Email Marketing News and Tips

As a Boomerang agent helping customers with the preparation of their email newsletters, I understand the importance of using CSS when designing creatives. For most email template developers, it reduces the burden of having to assign HTML elements... Continue reading

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If you have a well-maintained list, you save time and energy that you could use for another task. If you have a list that requires more of your attention to clean up, you better put on your gloves. An incomplete list may help keep your sanity and enjoy your job, too! Well, OK, maybe I'm stretching it. But really, having a well-maintained list can make you feel good about yourself. This practice is highly recommended if you plan on customizing your email newsletter by using merge codes. In this article,... Continue reading

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Do you know what your competition is doing? Why don't you find out? Sign up to be on their email list for newsletters or special offers. Find out if you are doing something better than them or if you might need to improve upon your own services to stay on top of the competition. It also gives you insight into how often they are marketing to their lists, what types of offers/newsletters they are sending, and if they offer any kind of incentives for feedback. Sign up for a free trial with your competitor’s... Continue reading

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Email marketing professionals are sometimes challenged by composing email newsletters with really lengthy articles, usually requiring the reader to scroll down significantly. While it is good to provide details of products, company events, tips, etc. in your newsletter, you might want to consider the following tips: 1. Use snippets of each article - perhaps the opening sentence - and then follow it with a "Read more" link so the reader can read the rest of it. I know this has been standard practice in the... Continue reading

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Before sending out your HTML email newsletter, make sure the HTML code is clean. What I mean by this is, your code must follow the standard formatting. An "unclean" code may lead to problems related to how the email appears. Each Web browser and email program has its own set of rules as to how code is rendered. The end result? Browser A shows it normally but Browser B displays it that makes you scratch your head. Email Program A displays it fine but Email Program B decides to take a day off. The following... Continue reading

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Let's admit it: HTML email designers are hired to create decent-looking newsletters that are dressed with a solid layout, styles, colors, graphics, etc to go along with content. Personally, I love incorporating these into my HTML emails simply because they add flavor to the message. This is not to say plain old text emails are not as effective. It's just that I prefer a little more pizazz - without overdoing it. You can use an internal or external CSS file in your HTML code. In addition, you can use... Continue reading

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If you're like me, you've noticed that learning basic HTML is not enough. You feel you've somewhat mastered creating HTML email newsletters using tables and are now up to a good challenge. After reading more and more articles on the Internet about how easy it is to create an HTML file without the use of tables, you've decided you want to dirty your hands. You've now decided to try table-less layout using CSS. A CSS table-less layout certainly gives you a high degree of control when creating a Web page.... Continue reading

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If you're reading the Boomerang Blog you're looking at our Blog Newsletter tool. Have unlimited employees contribute to your blog and schedule an automatic newsletter to be emailed out in a newsletter format, as often as you like. We'll design, create and host a branded corporate blog for you and create a professional looking newsletter template. You'll receive an automated proof for approval before activating the newsletter based on your schedule. Setup has never been more affordable! For a... Continue reading

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A few weeks back I met with a small restaurant chain here in the Silicon Valley that had not been collecting any email addresses for their customers. This is not at all uncommon for brick-and-mortar businesses that have grown up with traditional marketing. But they can reap significant advantages by staying connected to their customers through email marketing. So these are the steps I gave them to get started: Consider what you want to send to your customers that they will enjoy reading. Quite often... Continue reading

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Someone had asked me the other day about using character escapes such as 'character entity references' and 'numeric character references' (NCRs) in their HTML email, and how these differ from HTML character encoding mentioned in my previous blog article. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a great Q&A reference that explains in simple terms these differences and when one should use escape references. While the article primarily references web HTML, the information applies in large part to email... Continue reading

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