(Your Email/Customer Relationship, that is.)

When you’re creating your company’s email campaigns, it’s crucial that your branding stays consistent. Your customers will immediately recognize your company and what you stand for when you incorporate your logo, colors, and typefaces throughout your email campaigns, which will allow them to jump to the meat of the message.

As with anything that’s repetitive though, it’s easy to get boring. An example? Not to point fingers, but I signed up last month for the retail store Ann Taylor’s newsletters, and I’m already deleting them from my inbox without opening. I harbor no grudge; it’s just that I know what I’ll see when I open the email, and they give away everything in their subject line. Below are three emails where the company uses the exact same layout (one large picture with some text) – there’s no fire! My relationship with Taylor’s emails has fizzled like a bad marriage, and I’m looking elsewhere for my eye candy.

So how do you add the spunk back to your emails? Using multiple templates is a great way to spice up your campaigns, because it’ll switch things up. Try one large picture one week, and then add multiple columns the next. Use different fonts, and at least change the color or weight occasionally. It’s easy to have fun when you create your emails, and your newly-found energy for the campaigns will transfer to your customers. They will appreciate the effort, and your relationship will regain that old spark.

Getting the most bang for your email buck can happen a few ways, but having a quality list is key, and probably the most important. Although having a well-designed email with tons of clickable links and buttons is great for getting people to convert, what if your email is promoting highchairs and you’re sending it to 20-something bachelors?

First off, you have the bachelors’ emails because you probably sell something other than highchairs. That’s great! A variety of products is the perfect springboard for segmenting your email lists. On your website or at your store, or however you’re getting your mailing list, give options for people to tell you what they’re interested in. You can provide these options with checkboxes that automatically populate a list in the back-end of your site: the magazine Real Simple is a perfect example. When you click on ‘Free Newsletters’, it offers 8 different kinds of emails to subscribe to AND you can customize it even more with the 7 ‘Areas of Interest’.

Immediately, you’ll see your click-throughs skyrocket, and your unsubscribes will dwindle. Wunderbar! Now you can take it a step further. In your email marketing provider (who you send your emails through), you’ll have an option to create segmentation or suppression lists, which you’ll be able to grow by defining your customer’s actions. If nancy@beans.com clicked on a link for bean-bag chairs, you can add her action (Click-Through to Bean-Bag Chairs) to a segmentation mailing list for that action alone. Now you’re sending bean-bag driven emails to Nancy, instead of Joe who only sits on bar stools. Nancy will be thrilled that you ‘know’ her, and she will respond with love, affection, and her credit card.

Although email marketing segmentation might sound like math class, most providers like Mail Chimp or Publicaster make it simple and provide tons of ‘action’ customization. Take a second to play around with it, and you’ll save yourself the loss of valuable customers.

As a recently engaged designer I know for sure that I will be making my own wedding invitations; the only question is “What will they look like?”

I’m still young, so my design ’style’ is constantly evolving, which means I don’t have a sure-fire process or font or even a color to safely go to. Another difficulty is that I’m not only branding myself with this project, I’m branding my fiance and ultimately our relationship! Yet another thing to take into consideration is that, as a young designer, I want our invitations to be cutting edge and on top of every trend..but at the same time I want them to be unique and speak to our sensibilities..so what’s a girl to do?

A style I’ve always admired, but not had the skills to pull off, is the hand-drawn form, whether it be type or image. Hand-drawn is certainly not new, but it has started to regain momentum in main stream advertisements and branding. I’ve started practicing with doodles and rough sketches to create the perfect invitation, but I’ve used some inspiration along the way. Below are some fantastic uses of hand-drawn type and images, and how they can even be integrated into Email Marketing (brought it back!). Wish me luck, and enjoy these beautiful pieces:

I unfortunately couldn’t find the artist for this. It was found on the awesome website www.ffffound.com (yes, that many F’s)

Captain Burrito’s Poster campaign for a Barcelona gym.

Jesse Penico’s Call for Entries Poster is completely hand-drawn but modern and fun.

Anthropologie is known for their high class products that have a vintage or ‘distressed’ feel. The hand-drawn elements in their Email Marketing campaigns reflect their store and catalog presence, and feel very solid.

Optimizing your website to make the most of it takes continual work and modifications, but the benefits are well worth it. By changing something simple like the color of a button you could increase the revenue your site makes by 2% or more. Now 2% doesn’t sound like a jaw dropping amount but if you’re company has a $100,000 monthly sales thats an extra $24,000 in your pocket each year. And if you’re OverStock.com changing the location of a button up their conversion by 5% keeping with the same theoretical numbers for the imaginary company above that slight change adds $60,000 in revenue for a seemingly insignificant adjustment. These increases can be dramatic or slight but is a must for sustainable business practice. Your website works around the clock rain or shine, never calls in sick or complains and works to make you money.

I would recommend looking at a current site revamp if your traffic isn’t doing anything on your site yet. But if you have decent amount of leads maybe shift right into the minor changes. But if you do a whole site redesign let the site run for 6-8 months depending on traffic rates. After you have a nice benchmark start modifying the location slightly of your weekly sale, change type size, colors, navigation location (and keep it well within the sites look you don’t want to do a massive change to close to each other) but here is where the testing comes into play. Change something small, the size of the navigation font and run it for a few months and if it helps leave it, if it hurts change it back and move onto something else. Slowing adding 1-2% conversion every few months with four or five of these within a year you’ll jump your sales 10%.

Lets see how we can increase your numbers today.

In my recent email marketing research, I stumbled upon a group that’s trying to change the way email clients (ie Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook) display HTML emails. It’s a huge undertaking that requires everyone to work together to create a set of web standards that email designers can work with.

Currently, those designers are forced to use ‘90s technologies to create the attention-grabbing emails we all know and love, but they are also forced to deal with 12+ different email clients that all display their lovely message differently. As one of these designers, it’s hard not to pull my hair out every time I layout an email.

The Email Standards Project is still in its infancy and needs people to spread the word about web standards. Their mission is “…that some time in the future web designers will be able to rely on a solid, consistent level of web standards support when designing and building HTML emails.” On their site, http://www.email-standards.org/, you can view screen shots from every major email client to see exactly how different the same HTML email is displayed, and why, in our tech-heavy society, this is such an important thing to fix.

The Email Standards Project may not be saving children in the Sudan, however it’s trying to make the online world a nicer place to design for and interact with. Please pass their website on to other designers or email connoisseurs that would be interested in a standard future.

It’s shocked me to see the number of people still using tables to lay out their websites… Tables pose a problem for many reasons.

1. Website Speed

2. Cost

3. Compliance to ADA standards

WEBSITE SPEED
Why does speed play a part in this new world of 20mb internet speeds and fiber-optics infrastructure? Because not everyone has it! Websites still need to keep an eye on 56K dialup, as a majority of users have DSL+, there are a significant number of people who don’t have access to anything faster. Rural areas, which you might not consider too far off the beaten path, relay on glorified cell phone towers to get 128K speeds but it’s unreliable and works on direct line of site, leaving standard dial-up as the most viable alternative.

Google now takes your pages’ sizes and load times into consideration when placing you on the search results. And tables, great for tabular data is heavy on the code side, which increases the file size and load times. When designing a website each page needs to be below 150k before CSS, Images, and other attachments.

The speed is also affected by slicing your site into different images to be placed inside each cell. A browser will load one large image faster than 40 smaller images, and it loads all at once instead of populating one at a time making your site look like its having problems while it finishes the remaining images.

COST
You’ve defined the cell sizes, so when it’s loading your site isn’t jumping around like Richard Simons as it pulls in the files one-by-one, but lets talk cost. If your website has 50 pages, all built using your “template”

design, then what happens when you want to change your website using CSS? A simple update can be performed in one location, then tested and implemented in a matter of minutes. If you’re using tables, that same job just got amplified 50-times. When one simple change has to be manually pushed through each page again, one-by-one, that becomes costly and burdensome, and that’s when you begin to avoid changes. This, in turn, hurts your site’s ranking, which hurts your traffic, which hurts your sales… not a good thing.

Compliance
Any company with 15 or more employees is required by law to meet the ADA’s standards for website design, which means not using tables for website layout.

I took this quote from the government guidelines: “Large tables of data can be difficult to interpret if a person is using a non-visual means of accessing the web. Users of screen readers can easily get ‘lost’ inside a table because it may be impossible to associate a particular cell that a screen reader is reading with the corresponding column headings and row names.”

-http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm#%28a%29

What does this all mean for you? If you’re larger or smaller than 15 employees it’s in your best interest for all the reasons above to start removing tables from your site’s layout.

The old saying just doesn’t work… Probably never did, but now its become increasingly important to not only have a function but capture the content-blinded-public. Any company can create a “website” defined by webster dictionary as

Main Entry: Web site
Function: noun
Date: 1992
: a group of World Wide Web pages usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online by an individual, company, educational institution, government, or organization

but its FORM is what make people stay, converts those end users into tangible $$$ pumping customers. So the old saying Form follows Function is inaccurate, Form and Function breath simultaneously and should be tackled together. This becomes incredibly important with website design and something I keep in mind when designing and building them. For a visual tasty treat… Checkout the top image they’re both websites serving their “function” now ask yourself which one you’d trust to do business with…

I’ll try to keep that cheesy pun my last.

I had been anticipating the launch of Google’s new Wave product for some time; I have now had an account for a few months and I have to say I was slightly disappointed. Knowing what to expect, I’d sat through the full 1:32 video from the I/O conference and loved it. But after using it with the small number of my friends who were lucky enough to get an invite also, it has proved itself as an advanced chatting client, not the life changing email smashing concept I thought it was going to be (but i had some pretty high hopes). That being said there is some validity to Wave for small business, remote employees, and everyday users. Google Wave offers real-time(!!!), and it’s hard to express how legitimate the live, zero delay communication and collaboration this really is. The collaboration benefit to drafting documents, emails, proposals, etc. is endless with the ability to add users as the wave continues, letting them see the progression in a “playback” feature, making it easy to get caught up – altogether it is, and will be, a great advancement in the way we work. Standard email systems like Outlook fragment email strings into separate emails and can make it difficult to maintain a coherent conversational flow with multiple CC’s FWD’s Replys Replay Alls ect. (you get the point we’ve all hit this annoyance), and Gmail advanced this with “conversational” email stacking. Wave took a look at email that was developed back in the 70’s and hasn’t seen significant conceptual changes in 40+ years, then developed a tool that would be today’s email, if we were starting from scratch now. Email wasn’t designed for what it’s evolved into, and Wave is the start of the change. I’ll be the first to admit we’re not going to say goodbye to the friendly “@” symbol anytime soon, however we might see a dramatic evolution in the way electronic communication is thought of.

Another great feature of Google Wave that will also benefit the small business owners is the ability to maintain multiple blogs and Twitter accounts from one place. There are tools that do this already but it’s ANOTHER account you need whereas with Google Wave it’s already part of your Google experience. Once Google Wave is available to everyone, I’m confident some of my concerns and reluctance to call it, “the replacement for email,” will be ironed out.

And for those who want to want an invite, let me know! I’ll be giving them away to the first eight people to follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our blog.

[cmisak] [at] [adcuda] [dot] [com]

Open Source Design Tools for Business Owners

As promised I wanted to cover some tips tricks, opinion and on occasion some facts in my posts. This weeks is an arsenal of software every designer and small business owner should have installed on their computer… Little disclaimer I’m a avid PC users and most if not all of my focus will be catered to that platform. So to start off

Gimp, nothing new but a shockingly powerful photo editing alternative that is free! (most of my recommendations will be) I also carry around a portable version on my jumpdrive / phone. Never know when you need to do a quick fix for a client or spruce up your own site. But Gimp gives you the power of the more advanced photo editing without the $$ price tag.

inkscape this application is an alternative to Adobe Illustrator (R) and is also a must for small business owners. When creating your logo, its imperative to make sure its in vector format and not created with paint, photoshop, or any other pixel based editing software. When creating a logo in vector form it allows you to create a file that can be easily changed and scaled to nearly infinite sizes without pixelation or distortion.

Filezilla is an FTP client that allows you to upload/download your site to and from your web-server. I keep this application as a portable app on my phone so again never disconnected for the inevitable melt down.

Value Brand vs. Archers Farm Design Difference

Graphic design can/will define the “quality” of your product, perceived or reality. It will influence the dollars in your customers’ hands. My best example I can conjure up is Archers Farms from Target. I’m not knocking Target in any way, but what’s inside those well designed and articulately engineered packages are the “Store Brand”, nothing different than Kroger or Hy-Vee. Because Target spent a fraction more on design, which returns ten-fold their products, has the perception of quality, which in return can bring in a high price tag. It could be argued that the packaging costs more because it’s “fancy” but the additional $$$ retail cost versus other store brands doesn’t justify the additional markup for nicer papers and full color prints.

For small business owners, this becomes extremely important because money is already tight but spending the time now will pay off. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer stay tuned each week, I’ll be posting my ideas, thoughts and resources that may help most of them for free.