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Dec 27 2018

Inspiration for your 2019 Email Marketing Calendar

By Mail Designer 365 Newsletter Academy

2018 is coming to an end, and for email marketers and businesses, going into a new year can be a daunting prospect. With so much to plan and consider, we wanted to make things a little more straightforward for you in 2019. Here are 12 inspiring dates for your 2019 email marketing diary...

January 21st: Blue Monday

Officially named the most depressing day of the year, Blue Monday is hardly a cause for celebration. As marketers, you can be clever and do your best to take advantage of this day by giving your customers something to smile about. This may be a special offer or discount, or simply a kind email to remind readers to hang in there!

Travel company EasyJet launched an 'Orange Monday' campaign offering discounts across flights and holidays as a way to cheer up customers from the Blue Monday gloom.

Take your customers' minds off the Blue Monday gloom by offering a sale or promotion like EasyJet's Orange Monday...

February 5th: Chinese New Year

Vibrant and colorful, the Chinese New Year is an exciting event observed by Chinese families worldwide. Get involved by integrating some aspects of Chinese culture into your email campaigns to celebrate the start of their year.

This clever email from Karen Millen is a humorous way to incorporate Lunar New Year celebrations into a marketing campaign:

March 8th: International Women's Day

International Women's Day is a great opportunity for you to celebrate your female customers and colleagues. A marketing campaign giving back to women's charities or simply an email recognising the day would be highly effective way to show women your appreciation.

April 1st: April Fool's Day

Widely known as a day to joke around and have fun, April Fool's Day gives you the perfect chance to show off your funny side to your customers. Try integrating an appropriate level of wit and humour into your emails to make your campaigns more interesting, but remember to stay on brand whilst doing so!

This funny email from Domino's Pizza is well on brand and incorporates just the right amount of humour for readers to appreciate it as an April Fool's campaign:

Keep the humour of your April Fool's campaigns on brand and relevant to your business

May 15th: International Day of Families

It is important for businesses to be family friendly and cater to different age groups. The International Day of Families is a great time to show that your business does just that. Try coming up with a promotion to benefit families, such as kids eat free, or discounts across children's toys or clothing.

June 1st: LGBT+ Pride Month

LGBT Pride is quickly becoming one of the biggest celebrations of the calendar, with large scale events and parades taking place worldwide. As a business, it's important for you to show your support for this movement and email marketing offers you a convenient way to make this happen. Whether you incorporate the rainbow theme into your design, or build a specialised campaign, any support will be widely appreciated.

This bright and colorful email by Harry's effectively communicates their support for the Pride movement. Donating the proceeds of their shave set to LGBT+ causes is a further way to give back.

Bright colors and genuine displays of solidarity like this one from Harry's are highly effective

July 20th: Moon Landing Anniversary

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Depending on the nature of your business, this could make a unique and interesting theme for an email campaign. Try incorporating celestial imagery such as stars and planets to create a space theme, or take the opportunity to promote any products with a connection to outer space.

August 11th: Eid Al Adha

Eid Al Ada is a great celebration for Muslims all over the world and for many, marks the start of the pilgrimage to Mecca. If you know you are likely to have many customers celebrating Eid, it would be a good idea to send out an email greeting, wishing recipients a happy Eid.

This effective email design from drumbeat is a lovely way to reach out to customers celebrating Eid and shows they care as an organisation:

Reach out to customers celebrating Eid by sending out an email greeting

September 13th: International Programmers' Day

This is one for all the software and tech firms out there... Show appreciation for your fellow programmers by giving a nod to them in your email campaign! Try offering a discount on new software which developers may find useful, or provide programmers with early access to your beta releases. They'll definitely appreciate you going the extra mile for them.

October 27th: Diwali

Diwali is a Hindu festival of light, which is particularly prominent in India, but also celebrated throughout the world with fireworks and colorful lights. Recognising Diwali in your email campaigns is a nice way to include all the recipients on your list who may also be celebrating this festival.

November 11th: Singles' Day

Originating in China, Singles' Day is a day dedicated to celebrating single people and is now massively growing in popularity. Many businesses use this as an opportunity to offer discounts and great deals to their customers. In particular, this holiday is popular with younger people in China, the UK and the USA.

NastyGal effectively celebrate singles with this cat themed email design offering 25% off their entire site:

Give your single customers something to celebrate by offering deals and discounts for Singles' Day

December 3rd: Giving Tuesday

Taking a break from the hype of Black Friday and Christmas marketing, Giving Tuesday is another charitable way to demonstrate your business's CSR and encourage customers to get involved in good causes. In the last few years, many big brands have gotten involved in the Giving Tuesday campaign.

This festive email design from ONA inspires customers to purchase a camera strap to support charity water:

Choose a charity to support and encourage your customers to give back for Giving Tuesday

We hope we have given you some ideas and inspiration for your 2019 email marketing calendar. Alongside the regular holidays and events in your planner, these events should give you some fresh and interesting new subject matter to create engaging emails with in 2019.

Until next time,
Your Mail Designer 365 Team

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Mail Designer 365 helps you create stylish, professional HTML emails on your Mac. Download for free to see what you can achieve.

 

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Nov 20 2018

Optimize Your Pricing Tables to Boost Sales

By Mail Designer 365 Newsletter Academy

Pricing tables are a must have for any business looking to help customers understand the key differences between product offerings. Whatever you're selling, it's crucial your customers understand the main selling points of that product or service.

Here are some of our top tips on how you can put together informative pricing tables which make the shopping process easier and, in turn, will help boost your sales.

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Top Tips for Optimizing Your Pricing Tables

Use a clear font

A clear to read font is a must have for any pricing table.

Your customers need to be able to read and understand the information presented in your table. This means you should choose a font size which isn't too small and also aim to avoid any cursive, italic, or calligraphy style typefaces. We recommend using a sans serif font, as these are the clearest to read and also add a modern touch to your design.

Mail Designer 365 offers a wide range of sans serif fonts which you can easily apply to the text in your pricing table. Some of our favorites include: Open Sans, Encode Sans, and Martel Sans - all available under Web Fonts.

Find modern and stylish sans serif fonts for your pricing table in the Web Fonts section in Mail Designer 365.

Include product photos

Including a photo of your different product offerings is a great way to help customers visually distinguish them from each other. As the saying goes, a picture speaks 1000 words, and will make your tables much more interesting and informative. Having a picture is also more likely to entice customers to take more of an interest in the product.

Amazon often include useful product tables where shoppers can compare items based on their specifications and other criteria. These tables include images of the products to help shoppers visualise the product better:

Amazon's comparison tables incorporate product photos to make them more informative for customers.

Top tip: In Mail Designer 365 you can created mixed text and image tables. This means it's easy to incorporate images of your best product offerings into your pricing table. Simply click on a cell to change its content type in the style menu.

Use color coding

Color coding is another visually effective way to make your various product or service offerings easier to compare. For example, if you are a service based business offering different tiers, you may find it useful to color code each tier based on the pricing. This makes it easier for your customers to remember the differences.

This price comparison table from Airtable subtly includes color coding to add value to their different plans. The two higher priced plans are labelled gold and black which clearly demonstrates that they are the more premium option:

Try and label your plans according to their value. Gold and black stand out here.

Top tip: In Mail Designer 365 you can apply colors to your table by clicking on any cell, column or row, and adjusting the colors in the style menu.

Keep detail to a minimum

It's important for you to not include too much content in your tables. Overloading customers with unnecessary information can make the decision process more difficult.

Aim to only include the key information your customers need and link out to more detailed information if required.

You should also try and narrow down your comparison criteria to price and key features or characteristics. Generally, a bullet pointed list is more effective than paragraphs.

In this example from Spotify, they have narrowed down their criteria to the most important information which will be of interest to customers:

Bullet point the most essential information in your table.

Highlight the best option

If you have a plan or product option which you think your customers should be purchasing, let them know! You can use an eye-catcher to inform customers of which option you think they should go for. Phrases such as "most popular" or "best value" are particularly convincing.

Thanks to a clear eye-catcher, this pricing table from Litmus clearly demonstrates which plan is the best value for money. Not only is this helpful for their customers, it also encourages more people to buy the plan or product you want to sell more of.

Highlight the best deal in your table to help your customers decide.

Don't forget the CTA

You've filled out the table with text and product photos, now it's time to integrate an effective call-to-action (CTA) button to show customers exactly how they can purchase your product. This is one of the most important parts of your table's design, as it helps to finalise the sales process.

Make sure your CTA button is visible by choosing a color which stands out from the rest of your design.

In their comparison table, Slack use a vibrant green for their upgrade CTA, which clearly shows customers how to go about purchasing one of their plan offers:

Make your CTAs vibrant so that they stand out to your customers.

Top tip: In Mail Designer 365, you can take advantage of pre-made CTA buttons, or use our range of shapes and text styles to easily create your own. Explore the Content menu to find out more.

Make it mobile

The last, but arguably most crucial part of your table design is making it mobile responsive. Because so much content is consumed on mobile devices, it's massively important to make sure your tables look just as good on mobile as they do on desktop.

In Mail Designer 365 this is easy, as the app automatically creates a mobile version of your table with a stylish card style. You can even edit mobile content separately in the Smartphone view:

Mail Designer 365 creates a special card layout of your table for mobile.

We hope these tips for building effective pricing tables have been useful to you! Remember, you can use the Tables tool in Mail Designer 365 to quickly and easily build mobile responsive tables to integrate into your next email newsletter.

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Nov 07 2018

Guide to Email Marketing for Indie App Developers

By Uncategorized

After months of building a new app and getting it ready for release, you now need to promote it. Here are some tips on indie software marketing and how to increase app sales through email marketing…

Building up a mailing list

First, you’ll need a way to contact your customers.

If your app uses accounts, you may already have a list of email addresses, provided these customers consented to being contacted. If not, be sure to have a sign-up form in your app, as well as on your website or blog.

Slack include a newsletter sign up form on their blog to encourage blog readers to opt in for email alerts. After all, if they're interested in your blog content, they'll most likely want to know what's happening within your company!

Use a sign up box to get more contacts for your mailing list

Creating an app release newsletter

An app release newsletter is a really good place for you to start your email marketing journey. Present your latest app update and highlight the best new features. Here are some key things to try and incorporate into your design:

Screenshots of the app
You and your team have spent a long time designing the UI and now’s the time to show it off. For style points you can even use a gif to show off particularly beautiful transitions or features.

In this example, Lyft shows readers how their app works in three simple screenshots. In doing so, they are highlighting the key selling points of their app at the same time as showing off a sleek UI.

Include screenshots of the app in use to show off the UI to customers.

Pricing tables
If your app offers different pricing plans or a free and paid tier, you should highlight the options in your newsletter. With a clear table layout, you can help readers understand and compare plans.

In Mail Designer 365 you can build informative tables in minutes. On mobile your table will be automatically presented in a stunning card layout – perfect for advertising the best features of your app.

Try including a table in your newsletter to give a clear overview of plans and features.

Direct download buttons
Include one clear call-to-action (CTA) in your email so it’s super easy to find the download for your app. The quicker, the better, as the idea will be fresh in your reader’s mind.

Tip: Use the campaign link generation tool in App Store Connect to create a unique campaign url, that will let you track installs that came from your newsletter in your App Store Analytics

Dog care app Rover includes a download link for both the App Store and the Google Play Store in the footer of their email newsletter. This gets straight to the point and shows customers exactly how they can get their hands on the app:

Include a link straight to the App Store so customers can quickly download your app.

Mobile optimization
The majority of us prefer to view our emails on the go on a mobile device and if your email isn’t mobile-optimized, you’re missing a serious opportunity.

Mail Designer 365 automatically generates a mobile version of your design for smartphones and Apple Watch. This means you can even include separate call-to-action links, e.g. a direct App Store link for smartphone readers and a link to your webpage for desktop readers.

Once you’ve finished, you can preview your content on the latest devices, including iPhone XS, iPhone XR, Apple Watch Series 4, etc:

Create a mobile version of your design in Mail Designer 365.

With these simple steps, you’ll be well on your way to building an effective and informative release newsletter for your app.

Once you’ve found a regular rythym for release newsletters, consider adding onboarding emails and customer retention emails to your email strategy.

Until next time!

Your Mail Designer 365 Team

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Mail Designer 365 helps you create stylish, professional HTML emails on your Mac. Download for free to see what you can achieve.

 

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Oct 30 2018

More Great Fonts for Email Marketing

By Mail Designer 365 Newsletter Academy

It's time for another font guide! Just over six months ago, we published a font guide full of awesome fonts that you can use for email marketing. Because variety is the spice of life, we've found loads more web fonts to help you get inspired for your email designs...

Before we start...
All of the fonts in this guide are Google fonts, which are automatically integrated into Mail Designer 365. However, if you want to download another Google font to use in Mail Designer 365 which isn't already on our list of web fonts, please take care. Additional fonts are hosted from your Mac's Font Book rather than online via Google and can be found in Mail Designer 365 under "Installed fonts." To avoid compatibility issues, it's better to only use external fonts in image areas, unless you know that your recipient has the font installed already (ie. for internal newsletters.)

Important: Although web fonts are perfectly compatible with the leading email providers, we recommend that you set up an "email-safe" fallback font in Mail Designer 365 just to avoid any possible problems with how your email is displayed. You can find this option in the "Style" menu:

Add a fallback font to avoid any compatibility issues

Fonts for promotions

Sales, special offers, and promotions are all an integral part of the typical email marketing strategy. It's important to choose a standout font to help accentuate your promotional newsletter. As these fonts show, the more eye-catching the better, as your readers are more likely to be drawn in to the sales campaign...

The comic book style of Bangers catches the eye instantly

Lily Script One balances bold and feminine perfectly

The roundness of Fredoka One adds to its appeal

Fonts for CTAs

Every good email newsletter has at least one call-to-action (CTA.) The purpose of a CTA is to get readers to complete an action of your choice (e.g. visit your website.) For this reason, you need a strong, clear font to make your CTA button legible, as well as enticing to customers...

Changa One is a bold choice as well as being clear to read

Nobile is simple yet effective for a minimalistic style

Candal adds definition to your CTA

Fonts for professionals

For business professionals, a signature typeface is essential for email designs. As branding is more important than ever, it's good practice to choose a font to use as a basis for all business designs. Try and find a font with multiple weights so you can apply it to multiple areas of your design without it becoming monotonous. For modern firms, we recommend a sleek sans-serif font such as these...

Encode Sans Light is modern and stylish

Merriweather Sans Light could be a good choice for tech firms

Tenor Sans appears classic and professional

Fonts with character

Many designers are on the hunt for unique fonts to give their emails a memorable edge. Particularly for new businesses looking to establish a brand, it could pay off to choose a more contemporary font to add some character to your designs. Here are some ideas...

Aguafine Script is a brush font with an attitude

Finger Paint is the perfect choice for a child oriented business

Julius Sans One is a stylish editorial style font

Fonts for the holidays

We weren't joking when we said there is a font for everything. Whether you are creating a one-off holiday email design for your colleagues, or need a special font to spice up your Halloween newsletter, there's a font for every use case. Here are some of our favorites...

Butcherman is the perfect spooky font for your Halloween designs

Mountains of Christmas is a charming font for the holidays

We hope you enjoyed this continuation of our original font guide. We love fonts here at Mail Designer 365! If you have any cool examples of designs you've created using the web fonts in Mail Designer, send them our way, we'd love to see.

Until next time,

Your Mail Designer 365 Team

Give Mail Designer 365 a try today for free...

Mail Designer 365 helps you create stylish, professional HTML emails on your Mac. Download for free to see what you can achieve.

 

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