Melon Corporate Blog

You’ve Been Blacklisted! The Importance Of Keeping Your Data Clean.

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Jul 14, 2011

For the average marketer, creating and sending bulk email campaigns is seen more as a chore than an exciting adventure through the world of communication.

Depending on who you talk to, sending bulk emails can be tricky, time-consuming, stressful, anxiety-inducing and down-right scary. (If you’ve ever completed an email campaign, given yourself a pat on the back and then found a glaring and potentially job-ending mistake you’ll understand these feelings.)

It is this trepidation that most marketers approach email marketing with which ends up compounding the problem. It’s a difficult enough process to craft, build and test an email without worrying about additional factors - such as how clean is the list you’re sending it to?

But worry you should. And with good reason.

Perhaps “worry” is the wrong word here. What you should do is “embrace” your email marketing list data. Really understand it.

Why? To put it as bluntly as possible, it’s your legal obligation.

Every country has it’s own rules governing email. We all hate spammers and these rules are there to qualify legitimate email correspondence.

So here’s important link number one - The Spam Act of 2003:

http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2011C00080

Not following these rules can have some pretty severe consequences such as fines or imprisonment, but the most common of which culminates in ending up on a blacklist.

Click through to read more…

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Did You Know? How To Re-Size Images

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Jul 14, 2011

When it comes to creating content for the web or emails, an image can really help to illustrate a point or provide context for an article. 

Because they are such common elements, many people think it is a simple process to use images in your email broadcasts:

1. Find the image you want
2. Upload it into melonMail
3. Insert it and you’re ready to go!

Unfortunately, doing this and skipping some simple image quality processes can have detrimental effects on your email - which may even cause it to not be delivered at all.

So what do you need to know?

The most important two aspects of proper images in email marketing relate to the images size. It’s data size and physical size.

Image data size relates to how many kilobytes (kb), or megabytes (mb) if it’s really big, make up the image. As a simple rule, if the image is over 100kb it’s probably too big.

Now data image size is mostly influenced by the physical size of the image - how wide and how long the image is in pixels. To keep things in perspective the average email width is 600 pixels wide so you want to keep that in mind when preparing your files for the EDM.

You can view these image properties by right-clicking on the image icon and selecting properties, or just hovering over the image icon if you use Windows Vista or 7.

What to do if your image is too big.

Don’t upload it and fix it later! That’s a rookie mistake.

Yes it’s possible to re-size images within the melonMail system but there are three very good reasons why you shouldn’t.

1. Re-sizing the image in the system makes it physically smaller but keeps the data size the same. This is bad news if your image is over 100kb as too many large images can in some cases prevent your email from displaying properly or even being delivered.
   
2. Some older email clients revert the image to it’s original size! So if you have put an image in and re-sized it to display at 200 pixels wide, some clients will push the image back to its full height and width which will obviously break how your email displays.
   
3. The quality of the image is severely reduced. The system image resizer simply scales the image down and approximates the pixels - it doesn’t re-sample the image. The end result? Look at this photo of Dain. It looks like it was pulled from an 80’s arcade machine.
   For some purposes this is fine but if you want to maintain a high level of quality then check out the information below.

The best thing to do is re-size your images correctly before uploading them as assets to the system. 

There is a free web-based tool to do this which can be found here: http://www.webresizer.com/resizer/

This gives you plenty of options to easily re-size your photo, crop it, add borders, rounded corners and more. 

When you’re happy with the optimised image you save it back to your desktop and are then ready to use it within melonMail.

Look at the two images below:




Can you tell the difference?

No?

That’s the point! The image on the left is 62% smaller in file size than the original version but looks exactly the same.

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Google creates their best logo yet - with no Flash in sight

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - May 11, 2011

I was completely blown away by Google's logo today, so much so that it was difficult to believe it was done without use of Adobe's Flash animation tool.

But no, no Flash insight. The Martha Graham animation was done using some very advanced techniques - coupled with some very old techniques.

Because it will only be up for a day, here is a link to a video capture of the logo: http://www.popherald.com/martha-graham-google-doodle/6981

Beautifully implemented, the logo was created using the old-fashioned one-frame-at-a-time technique - similar to a flip book or 1980's-animated cartoon - and then ingeniously coded into picture (or sprite) snippets and animated using the new HTML5 canvas technique. You can see the full image here: http://www.google.com.au/logos/2011/graham11-hp-sprite.png

Phew! A lot of work went into this, but the effect has got the internet talking. Google has outdone itself again.

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Facebook: Profiles vs Pages

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Mar 10, 2011

As a digital marketer it is very easy to become convinced that when software gets updated (as it invariably does), the latest iteration automatically supersedes all previous knowledge and installments and must be used immediately. Newer is better, right?

This perception of mine was challenged yesterday when I received a ‘Friend’ request through Facebook for a business profile.

My immediate reaction was to wonder why this business was setting up their Facebook presence as a person, rather than as a ‘Page’. Pages are so much easier to market, you get a wealth of extra opportunities to network and advertise and the openess of a page allows you to be so much easier to find.

Knowing the owner personally, I sent off a quick message outlining my thoughts and offering him to help with managing his Facebook presence “properly”.

His response made me look at things an entirely different way.

“Easy: People are much more likely to accept a friend request than a page request. I personally almost never accept page requests. Also I don’t think pages can intrude on status feed the way an updating of my status can.”

This man was marketing himself by being more difficult to contact - and in doing so creating a more personal experience for his customers. He was creating friends, not fans. And in less than a week he’s up to 141 of them.

Whilst I still feel that he is limiting his potential reach, there’s a lot to be said about using technology to suit your purposes, rather than changing your purpose to suit the technology.

What are your thoughts?

If you want to ‘friend’ the Buckingham Quintet you can do so here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002149063009

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Kevin Garber - Internet Trends and Opportunities (audio)

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Mar 08, 2011

Kevin’s talk from the recent Melon breakfast event.

Audio begins at 1.10 minutes in.

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Email Testing

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Mar 01, 2011

Learn how to test your emails, buy credits and download the results.

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Conditional Content

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Mar 01, 2011

Conditional Content is here, watch this tutorial to learn how to use it for your emails.

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Global Spam Email Levels Suddenly Fall

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Jan 10, 2011

Between August 2010 and the first week of 2011, the total amount of spam email being sent around the world fell sharply. Not just fell, but plummeted.

On average there are around 200 BILLION spam emails sent each day. In December there was just 50 billion. Great news, but will it last?

Below article originally published at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12126880
—-
GLOBAL SPAM EMAIL LEVELS SUDDENLY FALL

The amount of junk e-mail being sent across the globe has seen a dramatic fall in recent months.

The volume of spam has dropped steadily since August, but the Christmas period saw a precipitous decline.

Click here to read more…

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Case Study: Gloria Jean’s Facebook Application

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Dec 22, 2010

Client:
Gloria Jean’s Coffee International

Aim:
To promote Gloria Jean’s Coffee, drive traffic and fans to the Gloria Jean’s Facebook page and promote engagement by getting people to create a virtual Christmas card, integrated with Facebook, offer the user a free “buy one get one free” drink voucher for a Gloria Jean’s coffee.

Timeframe:
6 weeks

Software used:
FBML, Flash, Javascript, PHP

Challenges:
• Lack of documentation on Facebook Markup Language (FBML)
• Developing on Facebook platform
• Profile authorization/authentication
• Unique coupon generation, different coupons based on geological location
• Optimising graphics while keeping file size down

—-

Gloria Jean’s Coffee approached Melon Media to help with their 2010 Christmas Card campaign. The aim was to create an interactive Christmas card builder which also integrated with Facebook, giving the ability to send cards to your Facebook friends. This online promotion ran in tandem with in-store and product branding.

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Three Insights To Boost Your Email Newsletter Results

Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Dec 10, 2010

What makes a good email? With a relentless flood of marketing emails pouring into my newsletter inbox each day, it is all too easy for the less-than-standout (read: boring & poorly designed) emails to be evaporated away by my delete key.
I have become very quick and merciless at this. My time is my own to spend - and babble doesn’t get a cent. So when a well-designed/thought-out/interest-grabbing email causes me to hesitate before turning it to trash I take notice. Congratulations, you’ve just passed step one - getting your readers attention. If you’ve presented the email properly I’ll be tempted enough to load images and click through your links.
So the question to be asked is this: “What makes an email ‘good’?”
Here we look at three major influencing factors…

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