reallygoodemails.com has a great library of well designed emails categorized by type, making it an amazing resource for email developers and marketers.

The post Get inspired by Really Good Emails showcase of well designed emails appeared first on The Email Geek.

Snappa.io is a simple web base graphic design tool that is perfect for the non-designer. It has a large set of templates and presets to choose from for creating images for Social Media, Ad Campaigns, Blogs/Websites and Email Newsletters. As a creative person I can see myself using it for its ease of use, as I was able to create the featured image for this post in less than 3 minutes.

Features

1. Presets for common sizes or create your own size

2. 8,000+ Photos & Patterns https://stocksnap.io
3. 2,000+ Graphics & Icons
4. 200+ Fonts & Typefaces
5. Image Uploads
6. Image Effects
7. Saved Designs
8. And More…

Pricing

Starter: 1 user free for 10 images per month with limited preset templates.
Pro: 1 user $15 a month or $150 per year with unlimited images & preset templates.
Business: 5 users $30 a month or $300 per year with unlimited images & preset templates
https://snappa.io/pricing

Walkthrough

The post Create Beautiful Email Hero Images with Snappa.io for Free appeared first on The Email Geek.

Social Proof is the psychological phenomenon where people use the actions of others to make a decision on a given situation. For example if you wanted to get a cup of coffee and there were two coffee shops across the street form one another, but one had a long line and the other was empty which one would you want to get the coffee from time not being an issue. The norm would be to go with the pack cause they must know something that you don’t. The saying “but everybody was doing it” may also come to mind.

How Marketers & Companies Leverage This.

1. Email Acquisition
Social proof can boost email subscribers by simply telling visitors how many people have subscribed to your list. (join the 131,342 people who receive our monthly newsletter) If this is something you are not currently doing it’s a good use-case for a/b testing where your original form would be the control group. Why am I not doing this on TheEmailGeek? Simple my list size is too small at the moment being that I am just starting out.

2. Apple Store Openings

There are a lot of things happening in the video that plays on the human psyche like the sun rising cueing that it’s a new day. Very uplifting music with the vocals “your sun’s coming out” paired with the perfect symmetry of the building and store layout which is very esthetically pleasing to the eye, but I digress. Social proof later in the video they show the cheering crowd outside waiting, then what was a empty store fill with happy employees that do a countdown to build excitement then open the doors (people at the front of the line waited the longest). Next product interaction ahem I count 8 kids cause who doesn’t like kids, lastly to the end there is a time-lapse of people out front.

3. How many People use your Product / Service

4. Amazon

How many sold? Hmm over 750,000 it must be good.

Customer Reviews what are others saying and are they happy.

5. Media coverage

6. Social share buttons

http://www.sharethis.com
https://www.addthis.com

I could keep going but now that you have a good understanding of this, how will you use it in your marketing?

The post The Psychology of Social Proof & How Marketers Leverage it to Drive Conversions appeared first on The Email Geek.

In a nutshell it’s interactive email built around the Checkbox Hack (interactions with pure Css post on this later :). Rebelmail is exploiting this hack to do a shopping experience such as product option selection like color, size and so on in the users email-client/inbox. Check out is still done via a website. Also not all email clients allow for this but they gracefully degrade to more limited versions for users on those unsupported email clients.

Demo It.

Their new site has a demo of their service. Just enter your email and hit send demo to see it in action, you will have to test in one of the interactive email clients outlined in their blog post on email client support.

https://www.rebelmail.com/

For more examples on this check out – Mark Robbins Punched card coding.

The post Send Interactive Emails With Rebelmail Beta Launch appeared first on The Email Geek.

For this freebie I decided to create a Hero Image with a animated background, color overlay, offer copy and a call to action button.

Hero Image

To see the hero image in action within a email click here.

Download Files

The post Animated Hero Image PSD appeared first on The Email Geek.

You can capture this from shipping info, signup forms, email preference center or account info pages. You can also send a campaign requesting this info stating it’s to help better personalize emails to their needs with a landing page to capture the info.

When importing this data a best practice is to import the full country name and it’s 2 digit alpha ISO code, this brings us to our first resource:
http://www.geonames.org/countries/
Here we can see the iso codes for all the countries in the world and other useful info like capital and population.

Now with the address you could use the State/Provence or even just the Country ISO code for targeting the subscribers most likely to attend the event, for say the launch email.

If the event is not sold out with the first email campaign. For a follow up email you may want to target people who did not RSVPed, Register or Open the first email.

Now sometimes for a last push to fill the event you can send a email campaign to subscribers within a mile/km radius, for this I like to use zip/postal codes.

Zip codes how do they work?

US zip code map

Radius resource and sql

freemaptools.com offers a free tool to find zip codes inside a radius:
http://www.freemaptools.com/find-zip-codes-inside-radius.htm

After you click the link above if you scroll pass the map there are some options for:

Step1 Radius enter:
50 miles

Step 2 location enter:
War Memorial Auditorium 800 NE 8th Street Fort Lauderdale, FL 33304

Then click the Draw Radius Button and scroll down to see:

Sql Code

SELECT * FROM Subscribers 
WHERE country = US 
And postal_code IN (33002,33004,33008,33009,33010,33011,33012,33013,33014,33015,33016,33017,33018,33019,33020,33021,33022,33023,33024,33025,33026,33027,33028,33029,33054,33055,33056,33060,33061,33062,33063,33064,33065,33066,33067,33068,33069,33071,33072,33073,33074,33075,33076,33077,33081,33082,33083,33084,33093,33097,33101,33102,33109,33111,33112,33114,33116,33119,33122,33124,33125,33126,33127,33128,33129,33130,33131,33132,33133,33134,33135,33136,33137,33138,33139,33140,33141,33142,33144,33145,33146,33147,33149,33150,33151,33152,33153,33154,33155,33160,33161,33162,33163,33164,33165,33166,33167,33168,33169,33172,33174,33178,33179,33180,33181,33182,33184,33188,33195,33197,33199,33222,33231,33233,33234,33238,33239,33242,33243,33245,33247,33255,33257,33261,33265,33266,33269,33280,33299,33301,33302,33303,33304,33305,33306,33307,33308,33309,33310,33311,33312,33313,33314,33315,33316,33317,33318,33319,33320,33321,33322,33323,33324,33325,33326,33327,33328,33329,33330,33331,33332,33334,33335,33336,33337,33338,33339,33340,33345,33346,33348,33349,33351,33355,33359,33388,33394,33424,33425,33426,33427,33428,33429,33431,33432,33433,33434,33435,33436,33437,33441,33442,33443,33444,33445,33446,33448,33462,33472,33473,33474,33481,33482,33483,33484,33486,33487,33488,33496,33497,33498,33499)   

 
this will give you all the subscribers in that radius note you will have to suppress the ones that have registered.

How complex can it get

Take a look at this sql I had to create based on rules given to me in a excel file: http://stash.lynxa.us/slabbed12

The post Target Email Subscribers Based on Their Distance From an Event appeared first on The Email Geek.

Spreadsheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-gxIjD5PVyRpltrq8saB-igZN5EtMNKiKNYGUIg3WXQ/edit?usp=sharing

Fast CTA Translate Example

Fun Fact

Some of the workers at google have a sense of humor and because of this some of the codes I have will not work mainly the ones prepended with xx-:

xx-bork for Bork, bork, bork!
xx-elmer as in Elmer Fudd
xx-hacker
xx-klingon
xx-pirate

if you would like to see these in action you can use the query string ?hl=[lan code] after www.google.com so:

https://www.google.com?hl=xx-elmer

https://www.google.com?hl=xx-pirate

The post CTA Button Translator With Google Spread sheets appeared first on The Email Geek.

More Info

In the video I showed the easiest way to achieve the force download of files but here are some other ways.

Here I leave the Content-Type as is and select Content-Disposition form the drop down it’s value is set to attachment by default and this will cause the file to download.

Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Disposition: attachment"

In this example I am adding a semicolon and filename=”thenewtest.pdf”, this will download the test.pdf as thenewtest.pdf.

Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="thenewtest.pdf"

The post Force The download of Hosted Files appeared first on The Email Geek.

At Apples September 9th 2015 keynote they unveiled the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Of all the new features that were added 3d Touch was most notable. It works by detecting the pressure a user applies to the screen and differentiate between tap, subtle press (Peek) and deep press (Pop) adding two new gestures.

So what does this mean for how we interact with their Mail app

Lets start with the Mail icon on the home screen if you push done on it to peek you now get the options for Inbox, VIP Messages, Search and New Message.

In the inbox once the app has been launched.

You can push on any message to peek inside without it being marked as read.

If you press harder it pops you into the email where you can read it as normal.

Now lets take a step back to when we were peeking in if you swipe to the right you can mark the message as read.

If you swipe up you get more options.

And finaly if you swipe to the left you can delete.

that’s all folks.

The post What Apple’s new 3D Touch Feature on iPhone 6s models mean for email appeared first on The Email Geek.

Download Files

I guess when you do something you love day in day out it’s bound to end up in your dreams, which is where this idea came from. In the dream I saw a tiled 3d flipping background with a png header with some transparent parts that made it possible to see through to the background.

So now let’s try it but fist lets take a look at the email we will build for this tutorial, also I will not go into the full coding of the email but focus more on the background animation set up and code.

The Design

With Peace Day around the corner I came up with the idea of a 5k walk and run for peace.

The animation timeline in photoshop

I have a 5sec delay on the frames that are full canvas and the others a 0.1 delay.

Exported gif

Code

<!-- START BODY SECTION-->
<tr>
    <td valign="top" align="center"  background="http://www.theemailgeek.com/email-images/walk4peace/changingBg.gif"  bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="background-color:#FFFFFF; ">
        <!--[if gte mso 9]>
        <v:rect xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" fill="true" stroke="false" style="mso-width-percent:1000;">
        <v:fill type="tile" src="http://www.theemailgeek.com/email-images/walk4peace/changingBg.gif" color="#FFFFFF" />
        <![endif]-->
        <table width="100%" height="20" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

 
In the code above we start the body section of the email, the png image, copy and CTA will be held in this section in the td we use the background attribute and enter the full url path to the changingBg.gif on the files server in the td we set the background to white.

next we use microsoft’s conditional comments <!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--> here we are saying if greater-than or equal to Outlook 2000 – Version 9 do the following. Outlook versions list.

inside conditional statment we use microsoft’s Vector Markup Language (VML) that has been deprecated as of Windows Internet Explorer 9 in favor of SVG, but older email clients still use it. we open a <!v:rect and declare the VML namespace, fill=”true”, stroke=”false” and width style=”mso-width-percent:1000; The number has to be ten times the percentage so mso-width-percent: 1000; is actually 100% or full page width. We then open the fill <!v:fill /> for this we set the type to tile, src to full url path to the changingBg.gif and the background to white the / closes the tag.

 </table>
      
       <!--[if gte mso 9]>
       </v:rect>
       <![endif]-->
      
    </td>
</tr>
<!-- END Body Section--> 

 
Lastly we close the table, open another microsoft’s conditional comments close the v:rect and the rest.

thats it take a look at the outcome video below or download the files to try it for yourself in a future post I will test results in different email clients also take a look at http://www.peaceoneday.org for info on peace day.

Video of the outcome

The post Animated Gif Background In Email Campaigns appeared first on The Email Geek.