WHITE PAPERS AND GUIDES

Most email marketing Best Practices guides cover only the basics, with very little attention given to the subjects of mailing list management and email testing. In Volume 1 of Best Practices Enhanced, we look at the aspects of content building, list management, and testing that are vital to a successful email marketing campaign. Topics include:

• Email Collection: Best practices for building your mailing lists
• Cross-channel marketing: Best Practices in the social media age
• Personalization: How to use segmentation, merge data and dynamic content effectively in email
• Measuring: The best techniques for split testing emails and measuring results

...and much more

There has never been a Best Practices Guide that covers the subject of email content, list management and split testing in as much detail as this one. It takes you step-by-step through all the initial stages of an email marketing campaign, from building your lists to assessing the results. You could use this guide to teach the subject in college.

Our email marketing Best Practices series continues with Volume 2: Design and Image Management. This volume covers all the things an email designer should know to create the perfect email. Topics include:

• HTML Code issues in email browsers: Ensuring compatibility
• Image preparation: Designing images for email, even when none are allowed
• Email layout considerations: Positioning content for maximum effect
• Designing email for mobile devices: Preparing email in a smart phone world

...and much more

Design is key to successful email, and yet there are very few good guides on the subject. This ebook fills the gap with a complete examination of every aspect of email design and how to make it work for you.

Email marketing deliverability tips and techniques to improve email engagement The best email campaign in the world is only as good as its deliverability. In Deliverability Enhanced, we show you how to make sure your mailings arrive in the inbox and not in the junk folder. Topics covered in this comprehensive guide include:

• Reputation Score: What it is and how to improve it
• B2C vs. B2B: The difference between in-house and online email service
• Address Collection: Deliverability problems to watch out for when you build your recipient list.
• Online Email Trends: New email provider features that can affect your deliverability

...and much more

There have been dozens of white papers on the subject of email deliverability, but you won’t find another that covers the subject as extensively as this one. If you are having trouble getting your emails delivered, or you simply want to make sure that you continue to have good deliverability, this white paper is filled with helpful information.

If you are planning to migrate your servers to Amazon Web Service (AWS), you’ll want to read this guide. Our guide will help you understand what is involved in migrating your servers from your on-site location (or co-location) to the cloud. The details are laid out here, including:

• How to use third party ESP software on AWS
• Which AWS components you’ll need
• Determining your RAM requirements
• Comparative Pricing for different installations

...and much more

If you’ve been considering migrating your data to a cloud-based infrastructure, but were worried about the logistics and the practicality of doing it, this guide will help you better understand what’s involved, along with tips on how to avoid potential extra charges.

How much do you know about adding multiple links to email images? Do you still cut your images up into tiny pieces, because you thought image mapping wouldn't work? Using the latest data and dozens of online tests, we've compiled a complete assessment and guide to the differences between slicing and image mapping, and the best times to use each. Topics include:

• A comparison of the techniques
• When slicing is the wrong thing to do
• Image slicing best practices guide
• Step-by-step Dreamweaver and Photoshop instructions

...and much more.

Based on the latest information and thorough testing of all the major browsers, this guide will show how to use each technique to its best advantage. The information in this guide could save you hours of unnecessary work and help reduce the code requirements for your mailings.

Mistakes happen when sending email, but there are techniques you can use to keep mailing errors to a minimum. This white paper covers many of the most common email marketing mistakes, how they happen, how to avoid them, and what to do to lessen the damage when they occur. Topics include:

• Content Flubs: From typos to mismatched content in your email.
• Coding Errors: Includes HTML issues and dynamic content problems
• Image Pitfalls: What to watch out for when using images in email
• Design Flubs: The most common email design errors
• Correcting Mistakes: What to do after the email has been sent

...and much more

All the examples in this booklet are taken from actual sent emails. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, this booklet contains several pounds worth of advice.

Referral programs are a proven technique for increasing list size and finding potential subscribers with interests in line with your existing subscriber base. This guide covers the basics of setting up a referral program using Goolara Symphonie. Topics include:

• Referral techniques
• Types of reward programs
• Avoiding abuse
• Customizing your referral page.

...and much more

Unlike many of the other guides in this section, this one is designed to be specific to Goolara Symphonie's interface, although if you are interested in starting a rewards program, you'll find plenty of useful information here.

With the growing use of mobile phones and tablets to read email, email marketers are turning to responsive design as a way to make their mailings more readable across a variety of devices. Representing months of research and testing, this guide covers everything an email designer needs to know on the subject of responsive email design. Topics include:

• The basics of responsive design
• Scalable vs. Responsive
• Advanced techniques
• Using Dreamweaver for responsive email

...and much more

Unlike most of the white papers that are currently available, this guide offers the nuts-and-bolts information you need to create responsive emails. You could pay more on Amazon for books that would give you less information than you’ll find in this guide. It also covers the use of scalable design as a more compatible alternative to responsive, so even if you have no plans to use responsive design in your mailings, this ebook is worth your time to read.

An effective alternative to video in email is the animated gif. Studies show that animated gifs can improve an email’s clickthrough rate and engage the customer in new and interesting ways. In this guide we look at many of these techniques with some best practice information to make sure that your gifs engage your customers and not turn them off. Topics include:

• Looped animations
• Limited-pass animations
• Carousel Gifs
• Cinemagraphs
• 3D techniques

...and much more

With the gif format, you can create a remarkable variety of effects, including some that seem to jump right out of the screen. We look at all the most popular techniques for creating animated gifs, as well as a few cutting-edge techniques that push the limits. Included in this guide are a variety of sources you can use to create your own gifs.

Well-crafted email achieves a fine balance between text and images. The text improves the email’s deliverability and the images help make appealing to the eye. But some email clients automatically block images, so what should you do then? This white paper is filled with great ideas to make your email attractive and highly deliverable under a wide variety of situations. Topics include:

• The secrets behind text-to-image ratios
• Why we use tables in email
• How email clients display your mailings
• Using Styled Alt Tags
• Understanding Fonts

...and much more

Follow the advice in this white paper and you can be sure that people will see your message under almost any conditions. Email is about delivering content, and this white paper will show you how to do just that.

Research shows that email containing video has a considerably higher response rate than regular email. Until recently, getting video to work in email has been a problem, but compatibility changes in some email clients, plus the built-in features of the HTML5 video tag make adding video to email easier than ever. Topics include:

• Advantages of embedding video in email
• Anatomy of the HTML5 video tag
• Email marketing video best practices
• How to create foolproof videos for email

...and much more

This is the most thorough white paper on the subject of video in email currently available. Whether you are ready to start adding videos to your mailings, or you just want to learn more about the topic, this white paper covers it all.