Creating detailed and actionable client reports has become a vitally important skill for any agency SEO to hone. Often we’ll spend 20-30 hours composing a veritable treat of a read for our clients, a hand crafted sluice for a torrent of brilliant ideas, delegations, and requests that will certainly lead to a better performance in the SERPs once put into practice…
So, while CSS-unfriendly desktop clients and Web email clients like Gmail will always be here to rain on our parade, the good news is that the rise of mobile email has meant that we may soon be at liberty to create more Web-like email experiences. It has also meant that optimizing your newsletters for handheld and touch displays has gone from being a “nice thing to have” to a given. This doesn’t just affect email newsletters at the code level, but it also changes the way we display design elements. For example, in the following two mobile designs, which do you think is the more effective call-to-action (CTA) button?
Compare the two posts below, both written by the exact same SEO expert and each containing around the same number of words. Without knowing the subject, can you guess which post earned more links?
When I mentioned that a lot of CSS properties out there work fine in many email clients, I wasn’t trying to be vague. Thankfully, the research into what works and what doesn’t has already been done. You need only skim this guide to CSS support in email clients to see what properties are within and off limits. Or just know that most of your CSS rendering troubles will come from Outlook 2010, Lotus Notes and Gmail, due to their refusal to do anything useful with CSS style sheets.
I write at least one post a week. Does that take discipline? Sure. But when I break it down, the hardest part — the part for which I need the discipline — is sitting down to write. I’ll find all sorts of things to distract me from starting. But if I can get myself to start a post, I don’t need much discipline to finish it.
You don’t get to 600 million friends without doing something spectacular. Mark Zuckerberg knows this more than anyone. But I wonder: do we have any hope of achieving similar success?
HTML email has a reputation for being a particularly tough design medium. So tough, in fact, that many designers regard coding and testing even the simplest email design to be almost as bad as fixing display quirks in Internet Explorer 6, and only slightly better than a tooth extraction. So, it’s with much courage that I tell you today about using CSS in email newsletters: what works, where it’s going and what you should do next.
Peter Drucker is one of the most influential business writers of the last century. His ideas have shaped the ways we conduct business today. One of Drucker’s main ideas was the notion that without a customer, there is no business. Furthermore, customer satisfaction is the key to the success of any business, or in his words: “The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.”
A number of techniques and elements can be used in Web forms to turn them from abject failures into successful conversion points. In this article, we’ll present some interesting examples and useful guidelines for Web form design.
Appearances can be deceiving. In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.