We’ve just released a big improvement to the snapshot page you use to see what your subscribers have been up to. While the old design focused only on their campaign activity, the new design makes things a lot more personal.

All you need do to find out a bit more is to click on a subscriber’s email address wherever it appears in your dashboard. Here’s how it looks:

The new snapshot includes a great deal more about each subscriber, but does so in a cleaner and less cluttered design.

For each subscriber, we now also show you…

Where they’re based

The launch of Worldview earlier this year opened up a new world of geo data on your subscribers. For any subscriber that’s opened an email from you, or clicked a link, we’ll now show you where they were on a map the last time they interacted with you.

On top of the latest location, we’ll also show you where each open, click and share has taken place over time. It’s amazing how may of our own subscribers open our emails in lots of different locations.

What they look like

If the data is available, we’ll also show you a small photo of your subscriber. While it won’t be available for everyone, it’s a nice touch that makes for a much more personal experience than just seeing an email address.

If they love you or not

The new snapshot now shows a small chart that illustrates how each subscriber has been interacting with you over time. It’s a nice way to spot trends at a glance and see if your subscribers are becoming more or less likely to open your emails, visit your site or share your content with their friends.

Super quick editing

On top of this new data, updating any subscriber’s details is now much snappier allowing you to basically edit in place instead of redirecting you off to a different form. It’s only a subtle change, but makes for a much nicer experience, especially when you need to update more than one subscriber’s details.

As ever, we hope you like it – at the very least it lets you know a little bit more about your customers real or potential (and that can only ever be a good thing!)

Thanks!
Team Beanz

Months in the making, we’re pretty excited about it and how it’ll help make things easier for you guys – and we’re hearing that so far you like it (thanks, Beauty Connection!)

So, down to the nitty gritty…

New Layout

The first thing you probably noticed is the new vertical split window. Now that you can have an unlimited number of elements in a repeater, we switched to a vertical split so you can still see most of your email when you’re adding content. We’ve been using this version for a couple of weeks now, and feel it’s a huge improvement on the old horizontal split. Now you can see most or all of your email as you add content to it.

Put anything in a repeater

By far the biggest request from you was for ‘more flexible’ repeaters, and it was the first thing we built into this update. Now you can have a repeater with 6 images, no images, 5 titles, whatever you like. You can also add your own labels for each of these elements so you know exactly what you’re updating.

(What we think this really means for you is total design flexibility when creating templates).

Design multiple layouts within the same repeater

This is probably our favourite new feature for the editor. Let’s say you want a repeater where an image is sitting on the right for the first item, but on the left for the second, then back on the right again. Using the new <layout> tag, you can specify any combo of different layouts in the same repeater.

What’s more, you can even label each of these different layouts so you have the option of choosing which one to use and when.

Streamlined WYSIWYG editor

The experience of formatting content was another area we wanted to nail with this update. The first step was simplifying things. We’ve combined all the different ways to add special items to your content into a single “Insert” button. You can add a link, personalisation, social sharing buttons plus lots of other goodies all from a clean menu system.

We’ve also given you the ability to tweak the font size for any content (this was a hard one for us). To keep a decent balance we’ve kept the size options within a reasonable range to minimize the chances of going over-the-top and ‘uglifying’ all your hard work! We’ve also cleaned up and streamlined the way text is pasted (goodbye annoying popup), especially from places like Microsoft Word.

Add alt text to any images

Another shortcoming of our old editor meant you couldn’t add alternate text to any images added to their email content. Image blocking in many email clients makes ‘alt’ text a valuable fallback when an image isn’t loaded so now it’s super easy to add or edit the ‘al’t text for any images inserted into your email.

Phew, quite a bit I’m sure you’ll agree, but we didn’t stop there and on top of some of these larger improvements, we also snuck in a ton of other niceties:
Drag and drop is now smoother, we auto generate thumbnails for any templates you add, plus images now upload automatically and appear instantly!

So. We do hope you like what we’ve done chaps and chapesses – but as ever, if you think of anything we could improve for you, don’t hesitate to contact. Or if you like, just tell us here how much Mailbeanz means to you – it’d mean a lot to us…

Thanks

Team Beanz

If you’ve been following Intrance over at their blog or on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll probably already know about this excellent update to our Mailbeanz platform. We’ve integrated social sharing so you can now add ‘Like’ and ‘Tweet’ links and buttons to your emails and see who’s sharing your Mailbeanz campaign via our real-time reports.

(If you’re not a Mailbeanz user, this blog post might seem a bit strange, so why not find out a bit more about Mailbeanz here?)

These social media sharing icons makes it really easy to share your Mailbeanz campaigns on Facebook and Twitter but also we’ve made sure you can see a report (we know you love our reports) of the results.

We’ve been thinking long and hard about the best way to add this kind of social integration into Mailbeanz. As always, our goal was to keep the sharing process as simple as possible for you.

Sharing made simple

We’ve made it simple for you to add your own share links to any Mailbeanz campaigns you send using the editor.

In-email sharing made easy

Or, if we’ve built a template (or two) for you, simply get in touch if you’d like to add this as a permanent feature and we’ll put some “Like” and “Tweet” buttons into your designs so that they work for every email you send.

Real-time reporting to bring it all together

While there are lots of different ways to share your Mailbeanz campaign, we bring it all together with our new Social Sharing report.

This includes who tweeted about your campaign, who liked it on Facebook and who forwarded your email on to friends. Basically, whenever anyone shares your campaign, we’ll show you who it was and how they did it.

Our Social Sharing report is broken up into two parts. Up top you’ll see a summary of the activity so far across Twitter, Facebook and email forwards.
Below that is a real-time list that pulls all of this together into a single activity stream. See what people are saying about your campaign on Twitter, who’s sharing on Facebook and which subscribers have forwarded it to their friends.
For each subscriber that tweets, we’ll show you their Twitter avatar and a link to the tweet in question. We also link to the subscriber snapshot and display a gravatar if available for anyone who “Likes” your campaign or forwards it on to friends.

There are loads of other subtle features in this report, but I’ll leave some of them for you to discover once you start sharing. We hope you guys have fun with this new feature. It’s a brilliant way to learn more about who is sharing your campaigns with the world, and what they’re saying about you in the process.

If you’ve not signed up for a Mailbeanz account yet, come along and have a look – it’s easy and there’s no obligation. Try it out, we promise you’ll be amazed at the results…

Team Beanz

We love the snow. It’s the time of year when we get to pile on the fisherman’s sweaters and hugely wooly socks and still manage to look “on trend” (as the mags would say!) But what’s more cool is the flurry of awesome email designs that we stumble upon at this time of year.

Well, it sure isn’t too late to get your emails out the door. If you think the ground’s too frozen to sow and plant any BEANZ, read on for a review of two simple and effective campaigns from our customers!

ACASSA

Designed by: Rachel Parker, Acassa. Template by: Mailbeanz. Photography courtesy of: Acassa.

We couldn’t pass on this one. This trade-fair promotional email from Acassa is pure class. Featuring excellent product photos and a healthy balance between imagery and copy, it’s sure to light up your inbox.

The  bold layout of this newsletter offers itself to bite-size content, which is perfect for distractable readers. A sense of hierarchy is apparent, with appealing content like ‘Exclusive Offers’ featuring in the upper portion of the email, with less critical information filtering down. That said, the entire email is full of the good stuff – not to mention refreshing, as it isn’t often that you see a defiantly mature yet colourful email marketing campaign.

Finally, you may have noticed there’s no lack of call-to-action links on this campaign. Well, there’s a good reason for it – these gals are specifically tailoring this towards those customers (and friends of) who visited them at their recent trade show – a small thank you to those who perhaps purchased or placed orders and a clever strategy on their part.

A big hand to the Acassa team for shining a light on good design this Christmas!

Formkraft Distribution Ltd

Designed by: Lorraine MacKinder, FKD. Template by: Mailbeanz.

Again, we could let this customer’s simple seasonal Christmas card take go unnoticed – it’s a lovely snowy design and gets the message across nicely, with money saved on sending out paper cards going directly to a favourite charity.

Nice one FKD!

Well, on behalf of the Mailbeanz team, I’d like to wish you a peaceful and happy Christmas. If you think one of your campaigns has been a treat this season, please share it with us in the comments below.

Team Beanz

We’ve just given your email campaign reports a little more jazz by including a new overlay view, displaying the number of clicks that each of the links in your newsletter received. If you’ve struggled to determine the most popular links in your newsletter, we’ve made it a little easier by pasting easy to understand click stats over a preview of the HTML version of your campaign. This report is available in your account now, even for campaigns you’ve sent in the past!

Get better insight into link click activity

Using the new report, it’s easy to see exactly which links in your newsletter received the lion’s share of clicks. Not only do we display the percentage of unique clicks that were due to that link, but what that percentage equals in terms of unique clicks. For our template tags like “Forward to a Friend” and “Unsubscribe”, we display the absolute number of people who clicked on the link so you can instantly see how your design is performing.

Just go to your report section and select the ‘Link Activity & Overlay‘ option from the right sidebar to see it in action…

We hope you like it.

Team Beanz

As a follow-up to our previous article ‘Some email design guidelines‘ we thought we would impart a little more advice, this time focused on the actual dimensions of your message.

Because when designing an email newsletter, it is important to consider how the final result will be seen by the  recipients.

Design widths – why fixed?

You may have noticed that most newsletters you receive nowadays have a fixed width, and do not expand automatically to fill the whole of your preview pane, often leaving borders on the left and right. This ‘non-fluid’ layout is used deliberately to cater for the different types of email client. Due to the fact that almost all mail programs use parts of the screen to display menus, or in the case of web-based clients (Gmail, Hotmail etc); adverts, the area remaining to display the actual message can be limited.

With this in mind, it is a good idea to format your emails with a fixed width, somewhere around the 600 pixels mark. Most of the time, this will also prevent the horizontal scroll bar from showing up, allowing your readers to concentrate more on reading your email as you intended.

Get the message across – early!

Just because we recommend that you limit the width of your message, we are not telling you to limit the height, or indeed the content.

However, it’s worth keeping in mind that a lot of your recipients may scan your email in a preview pane (which can be around 300-500 pixels high) before they decide to read the entire thing. So make sure you include the more important points in this first part.

Remember, your recipients are busy and impatient.

So, first impressions count.

Don’t forget that here at Mailbeanz.com we can create and customize fantastic email campaigns for you that not only look great but are specifically designed for HTML email and are guaranteed to get you and your product noticed, so if you think you’d like our help getting your message out there, don’t hesitate to contact us. Alternatively,  set-up your own free mailbeanz account and get sowing your beanz straight away!

Although we announced it a little while back we thought we’d spend a little time showing you round our new mobile optimized version of Mailbeanz that gives you quick access to your reports on any campaigns you’ve sent. It’s fast, looks great and is available now. Just head to your account on any popular mobile device like an iPhone or Android and the mobile version will be shown by default. You don’t need to install anything, because it is a web application, not a native phone application.

Here’s a quick preview of how it looks on an iPhone:

With a focus on reporting

When deciding what functionality to include in the mobile version, we decided to focus our efforts on the most popular section of your account – namely, your reports. Added to this, more than 95% of all our mobile visitors come in on an iPhone or iPhone variant, so we decided to put a lot of work into making sure the experience was perfect on these devices in particular. It’s a really nice way to get the latest stats on a campaign you’ve sent in a couple of thumb presses.

Launch it like a real application

One great thing about the iPhone is that you can launch web applications just like a traditional app you’ve bought from the App Store. By heading into your account with Safari and adding it to your Home screen, you have a dedicated button that will load your latest reports with a single click. We even provide a nice mail-envelope-thingy icon and loading screen for you while the latest stats are downloading.

Easy switching

While the Mailbeanz mobile version is all about your reports right now, you can still switch to the full version of Mailbeanz and access all its functionality with a single click. At the footer of every page is a link to switch to the corresponding page in the full version of the app. Don’t worry, we’ll automatically switch you back to the mobile version the next time you log in from the home screen.

Enjoy
Team Beanz

Alright, now that you’re getting to grips with our Mailbeanz email marketing solution we’ve had a few requests on how to get the most out of our design methods. Indeed, as web designers, we’ve grown pretty good at understanding how to create a modern, semantic, accessible websites using XHTML and CSS and we understand what makes a good website, and how to make it happen.

When it comes time to design emails though, do all the same rules apply? Are there things that you should be doing specifically for email that don’t make sense on a website? So, in this article we’ll discuss the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful Mailbeanz HTML email.

The quick and dirty guidelines

If you want to dive right in and just need some direction, here’s the outline:

• Don’t waste your readers’ time – An email inbox is a busy place, you won’t get much attention.
• Permission matters – Not only do you need to have permission to email people, but it helps to remind them of how they gave you permission, as specifically as you can.
• Relevance trumps permission – Just having permission is not enough, the content you’re going to be sending must also be relevant.
• Make unsubscribing easy – There’s no point emailing people who are not interested.
• Image blocking is common – You can’t rely on people actually seeing your images.
• Don’t overlook your plain text version – You can make blocks of text more readable.
• and test it before you send it – It’s the only way to be confident about your design working.

Don’t waste your readers’ time

An email inbox is a very noisy environment, with calendars, notes and folders all competing with the actual emails for space. Given that your reader may only ever see your subject line before deciding whether to read your email, you can’t afford to waste time.

So make sure that your emails show right away why they are worth reading. Consider starting with a succinct table of contents to help decide whether they should read on.

Permission matters

There are a multitude of laws that apply to commercial email dependent on your location, but the one rule that applies almost everywhere is that you absolutely must have permission to send people bulk email. In most cases, it also makes sense to remind people about how they gave you that permission.

Particularly if you don’t send emails very often, or the signup was for a competition (for example) people can forget that they actually asked to receive email. A short message at the top of your email can help people remember, and make them more likely to read on.

You can also use our custom fields tools to personalise your permission reminder. So if you have multiple sources of permission, be explicit; don’t just say “your address was subscribed to our list” tell them why their address was subscribed to your list. Let them know where they signed up and how they can opt-out. This can go a long way towards reducing potential spam complaints.

Here’s an example of a simple, contextual reminder that people gave their permission when visiting a trade show booth:

Recent email consumer surveys have shown that “knowing and trusting the sender” was the biggest influence on whether emails are opened, narrowly beating out “previously opened and thought valuable”.

So consistently reminding your readers who you are, and why they should trust you can make a big difference to your open rate.

Relevance trumps permission

Even more than having permission, it is vital that you are sending valuable, relevant information to your subscribers. That means not sending information to everyone on your list just because you can. Consider carefully whether the information is both useful to them, and what they are expecting from you.

Make unsubscribing easy

There’s no point emailing people who are not interested in your content any more. If it is no longer relevant to them, let them just unsubscribe easily. Forcing people to play ‘hunt the unsubscribe link’ will only irritate them, and is likely to end up with spam complaints.

This is unfortunately a common approach to permission reminders and unsubscribe links. Much better to make it clear and prominent; that way if they do decide in the future they need the information you offer, they will have confidence in signing up again.

Image blocking is common

In many of the major email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, AOL and Gmail, your images will not be shown by default. Your readers will have to click another link or button to make them download and display. Your readers will initially see the email on the left below displayed as shown on the right.

So no matter how perfectly you choose your imagery, it may have no impact, or a negative impact on the success of your email. As you can see above, your email can appear totally empty, so never design an email using all images. Always ensure that you have copy available in your HTML part, as well as the plain text.

Of course, as many as 30% of your subscribers might not even realize they can choose to show images. An unknown percentage just won’t bother. So you can’t rely on people actually seeing your images at all.

To ensure your emails still work even without the images showing, you can make a few simple improvements:

• Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
• Add a text-based link to your web version of your design at the top of your email.
• Get added to your recipient’s address book or whitelist.
• Use ‘alt text’ for all images for a better experience in Gmail etc.
• Test your design with images turned off before you send it.

Don’t forget your plain text version

Bear in mind that although that shiny happy HTML version may be beautiful, not everyone can view HTML emails, or wants to. Blackberry users, for example, will mostly see your plain text version. So we’ve made it easy for you in Mailbeanz by providing a quick start to your plain text version. With just the click of a link the text from your HTML email will be carried over to the plain text version.

Don’t stop there though. Make sure you review your plain text version. Although our import tool is pretty slick it’s not perfect. Your plain text version needs a human set of eyes on it to make sure the formatting is perfect and all the content you want to include is included.

Then don’t forget to test, test, test!

This one can’t be emphasized enough. On top of your client’s main lists, why not also add a small test list possibly consisting of yourself and your client’s email address? You want to make sure you receive what your recipients are receiving to ensure you know about any problems that may arise.

If you’re having trouble, don’t forget we’ve included a bunch of help files to get you polished up and these are always available at the top right of your control panel.

Tip: Get inspiration for great HTML email designs

There is plenty of great email design being done out in the world, so there is no shortage of creative inspiration. But if you’re struggling with a blank canvas why not sign up for the newsletters of companies in your industry, to see how other people are approaching it?

Should you want a bespoke template designing for you or you have a design you’d like us to convert into a great email design and upload it to your Mailbeanz account, please get in touch to discuss your requirements.

Good Luck,
Team Beanz