Tag: Email Marketing

Bulletproof Email Button Roundup!

Post author By John Wiedenheft
Post date August 28, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-08-28 at 10.49.06 AM — The original situation.

Came across this thread the other day. Spot on for anyone designing emails, and a great discussion, with lots of amazing shared resources on creating “bulletproof buttons” for email design.

I thought I would take a moment to write up my thoughts, and share some of those resources as well.

Best Resources for Creating Bulletproof Buttons for Email

1) SexyButton – A Responsive, Universal, HTML Email Button

"SexyButton" from BluePrint Interactive — “SexyButton” from BluePrint Interactive

Many of the resources this list includes are home-brewed solutions created by email marketers for their own in-house marketing needs. The “SexyButton” created by BluePrint Interactive is no exception. Not only does BluePrint provide the code for “SexyButton,” they also include a writeup of it’s creation, an explanation of the coding, and examples of how the “SexyButton” renders in different email clients.

Pros: Code available for end user. Button renders correctly. in most common email clients.

Cons: Only code based. Need to know HTML to edit button.

2) Bulletproof email buttons – The Holy Grail of Bulletproof Email Button Creators, Buttons.cm.

Bulletproof email buttons from Campaign Monitor

Buttons.cm from Campaign Monitor is a very easy tool to choose what options you desire for your button. They’ve included several different examples as well, so you can start from a template and change to what your email design calls for.

Pros: Allows user to change specific parameters of button design. Gives visual example of final button design. Copy HTML code directly from creator.

Cons: If your email template is <table> designed, you’ll need to fix things a bit to make the button work correctly.

3) Cheshire Impact – “Top 5 Free Call to Action Button Generators.”

A great resource from one of the premiere Pardot expert organizations. Cheshire Impact goes through 5 different button generators, each with their own value-adds. Great resource to check out. Be sure to follow them on Twitter as well!

4) Litmus – A Guide to Bulletproof Buttons in Email Design.

This is more of a background on bulletproof email buttons, which is a good place to start if you’re looking into the reasons why you should include non-image CTA buttons in your email designs. We can still make our designs “pretty” without being reliant on having an image-based email design!

Tags Email Marketing, marketing, marketing automation, pardot

Technology

Salesforce Pardot – Import User Sync Issue

Post author By John Wiedenheft
Post date August 4, 2015

Came across a “bug” with Salesforce Pardot yesterday while uploading new sales Users.

I’m writing this as a warning to other Pardot customers, and as a suggestion to Pardot.

Suggestions:

Change the User Import process to automatically dedupe existing Users.
Add functionality so that Salesforce Users are automatically synced to Pardot Users, including User Role.

Here’s the sitch:

I had a .csv of all of our Full License Salesforce.com Users that I needed to import to Pardot.

Once I selected the .csv file in the import window, and matched the correct fields for import, I finished the process, and clicked “Confirm and Save.”

A couple minutes later, when I got the email saying the import was completed, something crazy happened.

I lost Admin access to Pardot.

Unbeknownst to me, when I imported the .csv file, I indicated that the User Role should be Sales. Because I didn’t indicate the User Role in the original .csv, Pardot used “Sales” for all imported Users.

Pardot - Users Role — Where the mistake happened.

You might ask yourself, if I saw that under User Role, I’m specifically warned, “If the Role field is not mapped, all users imported will be assigned this role.” why did I continue to import?

Because, earlier in the process, Pardot specifically notes “Any users who already exist within Pardot will be skipped during the import process.” So, I thought, this is not going to affect any current User in Pardot.

I was wrong.

It took several hours for Pardot Support to provide me access back to the account. For those several hours, our team had no Admin access to our Pardot account. Yikes!

Today, everything is resolved and back to normal.

Here’s what YOU can do to help:

If you’re a Pardot customer, click on both links below and “upvote” the two ideas for this situation (or related situations).

http://ideas.pardot.com/forums/36996-ideas/suggestions/6425788

http://ideas.pardot.com/forums/36996-ideas/suggestions/7192608

Let’s make it clear to Pardot and Salesforce that we need to see greater connectivity between the two systems at a default, and not as a higher-priced add-on.

Tags crm, Email Marketing, marketing, marketing automation, pardot, salesforce

Uncategorized

Spreading a Brand through Email Marketing

Post author By John Wiedenheft
Post date August 17, 2012

In my day job, I spend a significant amount of time educating others on the best practices for email marketing. One of the most frequent situations I run into is the idea of sending a one-off message to a huge mailing list. Specifically, a mailing list that has been purchased, dug up, or otherwise not grown organically. These addresses are typically not current customers for us either.

If I get a 1% response rate on this, I’m happy!

The above quote is what I’m trying to avoid. Educated our sales team as to why we should avoid the “mass emailing” idea. The problem we run into is communicating the necessity of not using our email marketing for these “brand awareness” or “spreading the brand” mailings.

Target those prospects that have previously shown interest.

What you really should focus on instead of email as a “shotgun” approach, is to instead aim our email marketing towards the prospects that have previously shown interest or reached out to your company in some manner or another (tradeshow, call, white paper download, etc). Through a properly directed email campaign, we can garner that prospects interest in our company’s offerings. When you take the “blast” approach, there are usually consequences that affect all of your future email marketing:

When your emails are marked as spam by the recipient, you’re increasing the chance of all emails being marked as spam. This reduces the likelihood of all future emails reaching the inboxes of our prospects.
And once a recipient marks an email from your marketing campaign as spam, your company’s reputation and image is reduced to “just another spammer.” Not something that we want to happen!

And these two consequences usually go hand-in-hand, and also are greatly multiplied when left unchecked.

So, the take-home lesson is this: Don’t use email marketing as a brand awareness tool, or spreading your brand name. Email marketing is better utilized for measuring the interest in your company and your company’s offerings.

Tags Email Marketing