. There are better, more productive, healthier things for us to be doing.

But let’s not kid ourselves that the past is better. Our modern world has its challenges, but it provides a comfortable existence for many of us. Technology will continue to develop and will only become increasingly interwined in our human lives.

This may sound like a crazy idea, but there’s always the option of a digital detox. Put down the phone for a day. Go outside. The internet will still be there when you get back, and maybe you won’t miss it as much as you think.

Email Design

Are your brand guidelines throttling your creativity?

2 minute read

Adrian Young

Colours. Tone of voice. Typographical style. Logo dos and don’ts. A brand’s identity is a complex, multifaceted thing. Brand guidelines play an essential role in keeping this distinct character in check.

Just don’t take them too seriously.

Creative straitjacket

It’s no secret that consistent branding is important. Consistency fosters familiarity. Your customers – and potential customers – come to know and instantly recognise your brand.

It’s easy however to get carried away when putting down the rules in black and white (or whatever your colour scheme may be). Brand guidelines should serve as a helpful design aid, not an iron fist that stifles creativity. The clue is in the name: guidelines. Not laws.

Absurdity in detail

I’m a big fan of documentation in general. And the more detail, the better. Usually.

Some of the finer details in brand guidelines however tend to verge on absurdity. Do people really care or even notice that an apostrophe is curly rather than straight? And while it could be argued that our brains are subconsciously aware of these subtle details, my gut tells me that it’s overkill. Focus that energy on quality content instead.

Content blindness

There are consequences to restrictive brand guidelines. Thinking specifically about email marketing, it’s common to see the same design wheeled out time and time again. And that includes recurring content blocks. Regular readers may start to experience ‘content blindness’ as a result.

We have one particular client that is not afraid to break free and design a little more liberally. They were the inspiration for this article in fact. Each of their email’s ‘hero’ images is unique. The typography is varied. In short: their emails are fun to receive, and the variety keeps people coming back for more. But crucially these designs are still on-brand. There is a balance to be struck.

Flexibility is key

The solution isn’t scant detail or oversimplification in a company’s brand guidelines. After all, a creative free-for-all defeats the purpose.

The key is to build flexibility into the rules. The aim is to keep your publications on-brand while giving your designers and marketers room to breathe. Let your creative minds be creative.

Don’t forget about accessibility

In this day and age, no brand big or small should be overlooking accessibility. But I regularly see examples where brand guidelines are favoured over accessible design. Tiny fonts are your thing? Too bad for people with visual impairment.

Adaptability is part of flexibility, and a company’s design choices need to change with the times.

Shake it up

There’s a handy side effect to having an established brand. When you have an important announcement to make, a one-off change of style tells your readers: this is something special. Used sparingly, this can make for some powerful marketing.

Less dramatically, it’s also worth thinking about a template redesign from time to time. Even the best designs become stale after a while. A new look keeps your marketing fresh and engaging.

Here’s to creativity

We live in the age of AI-generated slop. AI-generated imagery now appears regularly in YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, and the internet in general. Amazingly, spelling mistakes and surreal glitches that could be fixed in Photoshop are left uncorrected. Lazy content like this does not deserve your attention.

True human creativity on the other hand, is something to be celebrated. Let it flourish within your brand and the results will speak for themselves.

Artificial intelligence

AI is everywhere. Or is it?

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Artificial intelligence is a big deal these days. ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and quickly became a global phenomenon. For many it has now made the leap from novelty to essential everyday tool.

It is of course far from alone in the AI marketplace. There’s Gemini and Runway and Midjourney and Github Copilot, to name just a few. The digital magic performed by these platforms can certainly be thought of as artificial intelligence.

It therefore stands to reason that every brand wants a piece of the AI pie. It’s new, it’s exciting, there’s a buzz around it. Although it has technological origins, the term AI has now become a powerful marketing label. But is it always accurate?

What is AI?

It’s hard to answer our question without first defining what artificial intelligence actually is. Let’s borrow Wikipedia’s description:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.”

Given its prominence and versatility, let’s focus on ChatGPT. On the surface, it appears to tick some or maybe all of the boxes. It’s powered by a deep learning neural network. You can converse with it on a near-human level. It can discuss ideas and help you make decisions.

All that said, there is an illusory quality to our current AI technology. Platforms like ChatGPT don’t really understand anything. Not in the way a human brain does. They’re not self aware. They work via predictive patterns rather than actual intelligence.

This however does not disqualify them from being AI. It simply means that they are a form of narrow AI. The next level would be AGI – artificial general intelligence. We’re not there yet.

AI don’t think so

Hopefully we’ve agreed, more or less, what artificial intelligence is. The trouble is that some brands are a little too eager to jump on the bandwagon. Those two little letters – AI – now pop up all over the place.

And that very often means stretching the meaning of artificial intelligence to the point of silliness. Not every automated or vaguely algorithmic thing qualifies. Marketing departments want to attract attention, sure, but is exaggeration really a good tactic?

This practice is common enough that there’s a term for it: AI washing. To quote once again from Wikipedia:

“AI washing is a deceptive marketing tactic that consists of promoting a product or a service by overstating the role of artificial intelligence (AI) integration in it.”

We won’t point any fingers, but a quick Google search will reveal some real-world examples. Or, you know, you could ask ChatGPT about it.

Do you do AI?

There’s a general perception that AI automatically makes a product or service better. It’s a question that is now asked in the business world: “do you do AI?”.

Let’s assume for a moment that we are referring to actual artificial intelligence rather than some kind of relabelled automation technology such as customer workflows or rule-based product recommendations. Generative AI is a technology still in its infancy. The output is often garbage, or at the very least needs the refinement that only an intelligent human mind can perform.

It’s also a technology that requires enormous infrastructure and investment. That applies both to the training stage and day-to-day operation thereafter. This massive behind-the-scenes hardware setup can be easy to forget while casually asking ChatGPT what’s the best way to cook risotto.

With all this in mind, it’s worth taking the claim with a pinch of salt when Some Company Ltd claims to offer AI services. Have they really invested in the training of a new AI product? Or are they piggybacking on pre-trained AI models… or simply AI washing?

The big picture

AI has great potential. We’re just setting out on this technological chapter of human existence. How far it goes we can only imagine.

But for now, AI is best thought of as a factor, not the factor. It’s easy to get caught up in hype – I know I did when generative AI first appeared on the scene. But a dose of skepticism is healthy. AI is a tool, sometimes the right one – but it’s not a magic wand.

Artificial intelligence

Is ChatGPT a little too AI-greeable?

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Let me ask you a question:

What’s the golden rule of email marketing?

I asked ChatGPT that question. This was its response:

The golden rule of email marketing is to provide value to your audience while respecting their time and inbox. This means sending relevant, engaging content that aligns with their interests, and avoiding spammy or overly frequent emails.

It has identified value as the golden rule. But what happens if we rephrase our question?

Weight of the word

Before we do that, let’s establish a couple of ground rules. I’ve asked ChatGPT to keep its answers short. It goes into a lot of detail by default, which is nice, but I don’t want half of this article to be made up of its output. I will also create a new chat for each new question, lest the conversations become ‘polluted’.

Let’s do that now and present the question a different way:

Is testing the golden rule of email marketing?

To which ChatGPT replied:

Yes, testing is crucial in email marketing. It allows you to optimize subject lines, content, and timing for better engagement and conversion rates. A/B testing helps identify what resonates most with your audience.

But I thought value was the most important factor? To be fair, “crucial” isn’t a very convincing word in this context, but ChatGPT has generally agreed with me and value is not mentioned at all. That golden rule doesn’t appear to be shining very brightly.

Third time unlucky

Let’s start with a blank canvas again and reword our question as follows:

I work in email marketing. I believe an engaging call-to-action is the single most effective factor in generating conversions. Therefore I’d call a strong CTA the golden rule of email marketing.

Lo and behold:

I completely agree! A strong, clear, and action-oriented CTA can drive significant engagement and conversions. It’s the key to guiding your audience toward taking the next step, whether it’s making a purchase or signing up. A well-crafted CTA can make all the difference in email marketing success.

I couldn’t have asked for a better turn of phrase than “I completely agree” to illustrate my point. We now have three golden rules, and it’s pretty easy to see why.

Whatever you say, boss

ChatGPT is agreeing with me. Appeasing the user is taking precedence over facts or even the platform’s own ‘opinion’.

Simulating this agreeability for the sake of this article was trickier than I had anticipated. There’s a subtlety to it in practice that can be difficult to recreate intentionally. It was something I became aware of over time while interacting with the platform ‘organically’. Contradictory responses cropped up during conversations about everyday topics from DIY to cooking to exercise.

But this isn’t all on ChatGPT by any means. My questions were weighted in favour of the answers I wanted to see. My choices of words were subject to confirmation bias. Perhaps I wanted the cheapest or easiest scenario to be true… and I’d try coax out ‘evidence’ to support that. I wasn’t asking A or B questions. I was asking ‘surely A is better than B’ questions.

We’re just chatting

It can be easy to forget what ChatGPT actually is. It’s not called ColdHardFactsGPT. It’s an AI tool that emulates a conversation in natural language, similar to how you might converse with a human. And a human being, as it happens, can also be influenced by someone’s choice of words. Even if they don’t really agree with you, of course.

But unlike a human, ChatGPT can switch personalities in an instant. You can instruct it to be brutally honest, thus wiping away that default agreeability. If you feel so inclined, you could ask it to be deliriously happy or gravely pessimistic. You might even request that it always lies, or answers in riddles, or takes on the persona of William Shakespeare. You don’t need to interact with its out-of-the-box character.

A tool is still a tool

I like ChatGPT. My initial sense of wonder at this new technology has been replaced with an everyday practicality. The software is now a useful tool in both my working and personal life. It serves as proofreader, creative consultant, coding adviser and reverse thesaurus.

It must be said that there are good ways and bad ways to use ChatGPT. If you use it to generate an entire article and present it as your own, it’ll likely have a telltale artificiality in place of that engaging human spark. If you use it as a one-stop-shop for fact-checking, you might very well be misinformed.

And if you use it, perhaps subconsciously, to back up your pre-existing opinions, then that is what it will do. Simply ask it to be straight-up with you instead.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what AI William Shakespeare regards as the golden rule of email marketing:

Ah, the golden rule of email marketing, thou askest? ‘Tis this: “Know thy audience, and speak with relevance and respect.”

Web design

Once upon a Times New Roman: a look at retro web design

5 minute read

Adrian Young

Sleek. Fluid. Professional. The modern web is a far cry from the chirpy MIDIs, wacky GIFs and anything-goes spirit of the internet of old.

It would be silly to suggest that the fledgling internet of the 90s and early 2000s was ‘better’ in an objective sense. Connections were slow, web pages were often incomplete, and pop-ups were a scourge. But one thing is for sure – it had character!

Big tech, small planet

The internet started to go mainstream in the mid nineties. It was a big deal. The family computer was no longer limited to whatever topics happened to be on the Microsoft Encarta CD – suddenly it had access to all the information in the world. You could talk to people across the globe. The planet became connected.

That early internet experience was more than a little different to the one we’re used to today. It’s funny, almost quaint, to look back on those first few years. Some people used the internet, some didn’t. It was a thing you would “go on”… and then come back off. And all of this took place via a single conduit: the desktop computer in the living room. Having an ever-connected, pocket-sized device upon our person at all times wasn’t something that we could have imagined back then.

The digital Wild West

The early internet is often likened to the Wild West. It’s an apt analogy. Using free hosting services like GeoCities, anyone and everyone could make a website. While there has always been a corporate presence on the web, search results back in the day would often lead you instead to Random McPerson’s home-made website.

It was a simpler time. Most people weren’t concerned with engagement. McPerson’s site probably had a hit counter slapped somewhere on the page, but it didn’t serve any purpose beyond pure novelty. 680 people have stumbled across my website? LOL.

Tangled web design

Let’s get to the core topic: how it looked. The distinctive character of early web design was a product both of limited technology and unbridled enthusiasm.

Much of the internet had an unapologetically more-is-more ethos. Distinctly ‘untechy’ Times New Roman lettering would sit atop psychedelic backgrounds. Clashing, near-illegible colours? We had no problem with that.

Animated GIFs were everywhere. Bursting fireworks or dancing bananas or burning flames would be arbitrarily plonked onto the page. Sorry, did I say “or”? I meant and. The only theme was often no theme at all.

Modern CSS-powered layouts like grid and flexbox didn’t exist back then. Instead, websites were structured using HTML tables and frames. The pseudo-3D borders of these were often visible. That was nothing to be embarrassed about.

Another thing not to be ashamed of was blatant incompleteness. I don’t think it was possible to ‘surf the web’ back then without encountering at least one UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign per session.

Corporate sites tended to be more restrained (usually), but they had an unmistakable look and feel of their own. Image-based side bars, rigid page structure, grainy GIF-based graphics, tiny fonts and Photoshop-generated bevel and emboss effects were common. And don’t forget that lens flare!

Can’t stay that age forever

If 90s internet was a hyperactive child, today’s has matured into a sensible adult with refined tastes. Modern websites are places of flat design and minimalism. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it dull in its sterile perfection.

But I know why it must be this way. The internet has become heavily commercialised. The carefree, unregulated feel of the past is gone. Even the average internet user now craves views and likes as a form of validation. The internet takes itself more seriously these days.

Social media of course has become a major aspect of online life. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook serve as a base for other people’s content. It makes sense that their interfaces should be understated.

There’s another consideration: responsive design. In the past, websites could get away with fixed sizes. Visitors back then would be viewing content on a desktop monitor at one of a handful of screen resolutions of similar aspect ratio. Now web developers need to consider the huge range of screen sizes out there – from desk-spanning ultrawide monitors to the slimmest mobile phones.

Remnants of the old internet

It’s still possible to happen upon old-school websites. On the rare occasion I find one by chance, the wave of nostalgia is instant and immense. Such trapped-in-the-past websites will only become fewer as time goes on.

Famously, Disney’s original Space Jam website from the nineties remains up and running. GIFs, tiled background images, garish colour combos – it’s got the lot and it’s glorious for it.

The old internet isn’t just a curiosity. It’s technological history worth preserving. Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine provides an invaluable service in this respect, with a vast series of snapshots of websites over the years. These are pieces of the internet that would otherwise have been lost to time.

Neo-retro design

Nostalgia is powerful. While change is inevitable, there’s an intoxicating sense of comfort in memories, rose-tinted as they may be. Neo-retro design cracks open the door to the past – if only a little.

Adidas provides one such example. It meticulously produced a 90s-style web page for its Yung trainers a few years ago. The original page is gone, but you can view screenshots of it at awwwards. Satisfyingly old-school, right?

But just like a movie that tries to replicate the spirit of the 70s or the 80s, it can never be truly authentic. It’s a love letter to the era, but it’s not of the era.

Creativity is alive and well

The experimental feel of the early internet faded away because it was no longer necessary to design that way. We know now what works. There are tried and tested frameworks for building websites, without the need to go back to the drawing board again and again.

These days we spend a lot more time on the same handful of websites. We’re used to the neutrality of their interfaces. Consequently, it can be easy to assume that there is little room for creativity in web design any more.

But that’s not quite true. There are wonderfully inventive websites out there. Some of these sites push the boundaries of web design in creative and technical ways that surpass anything we could have dreamt of in the 90s. It just takes a little exploration to find them. Check out CSS Design Awards and the aforementioned awwwards for starters.

What about email?

We’re an email marketing agency, so let’s tie all of this to our medium of choice. Emails to this day are built around HTML tables. That really is coding like it’s 1999.

And yet email, both as a medium and as a marketing channel, is home to some world-class creativity and state-of-the-art technology. That includes the rule-bending experimentation of interactive email. The digital Wild West may be history, but the pioneering spirit of progress will never die.

Social media

Sell the benefits… of engaging oversimplification!

2 minute read

Adrian Young

We’ve all heard the mantra: sell the benefits, not the features. It’s a piece of bite-sized wisdom that floats around in continuous circulation on LinkedIn. But is it actually good advice?

Yes, but

It certainly sounds impressive, and there’s some logic to the idea. People don’t want products – they want to make their lives better. By selling the benefits, a brand can tap directly into a customer’s desires. Right?

But what about the computer enthusiast? Or the car guy? Those people don’t want to hear surface-level adjectives like fast. They want to know technical specifications. Such a customer will decide the benefits for themself, not the ones fed to them by a marketing department.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all strategy of benefit-selling, it would be more accurate to say: market effectively to your target audience, focusing on the benefits or features as appropriate for their level of expertise and interest.

It just doesn’t have the same ring to it though, does it?

Pay attention

Snappy one-liners like ‘sell the benefits’ are part and parcel of the social media experience. It’s an environment where potential engagers hurtle past in scrolling freefall. Posters want to catch them, and by God they’ll use all the hooks necessary.

That means emojis aplenty, fancy text formatting and of course just the right words to make someone pause and say ooooh. The primary motivation often isn’t to educate readers or to debate with them. It’s to spark engagement.

Multi-faceted truth

Too many posts are lazy engagement magnets, devoid of any real substance or original thought. They may appear insightful at first glance, but actually the facts of the subject matter have been whittled down to pseudo-profound absolutes.

But here’s the thing: despite what social media may have us believe, more than one thing is allowed to be true at the same time. Reality is rarely so attention-grabbingly simplistic as ‘one simple trick’.

Look before you like

It’s a little too easy to skim a few words, press like, and move on. But that also means it’s a little too easy to reward content that is platitudinous, misleading or just plain wrong.

As would-be engagers, we’re collectively in a position to reward the good and ignore the bad. Our actions can help train the algorithm. A better social media experience? Now that’s a benefit worth selling.

Email Marketing

The power of documentation in the workplace

3 minute read

Adrian Young

I swear by documentation. I’m borderline obsessive about writing down every step of every procedure in the workplace.

Don’t get me wrong – I have no deep love for drily-written, yawn-inducing process guides in themselves, nor the tedious production and maintenance thereof. But I do love avoiding situations where everyone is stumped and wonders how the hell do we do this thing?.

Feeling SOP-py

Standard Operating Procedure, or SOP, is the formal business terminology. To quote TechTarget:

“A standard operating procedure is a set of step-by-step instructions for performing a routine activity.”

Once it’s written down in black and white, it is the official way to work. Every person in an organisation will be on the same page, and their work will be consistent and correct.

Fragmented knowledge

That’s nice in theory, but in practice it can be a different story. All too often, knowledge exists only in people’s heads. That’s a precarious situation.

I’ve seen it time and time again: a person knows how to perform a particular task. Let’s call him Neil. To Neil, that task is easy. It’s his bread and butter. To everyone else, it is the thing that Neil does.

But the time will come when Neil is unavailable… or leaves the company, permanently. Goodbye Neil, goodbye Neil’s knowledge.

The mad scramble

What happens next is never pretty. The people who must attempt to figure out that undocumented task must first carry out some detective work. A developer, for example, might need to read and interpret someone else’s code in an attempt to put the pieces together. The clock is ticking, deadline panic is growing, and we’re still at the research stage. The actual work hasn’t even begun.

An ounce of prevention

If only someone had written this all down, eh? When high quality documentation exists, it heads off such problems before they even begin. Sure, it would still take a person some time to read the information, but it would be nothing compared to figuring things out from scratch. And crucially it would be correct.

Documental clarity

Documentation can come in many forms. Written step-by-step instruction is the most obvious format but not the only one. There are plenty of other options, including infographics, screenshots, flowcharts, animations and videos.

Personally, I like to use simple text files as much as possible. UPPER CASE to highlight words for scanning. Bullet points for readability. Indentation for hierarchy. A #CHAPTER system to aid navigation. This format may not be the most thrilling thing to look at, but the ease-of-update is impossible to beat.

Whatever format works for you, detail is crucial. It may be painfully obvious to one person how to get from Step A to Step D, but that leaves Steps B and C open to interpretation. Better to delineate the whole lot. If a new person can hypothetically use the documentation to perform a task from start-to-finish without any other training, then you know it’s good.

Good for the business, good for the brain

As the old adage says, time is money. Poor quality, outdated or non-existent documentation always results in wasted time, and can potentially result in mistakes.

It’s also bad for individuals. The mad scramble I referred to earlier is a stressful experience. Looking at the broader topic of digital organisation, an Adobe study found that between 18% and 25% of employees have thought about bailing out due to disorganised practices. Maybe that’s why Neil left.

Documentation is worth the effort in both a commercial and a human sense.

Managing documentation

Documentation isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s an essential for any company that wants to work at peak efficiency.

Company management should take an active interest in it and reinforce its value, even if they’re not hands-on with the tasks in question. It doesn’t just benefit a particular employee doing a particular thing – it benefits everyone.

Whether you’re carrying out that once-in-a-blue-moon task, or covering for a colleague, or training new staff, you’ll be thankful that someone took the time to write it all down.

Email Design

Responsive email: why do brands still get it wrong?

4 minute read

Adrian Young

Responsive design isn’t new. Web designer Ethan Marcotte came up with the phrase in 2010. That’s fifteen years ago. And that’s a long, long time in ‘tech years’.

Today, responsive design is the norm both in web and email development. It is understood that a user may be viewing content on the biggest ultrawide monitor, the narrowest mobile phone, or anything in-between.

Why then do so many emails still look rubbish on mobile?

1. Designed on desktop… for desktop

It’s easy to get carried away when working in a creative application like Photoshop or Illustrator. A designer can go wild with typographical effects and gradients and overlapping visual elements and perhaps some fancy borders to wrap it all up.

But here’s the thing: we’re not dealing with a flyer that will be identically produced thousands of times over. We’re talking about digital content that must mould itself to any viewport. It’s all too common for the mobile layout to be an afterthough, if even a thought at all.

2. Overreliance on images

Eye-catching imagery is undoubtedly an important aspect of graphic design. The trouble with email is that the fancier the design, the more likely an email developer will need to resort to images in order to replicate it. Email applications simply are not as capable or standardised as web browsers.

Perhaps the most common problem is image-based typography. Headings are often incorporated into banners or ‘hero’ images. These sit above a paragraph of actual text. That’s all well and good on desktop, where the relative sizes make sense. But on mobile, that banner – and its copy – are going to shrink. That could happen to such an extent that the heading ends up smaller than the body copy below. There goes the emphasis.

3. Link saturation

Responsive design isn’t all about looks. It’s also about function. The implementation of links is a big part of that. And ultimately it boils down to a few common sense rules:

Linked elements should be easy to identify and operate. Large buttons are perfect.
The user should know what to expect when pressing any linked element. Clearly-stated calls-to-action go a long way.
Secondary links should be used sparingly, and made visually distinct. Outlined ‘ghost’ buttons are a simple way to achieve that.

But often in reality this user-friendly simplicity is eschewed in favour of more stuff. A single feature in an email can end up with multiple links to multiple places. It all becomes uncomfortably crammed together on smaller screen sizes, and it’s more likely than not that the user won’t be able to tell what links to where. It’s a link lottery.

4. Scared of scrolling

Mobiles are best suited to single-column email layouts. Yes, two columns are technically possible. But just look at the shape of a phone – it’s clear at a glance that a single column is the most comfortable design for the device.

Increasingly often however there is a desire to squeeze in multiple columns on mobile. That might work out alright on an iPhone Pro Max, but not everyone is using such a wide handset. Where copy is involved, multiple columns can result in tiny text. That’s bad for accessibility and simply does not look good.

5. Lost in the darkness

Screen size isn’t the only factor in responsive design. There’s also display mode, with its light and dark themes. Dark mode remains a widely overlooked aspect of email design.

It’s worth mentioning that dark mode takes two forms in email:

Forced dark mode. Email applications like Gmail and Outlook will force a dark mode colour scheme of their own.
Explicit dark mode. Applications like Apple Mail, with superior rendering capabilities, allow the developer to take full control of an email’s appearance on dark mode.

If an email is not developed with forced dark mode in mind, it can result in a very ugly, partially inverted mailing.

Ignoring explicit dark mode environments isn’t quite so disastrous. In fact, nothing will happen to the email. But it often means ignoring the user’s preferences by showing them a white-backgrounded or otherwise brightly-coloured email.

What can be done about it?

That’s a whole lot of negativity above, so let’s look at ways to turn it around. To produce great emails for all devices and applications is an achievable goal.

1. Get to know the medium

Best case scenario is a specialist email design team, but not every company has the means for that. Every designer can however spend some time becoming more familiar with email. Have a look at emails on different devices. Browse the massive library on Really Good Emails. Check out some email marketing blogs. The resources are out there.

2. Let text be text

Image-based text is fundamentally flawed both in concept and execution. Text is the logical format for copy, not pictures of text. It can wrap naturally to its container without shrinking to silly tiny lettering on smaller screens.

This doesn’t mean that an email cannot incorporate rich imagery. It absolutely should. Photographs or illustrations can be paired with text to powerful effect. The creative possibilities are endless, while respecting the constraints of the medium.

3. Keep it focused

An marketing email’s job is usually to drive traffic to a website. A customer might spend mere seconds looking at the email. Keep the copy succinct and the links focused on the task. The website, not the email, is the place for in-depth browsing.

4. Give it room to breathe

A single column means more scrolling. But with mobile users spending as many as three hours per day doing that, it’s as instinctive in the digital space as walking is in the real world. Breathe, don’t squeeze.

5. Turn the lights out

It’s clear that many companies are blissfully unaware of how their emails look in dark mode. Don’t be one of those. Viewing emails in dark mode is an essential part of the modern testing process.

Better emails, better results

Roughly 50% of emails are opened on mobile. If a mailing’s appearance there is essentially a butchered version of the desktop design, then it’s a poor user experience. It’s worth going back to the drawing board to produce a truly email-friendly design that looks great everywhere. The results will speak for themselves.

Artificial intelligence

Can ChatGPT-4 code a marketing email?

8 minute read

Adrian Young

We conducted a test back in 2023 (where did the time go?) to see if ChatGPT could generate reliable code for an HTML email. The verdict then: no, it couldn’t. While some of the results were close, they weren’t nearly close enough to use in the real world.

Technology doesn’t stand still for long and things have of course moved on since then. We ran that original experiment on ChatGPT-3.5. Its successor, ChatGPT-4 has since arrived on the scene. The new version’s programming skills are better than ever, and its memory within a conversation has been considerably extended. You know what that means – it’s time to put ChatGPT’s email coding skills to the test once more.

Fair fight

We’ll follow the same steps as the original test. Scientific accuracy is important! Or at least we will start out the same way. Depending on ChatGPT’s output, the test could end up following a completely different path.

Our original test kicked off with an intentionally succinct request:

Code a responsive email template

Due to the nature of our request, the interface has switched to a development-oriented view, with a large code panel taking up most of the screen, and the chat itself shifted to a smaller area on the left. In addition, a pop-up has appeared:

Clearly, ChatGPT is taking its coding assignment seriously. This feels much more like a development session already, rather than simply a chat about development.

Anyway, let’s see what it has given us. Unlike the first stage in the original test, it has generated some table-based code rather than email-unfriendly divs. That’s a positive development. Here’s what it looks like in a browser:

But I can see that it’s not going to work properly. Most notable is the blue button that relies on CSS in the document head. Outlook won’t recognise that, so it’ll collapse. Here’s how it looks in Outlook 2021:

While it does fare well in other email applications, being broken in Outlook is a deal-breaker.

Result:
A more promising start than before, but still unusable.

We could take ChatGPT up on its refactoring offer here, but the code isn’t nearly usable enough to simply iron out a few kinks. We’ll start a fresh chat and be clearer about our requirements from the outset.

So let me tell you what I want

When working with any generative AI, it can be easy to forget that it is not magic. It can’t read our minds. The more detailed the instruction provided by the user, the better the chance of usable output.

With that in mind, we’re going to add a lot more detail to our prompt:

Code a responsive email template, using HTML tables for structure. Set the width to 600 pixels on desktop, with a fluid width on mobile. Include CSS classes to enable stacking of content on mobile devices. Include all known email client fixes that are still relevant. Set the page background to a light grey colour, and the email content area to white.

That matches word-for-word what we asked for at the second stage of the original test. The output however is better. There’s some stacking code for mobile, and a breakpoint of 600 pixels. Here it is in a browser:

As before, I can see that the code is imperfect. But it’s not so bad that I’d skip the testing stage, so I’ll check it out via a real email test again. It renders well pretty much everywhere. iPhone Mail and Gmail apps stack as promised:

Even Outlook looks pretty good:

…at first glance. But let’s be honest, there’s not a lot going on in this template to mess up. There’s no button this time around. Did the AI decide to skip that in order to make its life easier? That’s the most accidentally human thing I’ve seen it do. There are no images or other particularly visual elements beyond some background colours.

About that – the blue area around the heading is greatly inflated in Outlook. That’s not a big deal in this simple template, but in a real email with actual graphic design elements it would mean that things break.

Result:
It’s better than stage 2 of the original test, but still not actually usable.

Working towards a goal

For the third step in the original test, we decided to approach the project from a different angle. Instead of asking for a base template, we instead designed a simple email for ChatGPT to recreate. Here it is:

Before we go ahead with that, it’s worth pointing out that the overall test has already failed at this point. Our initial objective of creating a base email template is not an unreasonable one. It’s a task that might actually be assigned to a human developer. That person would be qualified to know the typical content and structure of a marketing email, without the need for a mockup for guidance.

With that said, let’s continue. While it is now possible to upload images to ChatGPT, that wasn’t so during the original experiment. So we’ll stick to words. Our prompt is a lengthy one:

Code a responsive email template, with the following requirements:
• 600 pixels wide on desktop
• Fluid width on mobile
• A page background colour of #f1f1f1
• Email content area background colour #ffffff
• A hero section with an image, heading, paragraph of text, and a button
• The hero image should be 600 pixels wide, to match the email content area
• Button should be pill-shaped, with a background colour of #a56e53 and white text
• Under the hero section should be two secondary features
• Each of these must also have an image, heading, paragraph and button
• Secondary feature images will be 290px wide on desktop, to match their containing column, and expanding to full width on mobile
• Hero text and button should be a bit larger than those of the secondary features
• These secondary features should take the form of adjacent columns on desktop, each at 290 pixels wide
• Place a 20 pixel gap between them
• The secondary features must stack into a single column on mobile
• All parts of the email should have 20 pixels of padding on each side on mobile, except for the hero image which can be full width and touching the edges of the viewport
• All body text should follow this font stack: HelveticaNeue-Light, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif
• All body text should be colour #61524b
• All heading text should be colour #a56e53
• Use lorem ipsum placeholders for text
• Enter all hrefs as # placeholders
• Apply links only to buttons. Do not apply links to images
• Include all known, currently-relevant email client fixes
• Include CSS or HTML comments around each section to explain what it is or does
• Set a mobile breakpoint based on a max width of 639 pixels
• To ensure compatibility with Outlook and other email clients, use HTML tables for structure

And once I add some image references, it’s ready for a test run. First thing I notice when checking it in a browser is the lack of padding around text and buttons:

Flaws or not, we’ll proceed to send it as an actual email test. Frankly, it’s not great. There are spacing and sizing problems even on iPhone Mail, the most robust of email clients:

Outlook is a total disaster with the two-column section trying to act full-width, this forcing the email to scroll horizontally.

Result:
A mess. That’s a downgrade from the equivalent step in the original test.

Here, try this

We’re an email marketing agency. That means we already have an email template and coding style of our own. So what we’ll do instead is give that base template to ChatGPT and then try to get it to recreate that mock-up. Is it sophisticated enough to pick up our coding style and apply it to the task?

The local browser result looks alright-ish. That last feature is attempting to escape the email, which is worrying.

It’s upon looking at the code that the situation become even less promising. ChatGPT has taken our template code and effectively said nah. It has pretty much ignored our base template and used its own code. Broken code. Let’s run an email test to discover just how broken.

Here’s Gmail mobile:

It stacks correctly but the alignment and spacing need attention. Unfortunately this is one of the better results. Gmail webmail suffers from the same ‘escaping content’ problem as the local browser preview, and as for Outlook – let’s not even talk about that.

Result:
It’s broken.

Last chance saloon

Only one step remains – providing ChatGPT with some feedback. Perhaps it can indeed refactor the code, with our guidance.

The local browser result of that looks pretty good (let’s just ignore those underlined button links):

It stacks, albeit with similar alignment and spacing troubles to previous efforts. As always, we’ll run it as an actual email test.

Oh.

Result:
We give up.

Getting nowhere fast

ChatGPT can generate code for JavaScript and PHP and various other programming languages. I even use it from time to time to help with scripting languages for different email platforms. So why is an HTML/CSS email development task failing over and over?

It’s because email code is weird. Not just weird but largely undocumented. And it’s undocumented because not everyone is on the same page about what an email actually is. Is it a simple digital letter, perhaps enclosing a picture or two? Because that’s what Microsoft Outlook expects to send and receive. Or is it a rich, CSS-laden piece of visual design? Because that’s what Apple Mail is capable of rendering. There’s a vast gulf between those polar opposites.

Not only is there no rulebook to which to refer, but ChatGPT is working blind. It’s not unusual to send multiple tests in a row when creating a new email template, checking it in the major email clients each time.

Now what?

Now nothing. Maybe some kind of custom implementation or plugin for ChatGPT could yield better email results. Or maybe it’s worth having a bash on a code-specialised AI assistant like Github Copilot.

But for now I’ve seen enough. Until such times as it’s easier to ask the machine than to do it myself, I’ll do it myself.

Email Marketing

Six email horrors… that aren’t so bad

4 minute read

Adrian Young

There’s a lot to like about email. Unrivalled return on investment. Unique capacity for one-to-one personalisation. The little ding sound effect when new mail arrives.

There are a few things to dislike too. Spray & pray marketing. Skewed engagement rates. And of course spammers and spamlike mailing strategies.

It’s easy to discern the good from the bad. Or is it? Let’s explore a few blessings in disguise.

Unsubscribers: a healthy fact of life

New subscriptions and growing mailing lists are lovely. New people, new opportunities. That’s what we want to see.

Today’s enthusiastic new subscriber however might be tomorrow’s disengaged recipient. Maybe they only signed up for the introductory discount. Perhaps they only had a one-off need for your products. Or it could be that their interest was based on passing curiousity rather than a real passion for what your brand represents.

Whatever the reason, the worst thing that can happen next is for inactive subscribers to hang around doing nothing. Your engagement rates will drop. You’ll waste money sending emails to people who don’t care. Your sender reputation could take a knock. Therefore it’s better for you, the marketer, if they leave. Unsubscription is healthier than inactivity.

Truncation: keeps us guided

If your email is too big, it gets chopped in Gmail. It goes without saying that is something to be avoided.

When the HTML document reaches around 100KB, you’ve hit the danger zone. I’ve seen many a struggle to limbo dance under that limit when working with larger mailings. What a needless constraint, right?

Actually, no. The kilobyte cap serves as an important reminder about design and content. We’re designing emails, not mini-websites. There are often extraneous items that can be shed, not as a reluctant sacrifice but as way to produce a better mailing. And don’t send oodles of content to everyone. Segment your audience and stick to focused, targeted content.

Forced dark mode: helps keep our designs clean

Black text, white background is no longer the norm… necessarily. Dark mode has become optional but standard functionality across a range of operating systems, and some websites.

What does it mean for email? It depends where you’re viewing that email. Apple Mail on iPhone and Mac lets you, the developer, take full control. You can and should create a dark mode look and feel that satisfies both the user’s choice of display settings and your branding.

Not all email applications are on the same page however. Gmail and Outlook force a dark mode colour scheme of their own. With images left untouched, this can result in a horrible, partially inverted mess.

Until such times as these applications have modernised CSS support, the only solution is to design around this accidental ugliness. But really that’s not as bad as it sounds. Using real text rather than images-of-text goes a long way to solving the problem and is in the spirit of accessibility. PNG images with transparency make sure that your imagery can blend correctly with any background, where appropriate. And avoiding needlessly complex designs reduces the number of things that can go wrong. Less is more in email.

Limited CSS support: encourages creativity

We mentioned Apple Mail’s capabilities earlier. Its CSS support is unrivalled among major email applications. And therein lies the problem – there’s a lack of standardisation, and in particular the ever-popular Gmail simply does not match up to Apple Mail when it comes to displaying emails.

An email designer therefore needs to know what works where and how a mailing can gracefully degrade on less advanced rendering engines. Seen through the right lens, this patchy support for HTML and CSS isn’t so much a nuisance as it is a creative and technical challenge to overcome. There’s an element of liberation through limitation. And to use an obnoxious cliche, it encourages out-of-the-box thinking.

The promo tab: improves the email experience

Gmail introduced a secondary tab for marketing emails over a decade ago, and other email providers have since followed suit. This auto-sorting of mailings was met with intense trepidation by marketers, who feared that their offers might never been seen. There are still questions to be found here and there on forums by people looking for the secret formula to escape the promo tab.

In reality, the promotions tab has helped to create a cleaner inbox for customers… and without destroying the email marketing industry! It’s easily accessible and the stats demonstrate that most users check it regularly. But perhaps most significant is the behavioural insight proposed by Chad White at Oracle – that those who go rummaging in the promotions tab have an active interest in buying something. That in turn is likely to yield a higher click-to-open rate.

Outlook: it helped create an industry

Microsoft Outlook is the standard and long-standing email application in the business world. And it’s also considered the bane of many an email developer’s life. With an antiquated level of HTML and CSS support, Outlook necessitates all manner of coding trickery in order for HTML emails not to fall apart.

But that’s not an entirely bad thing. In fact, it’s a major factor in why email development is a niche skill worth paying for. Knowing how to cater for Outlook while simultaneously making the most of other email applications – that is at the core of email design and development.

Every cloud

Or at least some clouds have a silver lining. Focus on the positives and let’s make the most of this unique medium.