Email design guidelines - Articles & Tips At some stage in your career, it’s likely you’ll be asked by a client to design a HTML email. Before you rush to explain that all the cool kids are using social media, keep in mind that when done correctly, email is still one of the best ways to promote you and your clients online. In fact, a recent survey showed that every dollar spent on email marketing this year generated more than $40 in return. That’s more than any other marketing channel, including the cool ones. There are a whole host of ingredients that contribute to a good email marketing campaign. Same same, but different Before getting into the details, there are some uncomfortable facts that those new to HTML email should be aware of. While it’s not without its challenges, rest assured it can be done. Setting your lowest common denominator To maintain your sanity, it’s a good idea to decide exactly which email clients you plan on supporting when building a HTML email. Let’s get started. Use tables for layout Err toward nesting
What Twitter and Facebook's 2009 Trends Tell Us About Ourselves The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space. As the year comes to a close, several social media companies decided to take a look back and reflect on the events, people, technologies that captured our interest this year. Twitter took the first crack when it revealed the most discussed topics of 2009. Facebook was next when it released its Facebook Memology for the year. Both reports are interesting and have a lot of useful information, yet nobody's really taken the time to analyze just what these trends mean. First, A Recap of Facebook and Twitter's Top Trends of 2009 Before you start reading this week's column, please make sure to take a good, long look at this year's top trends for Facebook and Twitter. First, Twitter's 2009 trending topics: Here are Facebook's top status trends: 1. The #3 trend on Facebook? 2. This was clearly the year of the sci-fi film. 3. 4.
20 Email Design Best Practices and Resources for Beginners Even for experience designers, building email newsletters isn't easy. You receive a lovely looking design, and you crack on with the development. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work as it should in every email clients. Styles don't display, images aren't visible, etc. This is where these twenty best practices come in handy. 1: Keep the Design Simple Emails are not like complex website designs; they should be nicely designed, but somewhat basic. The cleaner the design, the easier it will be to code, and the less chance of any abnormalities happening between various browsers and email clients. 2: Use Tables Email clients live in the past, so all emails must be built using tables for layout. Not Accepted Accepted 3: Have Web Browsers at the Ready Make sure you have as many web browsers as possible available to you. At the very least, use these: Internet Explorer 6Internet Explorer 7Internet Explorer 8Mozilla Firefox 3Apple Safari 3Google Chrome 4: Sign Up for all the Major Email Clients No Alt Tags
Who Really Uses Twitter? While Twitter is reputedly growing at 700% per annum and hitting the headlines, it’s sometimes easy to get carried away with it’s significance. Obviously, if you’re a daily Twitterer who’s plugged in to several active networks and using TweetDeck (or a similar tool) as your primary source of news – it seems like anyone who is anyone is using Twitter. But really, are they? The fact is, the Twitter user-base is still a tenth of the size of Facebook and the majority of users remain casual (if not dormant) Twitterers who’ve posted more Tweets than they have followers. Granted, if you’re in the media, marketing or PR, you’ll find millions of active users to follow and engage with, but what about those of us who work in more publicity shy, less showy industries and business sectors? If, for example, you’re an Insurance Lawyer you’ll have a choice of 25 people to follow. Creative industries seem to be disproportionately well represented on Twitter. Clearly, some perspective is needed here.
Younger Americans Still Fueling Facebook Social Media Today | 80%+ Twitter accounts inactive, but core users more committed Best Free Website Analytics Tools | Web Design Ledger Web designers are often website owners. If you fall into this category, you have probably already realized the importance of knowing and understanding who is coming to your site and what they are doing while they’re there. Whether you are running a blog or an e-commerce site, this information is vital. That’s why it’s key to have a good set of tools providing you with website analytics. There are lots of tools out there, all with different features and different prices. In this post, I’m showing you the best free analytics tools available. Clicky Clicky prides itself on providing real time analytics. Google Analytics Google Analytics is probably the most popular free analytics tool available. Reinvigorate Reinvigorate also provides real-time stat tracking and can alert you when a visitor performs a particular action on your site. Piwik Piwik is open source and is built with PHP and MySQL. Yahoo! Yahoo! WordPress.com Stats Woopra FireStats GoingUp With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! Mint
Only 8% of Advertisers Say Twitter is Effective Promo Tool The study also found that advertisers are more likely than consumers to know about Twitter and are more likely to believe in the microblogging tool’s future power to help promote products and services. Twitter Awareness and Sentiment The research, which included surveys of both advertisers and the US public at large, revealed that just less than half of advertisers (45%) think Twitter is in its infancy and its use will grow significantly over the next few years. In contrast, 21% believe Twitter will not move into the mainstream and it will remain something mostly young people and the media will use. At the same time, just under one in five advertisers (17%) believe Twitter’s five minutes of fame are already over and it’s time to find the next big thing, while 17% of advertisers say they don’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion on it. Among consumers, the study found a different picture, especially in terms of awareness. Age Differences Evident
Twiangulate Study: Google Tracking 88% Of Domains In Study A new study published by graduate students at University of California, Berkeley showed that Google is the leading footprint on the top 100 sites in their study. As you can see from the chart below, Google Analytics was found on 81% of the top 100 sites, while DoubleClick (owned by Google) was in second place, by being found on 70% of those sites. Microsoft came in third with Atlas showing up on 60% of those sites. Here is the chart: When combining Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdSense, Google Widgets, Google FriendConnect and others, Google has a 88% footprint on those sites: The New York Times blog has additional commentary on the limited study. Postscript: Google: Master Of Closing The Loop? Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | Google: Business Issues | Legal: Privacy | Stats: General | Top News
What Social Media Users Want [STATS] Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg's audience has a mixed bag of interests. This is all according to online advertising network Chitika, who set out to analyze the interests of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by comparing the genres of sites that receive traffic from these social networks. 287,090 impressions were used in the report, and based on this research, each social site has a distinct makeup of users with unique tastes. The graphic below breaks it down. Another interesting tidbit is that MySpace users have no interest in news whatsoever. If anything this data points to the varied interests behind our current obsession with popular social networks. Image courtesy of ChrisAt, iStockphoto
5 refreshing alternatives to Google Analytics A majority proportion of the internet community now use Google Analytics as a method of measurement, it’s ease of implementation and lack of cost have made it one of the forefront contenders as a mid level analytics product. There are however a couple of other great Analytics options out there creeping up on it’s market share. Here are the best designed and freshest ones to watch. If you’ve been reading recently, I’ve had an unhealthy obsession with all things realtime. Whilst a good proportion of the web community are happy enough with watching Google Analytics on a daily basis, for those of us spending money on advertising, the added benefits of watching exactly what visitors are doing in realtime are obvious. URL: Chartbeat offers a free trial of their software for a short period, and are then priced at ten dollars a month thereafter, which is quite competitive considering their offering. URL: URL:
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