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.

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.

Email Marketing

Sweat The Small Stuff

< 1 minute read

Mike Parry

We were recently asked to talk at an Email Marketing Summit by Figaro Digital and our C.O.O. Tony MacPherson presented on “Sweat the small stuff”. A look at all the nuances, the 1 percents that make the difference in email marketing campaigns. The attention to detail that really makes a difference to your bottom line, not a silver bullet but a long term strategic change.

A look under the hood

So, this week with Black Friday in full throw we thought we would give you a sneaky look into what the presenter sees when you go to an event to see a talk on Email Marketing or CRM or any of the wonderful seminars out there. You can download Tony’s presentation here… However, this time we’ve left the presenters notes, the explanation, what Tony was seeing as he presented. This will explain the slides in a way just looking at them doesn’t.

Take a look and let us know your thoughts.

Email Marketing

Email marketing for today’s digital attention span

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Ten seconds. That’s how much time the average customer dedicates to your marketing email. If you’ve written this:

…then your customer is going to see this:

All that copywriting for nowt! So, how can a marketing email deliver its message when up against such a strict time limit?

Wear the shoes

This is step one: put yourself in your customer’s position. Would you read all that text? What do you want from a marketing email?

If it seems too wordy, it is. Treat email marketing like the shop window. Display enough information to capture someone’s interest, but leave the fine details to the salesperson standing inside.

Format for scanning

Nobody reads paragraphs of marketing spiel from left to right like a book. They scan it. You can help them (and yourself).

We don’t want the important points merely to stand out. They need to jump out and scream for attention. Headings, bold text, bullet points – there are plenty of typograhical formatting options at our disposal.

Remove excess padding

I see a lot of big, bloated marketing emails. They’re crammed full of… stuff. Navigation bars. Extensive footers. Tons of secondary links. Boring recurring blocks. And of course, lots and lots of words.

And that’s a pity, because every extraneous thing makes an email less focused and obfuscates its purpose. It can also be a telltale sign of spray & pray marketing. No idea who likes what? No problem, just send everything to everyone! We’re kidding, don’t do that.

Take a step back to evaluate what exactly you want a particular email to achieve. Be ruthless when trimming the fluff and you’ll be rewarded with a purpose-driven mailing that slots nicely into that ten-second reading time.

Graphic communication

As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Turns out that may be a pretty conservative estimate. The human brain can process an image in 13 milliseconds. That’s 60,000 times faster than it processes text. And that’s a very, very good reason to use images as a form of communication in email.

Charts and diagrams offer a digestible, bite-sized form of information that is well-suited to the medium. Animated GIFs let you show your customer something about your product that just wouldn’t have the same impact in words. Quite simply: graphic communication is powerful.

Just don’t get too carried away with images! Your email must be accessible, so your text content, imagery and alt tags need to work together.

Don’t be boring

If your marketing emails follow a rigid format, they’ll become boring fast. Mix up the type of content that you send to customers. Have something to say beyond BUY NOW and ONLY FOR YOU. Give your reader a reason to keep opening your emails.

What’s the rush anyway?

Gosh, we all spend so long crafting our marketing emails only for readers to chew them up in mere seconds? What brought us to this point? There’s a lot of discussion, expert and casual, about the causes and consequences of dwindling attention spans. The impact of our ever-online world on the human brain is a fascinating topic.

But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about email. I don’t see the ten-second read time as a bad thing. It can serve as a reminder about best practice and keep us focused on the goal. We can reel ourselves in and stop wasting time on cumbersome, meandering mailings. There are certainly positive aspects to this situation. And who has time these days for negativity?

Email Marketing

Brrr! Are cold emails worth the cold shoulder?

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Do you have a business email address? Then you probably receive cold emails. On a daily basis.

Let’s define what a cold email is. To quote from Wikipedia: “a cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact.” Some people might call that breaking the ice. Others might use a less desirable term: spam.

Dear person, buy my thing

Here are some of the products and services offered to me in cold emails lately:

Thing I don’t need
Thing I don’t need
Thing I don’t need
Thing I don’t need
Thing I don’t need
Thing I don’t need
Golf packages

The last one sticks in my mind because somehow the seller is always down to their last few spots. It’s like a parody of FOMO. Final, final, final, final, FINAL chance!

The recurring theme is irrelevance. My first name is the only aspect of personalisation, and by God will they use it liberally throughout the email. Because seeing your name plucked from a database, mail merge-style really builds rapport, right?

Tone deaf

Wording in cold emails varies wildly. Many are faux-chummy (“Hey, Adrian!”). Some are sycophantic. Sometimes there are jokes, sometimes they’re deadly serious.

But here’s the thing – for me, a very experienced cold email recipient, there is no magic combination of words that will make any difference.

Do they ever work?

The law of averages says yes. Even actual spam emails will get a bite every now and then, making the sender’s efforts worthwhile. But spammers don’t have a reputation to maintain.

For cold emailers, someone out there will just so happen to be looking for promotional mugs at that moment in time, and be willing to consider buying from a brand that popped unexpectedly into their inbox.

Stats say that cold emails hover around an 8.5% response rate. What the stats don’t reveal is how many of those responses say **** off.

Unicorn tattoo

I wouldn’t be arrested if I got a unicorn tattooed on my forehead, but it might be a hindrance in the workplace and adult life in general. Just because something is legal doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good idea.

I recently looked up reviews for a particularly persistent cold emailer. On both Google and TrustPilot, the score was rock bottom as a direct result of their cold emailing practices. While they surely hit the target every now and then, there’s a lot of damage being done around it.

Tarred with the same brush

I’ve been pretty harsh on cold emailing and it’s clear as day which side of the fence I sit on. But in the interests of fairness, I should mention that some cold emailers put in the work and follow the rules, while others are far more unscrupulous. Some are legitimate companies and some are scammers, pure and simple.

And therein lies the problem – I am not going to take the time to discern which is which. I am absolutely not ever going to risk pressing an ‘unsubscribe’ link on an unsolicited email. Everyone gets marked as a spammer, and ignored.

Opposing views

Cold emailing has its proponents and detractors. A lot of the advice for effective cold emailing is the same as for email marketing in general. Segment properly. Personalise the content. Run A/B tests.

To those cold emailers that put in the effort and get results, good for you. For real. Being impartial for a moment, cold emailing certainly appears to work to some degree despite its questionable reputation. But for me, personally speaking, the instinctive reaction will always be cold shoulder.

Fake cold email example — I asked ChatGPT to create a parody of a cold email. Replete with corporate cliche and insincerity, this is beautifully close to the real thing.

Email coding

What’s the point of design and hand coding?

4 minute read

Mike Parry

Designing by numbers

So, we’ve been working with a client who came to us a few years ago wanting to get away from image heavy, WYSIWYG coded emails for their EU region. Meanwhile their US region continued to do things in their traditional manner, not the traditional manner. Things were going okay until they had a crisis of resource and over the last 6 weeks have had to revert to type, and their EU emails have gone back to being the very samey, very US style. The new management team asked us to justify the benefits of going back to proper design and properly hand coded emails with live text and background images, and generally all the cleanliness in the code that comes from not getting a machine to do it.

We gave them the justifications:

Better delivery
More clicks
More consistant rendering
Better user experience
Fewer unsubscribes
More on-brand
Higher revenues

Ultimately, well designed and hand coded emails would give them small long term gains, they would getter better delivery, better engagement, less churn – not a silver bullet on its own but a really, really good long term strategy. Unfortunately, we felt this advice was falling on deaf ears. We knew the argument that to increase profits you either need more sales or less cost and felt the less cost argument was winning over the opportunity cost argument we were making. Fortunately, we have numbers available to us. Could we prove, using the last year’s numbers that the argument we were making was in fact correct?

So we delved into their data

We had our data team go back and look at a comparison between all factors available to us within their Email Service Provider. We then ran some analysis over those numbers. Since MPP, open rates have been a soft metric and there has been a greater take up of MPP in the US. However their EU data performed at 104% of the US number. But interestingly, in the 6 weeks since changing from proper design and coding to the US style, open rates also fell off by around 104%. Within this period there was also a large data cull in the US of people who hadn’t engaged for a long period and this meant there were 2 months of increased open %’s there. Essentially skewing the figures a little because if you look at the numbers before the cull there it a 116% increase for EU over the US.

More interestingly for me are the clicks, unsubs and bounce rates. As a long term strategy the longer you can keep people engaged on your list and clicking, the higher the revenues. So we took a look at those. The EU emails designed by a designer and coded by hand received approx 3 times the number of clicks per email as the US emails, 3 times! That’s a number so significant as to be impossible to ignore.

When we looked into the unsubscribes and bounces we get a similar story, unsubs for both are well under 0.1% which is below industry average with EU being slightly higher but only very marginally and this can be accredited to the fact there was no cull in the EU data and also the US data is less engaged and as such is less likely or able to unsubscribe. If we look at unsubs as a % of opens then EU is significantly lower than the US.

However, what was really interesting were bounce rates, the ISPs were voting with their servers! Bounces for US emails before the cull were at 2.636% and for the EU were 1.223%. The ISPs don’t like image led, code heavy WYSIWYG emails. Interestingly in May where the EU were no longer hand designing and hand coding the email bounces went up from an average of 1.223% to 1.794%. The big drop in US bounces coincided with the cull of the long term unengaged data but over time will gradually start to increase.

So in conclusion

In a game of inches the opportunity cost of taking short cuts has a dramatic bottom line effect. The stats don’t lie, design great engaging emails, code them by hand, send them regularly and clean your data. A recipe for long term email marketing success over a short term cost saving.

Email Marketing

Copycatwriting: 5 marketing cliches to put in the bin

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Words are powerful. They help to define your brand’s personality. In email marketing, the right phrasing can make the difference between open and ignore.

But sometimes copywriting is more copy and less writing. How many times have you seen the following phrases recently?

Just for you

A spectacular summer sale – just for me, and me alone? Well, don’t I feel special! Call me a skeptic, but I suspect it’s actually for me and your 799,999 other subscribers.

Just/only for you crops up pretty regularly in email marketing. Nine times out of ten, it’s used in a context where it is both meaningless and absurd. Dishonest too, but that particularly unfortunate quality is usually drowned out by the silliness. Most times when I see this phrase, I’m not even sure what exactly the brand is pretending to be true.

‘You’ may be the magic word of advertising, but a misplaced ‘just for you’ is more hooey than Houdini.

[Verb] your [adjective]

Find your incredible! Discover your awesome!

Cease your unimaginative, more like. It’s ok to creatively bend the rules of English. Copywriting wouldn’t be much fun if we always had to stick steadfast to a strict set of rules. But when the linguistic rule‑bending is an act of copycatting rather than innovation, then it starts to look less like cool copywriting and more like grammatical incompetence. Write your something new.

Don’t miss out

Yes, I know: FOMO. Truth be told, I have never been comfortable with this concept. It’s ethically questionable, and I suspect that the modern shopper is more aware than ever of the sales tricks up a brand’s sleeve. This is particularly true when a sender hits their audience with the same panicky phrases time and time again. Overuse diminishes effectiveness.

That’s my personal position on the matter but the stats tell a different story, for now. The numbers tell us that FOMO works. CXL‘s research reveals that a countdown timer, for example, can push up conversions by more than 300%. Urgency sure brings in the money.

But ‘don’t miss out’ is bottom‑of‑the‑barrel FOMO. It’s generic and ignorable. Motivators such as offer end dates and limited stock give people a real reason to act. ‘Don’t miss out’ is copywriting fluff.

Click here (to)

The computer mouse was invented in the 60s, came into popular use in the 80s and became a household essential in the 90s. People have been clicking things for a while.

In well‑designed email (or even an adequately designed one), the clickable elements are self‑evident. Plastering CLICK HERE on a button tells the user precisely nothing. It’s a lever labelled pull me. Thanks, I know how to use it, but I’d love to know what it does before committing to the act.

Click here also pops up regularly in passages of text. Click here to see the full terms and conditions, click here to download the PDF. In this context, the phrase is merely redundant but in such a way that it gives a mailing an unfortunate ‘My First Marketing Email’ quality.

Maximise / power up / supercharge…

Wow, this company doesn’t just promise to increase our sales. They’re going to ultrarocketblast them. Let’s give them our money, right now!

Over-the-top choices – or inventions – of verbs are an extreme side effect of the sell the benefits principle. But there are a couple of problems with this phrasing: it’s been done to death, and it was never that great in the first place. Human beings simply do not talk like that.

Keep the actions grounded in authenticity, incorporate some demonstrable stats, and let the numbers speak for themselves.

What’s good copywriting?

This article probably reads as a list of my least favourite pieces of copywriting. And that’s because it is. Copywriting is a creative endeavour and that always brings subjectivity into play.

For me, the best email copywriting is a blend of directness and true inventiveness. I see few brands pulling it off. But those that do, send the emails I look forward to opening. Maybe yours is one of them.

Business

Communication: take a long, hard look at this soft skill

5 minute read

Adrian Young

Time is money, right? And it’s so much quicker to write “the email” than it is “2024‑06‑13 – US – Loyalty members – jackets mailer”.

But is everyone who reads the message guaranteed to know, specifically, which email is being referred to? Probably not.

Specificity is an investment

It’s easy to be lazy when typing. Decades of text‑messaging and social media have encouraged brevity. Often we’ll skip words entirely and opt instead for digital hieroglyphics like 💯 or 🙌.

In the workplace, however, lazy communication is a problem. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings lead to errors. Errors cost time and money.

Initial detail is the pre‑emptive remedy. It may take a little longer to write crystal‑clear instructions, but the time saved in the long run is an invaluable payoff.

As a bonus, your correspondence history becomes more searchable. That’s handy when the need arises to trawl through old messages.

Get to the point

An excessively polite, near‑submissive tone plagues a lot of communication in the modern workplace. Euphemisms and other softeners tend to obfuscate the true meaning. Vague communication is bad communication.

Don’t ask: “I just want to check the ETA on the display ad design?”. Say: “we need the display ad by 3pm, please”. Succinctness is a world away from rudeness. If anything, padding and softening inadvertently demonstrates less respect, not more. Sensibilities are rarely so delicate.

Stick to the subject

Conversation about Thing A should remain in the thread about Thing A. If someone starts talking about Thing B in there, the convo is muddied.

This ties in with the concept of specificity. If you send an email message on the topic of “tomorrow’s promotion”, that will very quickly become today’s promotion, and then yesterday’s promotion. Good luck finding that message again in the future.

New is the new old

Good communication doesn’t only pertain to messages sent between colleagues. Naming conventions and folder structures can also benefit greatly from clarity and consistency. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up an existing project, only to find an incomprehensible dumping ground of files.

Relative terms, most notably new, are to be avoided. New is only new until the next version comes along, at which point the label becomes a misnomer. Better to go with version numbers than new, really new, and really really new.

Tools of the trade

Email isn’t the only kid on the block. Communication and organisational tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Alfred and Monday.com are popular. Their functionality varies, but they all have one thing in common: they can make your life easier.

Some communication‑enhancing features include:

Projects: Keep discussions automatically on‑topic and save yourself the bother of referring to project names over and over again.
Pinned messages: Need to make everyone aware of some important changes? Stick a note to the appropriate channel.
Reminders: Want to ask Dave something when he comes back from holiday? Set yourself, or him, a reminder.
Message templates: If you repeatedly send similar messages, a customisable message template is just the thing.

Good brief!

Project briefs (and lists of changes) deserve attention to detail. The more information provided up‑front, the fewer questions asked later. Oh, and watch out for instruction intertwined with content. That’s a messy crossover that happens surprisingly often.

Write it down

I’m a huge fan of documentation. We’ve all seen people leave companies and take important knowledge with them. None of the remaining employees are familiar with a particular project, and nothing was ever put down in black and white. Cue a mad scramble to piece together clues and figure it out.

Communication processes can and should also be documented. By giving your teams a communication framework to operate from, everything is consistent, and the machine runs smoothly.

Corporate jargon vs plain English

We’re all familiar with the comically stilted and metaphor‑laden nature of ‘business speak’. Many of us consider it a pet peeve, and yet it continues to flourish in the workplace. Many perfectly good plain English phrases have been permanently replaced by strangely artificial and sometimes grammatically‑incorrect alternatives.

While it’s true that specialist fields develop unique lexicons, corporate speak isn’t really that. And it comes with problems. Often the wording is fancier but less specific than the plain English equivalent. I’ve seen it cause non‑native speakers to question the rules of English that they had so carefully learned.

The history and psychology of corporate jargon is a topic worth reading about. It’s not likely to go away any time soon and there’s a fair amount of pressure to talk the talk. But those who have the courage to break free may be rewarded with a smoother, more authentic, more understandable communciation experience.

A little too creative?

Creative is an adjective. Or at least it used to be. In a modern business context, it has been repurposed as a noun.

What does it mean? Well, that depends. Not only is the nounified creative used to refer to a piece of design work, but also to the designer who produced it. Assuming that the word also retains its original adjective functionality, you might just see a creative creative creating a creative creative.

It’s unfair to point the finger exclusively at the corporate world for this practice. Nouning is not a recent phenomenon, and neither is its cousin, verbing. Language changes naturally over time.

Change, however, does not necessarily mean improvement. The dictionary‑approved usage of literally to mean figuratively, for example, is quite blatantly a barrier to understanding. When the definition of a word is so blurry that its meaning can only be discerned through context and tone, that is surely a problem. Let’s not foster confusion.

Linguistic elasticity is wonderful for creative writing and liberating in informal everyday speech. But in a task-driven business environment, does it leave too much to interpretation?

It’s good to share bad news

Mistakes happen. We all make them. But we don’t always admit to them.

When things go pear‑shaped, and you just so happen to be to blame, it’s decision time: own up or attempt to bury it. The trouble with the latter is that most times, everyone else can quickly figure out what happened. That leads to tension and distrust. A mistake is an accident, but dishonesty is a choice. On the rare occasion when the truth is not so apparent, time is wasted investigating what went wrong.

An employee’s willingness to own up isn’t solely determined by their personality, but by the workplace environment. The focus should be on resolution and development, not punishment. A culture of openness and honesty takes the pressure off staff and reduces the chance of stress-based mishaps in the first place.

End transmission

Communication is considered a soft skill, but that term downplays its importance. Poor communication isn’t simply a nuisance. It’s a significant drain on a company’s resources, and a major source of stress for employees.

Every business, big and small, can benefit from a communication review. Unclog your company’s information arteries, and the rewards could be substantial.

Email Marketing

10 typographical effects to prettify your emails

5 minute read

Adrian Young

10 typographical effects to prettify your emails

Text needn’t be plain. Modern CSS can apply all manner of visual effects to text. That makes it possible to create some eye‑catching typography without resorting to using images.

Well, all of that is true in web design. Email on the other hand has inconsistent support for CSS from one application to another. But don’t worry – that’s nothing a bit of graceful degradation can’t handle.

1. Letter spacing

CSS property: letter-spacing

Kerning is typographical lingo for the gap between letters. Increasing the kerning is a neat way to bump up the visual impact of a text banner or heading.

Before:

After:

And the good news? It works everywhere.

2. Drop shadow

CSS property: text-shadow

A drop shadow can add a subtle illusion of depth. Unlike letter spacing, this CSS property isn’t so widely supported in email. But it works in Apple Mail on iPhones and Macs, and that alone makes it worthwhile. With no particular fallback considerations, text shadow is a perfectly viable design option.

3. Outline

CSS property: text-stroke / -webkit-text-stroke

An outline can accentuate a heading or call‑to‑action. Just like drop shadows, support is not universal. So consider it a progressive enhancement and don’t rely on it for contrast!

4. Pseudo 3D

CSS property: text-shadow (again, but fancier)

Masterful coders can wield CSS like a paintbrush. Code‑based reproduction of the Mona Lisa, anyone? To create something like this, you only need bucketloads of artistic talent, abstract thinking, coding prowess and mathematical aptitude!.

These works, incredible as they are, are the endeavors of hobbyists. But the point is that CSS can do a lot more than basic styling. You can combine effects with limitless potential for creativity.

For example: you can apply as many text shadows as you like. How about layering a few to create a 3D text effect?

5. Gradient fill

CSS properties: linear-gradient / background-clip / -webkit-background-clip

Colour gradients, a once‑beloved staple of web design, can be easily applied to a background in CSS. But with just one extra property, they can also be applied directly to text. Nice.

Beware if using this technique – some email clients will recognise the gradient, but not the clipping mask – thus leaving you with a coloured block and no text. These are essentially experimental techniques in email, so some degree of fallback content may be necessary.

6. Texture fill

CSS properties: background-image / background-clip / -webkit-background-clip

Gradients aren’t the only thing that can be applied as a text background. You can use an image. I guess you could call it a texture.

7. Web fonts

HTML element and CSS properties: <link> / font-family / @font-face

So far we’ve only looked at effects to be applied to existing text. But we’re missing a trick. A major part of typography is of course the choice of fonts.

Once upon a time, web designers were limited to a small pool of web‑safe fonts. Arial, Times New Roman and the like. The advent of web fonts meant that developers could remotely load any font under the sun onto the user’s computer… thus opening up a new world of typographical creativity.

Do web fonts work in email? The answer – as is so often the case with this medium – is sort of. Compatibility is all over the place. This article isn’t a how‑to on web fonts, so let’s note only the most important points regarding support. They work fully in Apple Mail, in an extremely limited form in Gmail, and not at all in Outlook.

Here’s a comparison of web fonts and their more prosaic fallbacks. When they work, they undoubtedly enhance an email. They also make it possible to produce designs that are more on‑brand. But the downside is that the fancier the web font, the bigger the fall! Perhaps one day all major email services will cater for them.

8. Rotation

CSS property: transform: rotate(#deg);

Text doesn’t always have to lie horizontally. A little bit of rotation can make a big visual impact.

9. Text scaling

CSS property: font-size: #vw

Huge text‑based headings can sometimes present a challenge on mobile. Multiple breakpoint‑triggered classes to resize the font can work, but it’s pretty clunky and requires some trial and error. If only there was a way to scale the text smoothly, as if in an image.

Well, there is. One of CSS’s many units of size is viewport width, or vw for short. That lets text scale relative to the screen size. It’s surprisingly well‑supported among mobile email clients.

Here’s an example, placed on a background image because, well, why not?

10. Animation

CSS properties: animation / @keyframes

CSS comes equipped with a couple of options for movement: transitions and keyframe animations. In the right hands, the latter can produce some richly complex animation. The results are far smoother than an animated GIF, and they’re not limited to that format’s paltry 256‑colour palette.

Here’s a very simple example with some skewed text. To see what can really be achieved, I recommend checking out the myriad examples on CodePen.

Note: this is a GIF-based recording of a CSS animation!

Is this really worth doing in email?

Maybe, maybe not. I’ve written in the past about the value of simple design for this somewhat fragile medium. But I’ve also written about all manner of experimental interactive content. Clearly those concepts are at odds.

But I believe there’s a time and place for both ends of the spectrum. There are accessibility and compatibility considerations for sure. Often an image with an alt tag will be the better choice than CSS text effects. But if you’re feeling adventurous and fancy producing an email that looks spectacular on the strongest email clients… then I reckon it’s an adventure worth having.

Email Marketing

Email: the big picture

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Email is a wonderful marketing medium. Its ROI is legendary. One might go so far as to say that it’s the best marketing channel. They might even be right – but there’s a better way to look at it.

A component of a larger machine

What’s the best meal in a restaurant you’ve ever had? Compliments to the chef! Of course, the (head) chef isn’t alone in the kitchen. There’s a sous chef. And a saucier. In fact, there’s a whole team’s worth of culinary talent.

We can keep zooming out. The waiter who delivered exceptional service, the interior designer who cultivated the perfect ambience, the couriers who delivered fresh ingredients, and the farmers who produced them. Remove any part of the equation and it all falls apart.

Email marketing is also a part of a bigger picture. The most effective marketing campaigns are those in which multiple channels actively work together. But even when this hasn’t been consciously planned, it’s still happening to some degree. An email engager wasn’t always a subscriber. They arrived via your website or social media or by some other non-email means. That raises a question.

Who gets credit?

Attribution in marketing can be seen through tunnel-vision. It’s a little too easy to give exclusive credit to the most recent link in the chain. The truth of attribution is that it’s often more fuzzy than focused.

Even when a clear click-to-conversion can be tracked from a particular email, who’s to say that a series of emails hasn’t influenced that decision? Maybe there wasn’t even anything particularly tempting about that latest email, but it happened to serve as a convenient conduit to your website.

We haven’t even left the scope of email and this is already becoming blurry. There are broader factors to consider, such as your social media activity, or web content, or external influences like third party reviews or good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. A complex series of events leads up to every conversion. The marketing report may assign success to Wednesday’s email, but it’s worth taking a step back and considering the full story.

Clicks aren’t everything

It goes without saying that clicks are one of the key indicators of an email’s performance. After all, the goal of a marketing email is usually to drive traffic to a landing page. A click therefore seems like the email’s final goal, before Team Website takes the baton.

By that theory, all clicks could be considered equal in value. Except they aren’t. An enthusiastic clicker might be disappointed by the content they’re met with online. Is that a weak landing page’s fault, or a misleading email? Most likely some hard-to-measure ratio of the two.

Are conversions therefore the best way to measure an email’s success? Maybe, but not the only one. A non-clicking opener has potential latent value, as does a non-purchasing clicker. As humans we often think in absolutes, but reality is rarely so black and white. Sales may be the most direct way to gauge an email’s performance, but its real contribution to your brand runs deeper.

The depth of design

Design is another aspect of email that is easy to oversimplify. An email’s design isn’t just its layout and colours. It’s the whole shebang. Copy, imagery, links – they’re all intertwined.

Even the subject line isn’t as isolated or single-purpose as it may appear. Its influence extends beyond the initial open, and perhaps beyond the scope of that one email. Words are a big part of your brand’s personality.

Design considerations like responsive layouts and dark mode and accessibility should not be treated as standalone concepts. It’s far better to make an accessible design… than to make a design accessible.

Back to reality

It’s easy to preach. In the real world and the hubbub of business, there isn’t always the luxury of stopping to think about the big picture. It might even come across as an excuse. Hey, this email had a terrible click rate… but at least it raised awareness!

Nonetheless, it’s worth pausing from time to time to consider how everything fits together. There’s a causal chain. Nothing is random. No two things are truly distinct. These concepts aren’t only relevant to email or marketing or business, but to every aspect of our existence.