Smith-Harmon is one of the most famous email design agencies around. I’ve talked about some of their design tips in seminars and here in the blog (like this article about 250px boxes). They design emails for companies like Intuit, Costco, Williams-Sonoma, and Pottery Barn. They know a thing or two about email design trends.

So if you’re thinking about revamping your email marketing for the holidays, you might want to check out their free PDF Guide: “Get Ready for the Holidays”

Their guide covers a wide range of topics, including:

• A/B testing (also see: MailChimp’s A/B testing tool)
• Subject line writing tips (also see MailChimp’s Subject Line Suggester)
• Creating a special “holiday email series” (also see MailChimp’s Autoresponder)

If you like their tips, you should also bookmark their Retail Email Blog, where they cover all the trendy topics in the world of email design.

A couple days ago I mentioned the interesting use of flickr in Steve’s App Sketchbook email campaign. This morning I got this Halloween-ish email from ChoppingBlock that also used flickr in an interesting way: they invite you to post a high-res image from flickr to your blog, to see if you can name all the spooky characters in their latest tshirt:

Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!

We recently analyzed all outgoing email traffic from the MailChimp servers to see who the major email providers are, and to identify trends (analyzing gobs of email data is what we do in our pastime here). So we though we’d share our findings:

Major email domain market share

Yahoo and Hotmail are tops, but Gmail is on an upward trend (related study: Gmail Users More Engaged?). AOL has some work to do, and Comcast is pretty flat.

BTW, if you like email marketing stats, or need data to print and show to your clueless boss, bookmark MailChimpCharts and EmailStatCenter.

On July 30th, the social site MySpace (with around 130 million users) rolled out a new email service in beta. If you didn’t catch that in the news, here are some stories about it from Mashable, TechCrunch, and Giga Om.

So is this something email marketers should worry about? Not just yet. We analyzed all outgoing campaigns from MailChimp to see how many emails were being sent to the myspace.com domain, and found a spike around June, then only gradual growth since their official beta launch:

They’re not quite as huge (in terms of opt-in email subscribers) as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Gmail yet. But we’ll keep watching the stats, because some day they might be a big email player. That’s definitely their goal, according to the article from Giga Om:

“Given its large user base, MySpace claimed in a press release that its new mail service can eventually become the fourth-largest mail provider in the world and the second largest in the U.S. Yahoo is currently the largest email provider in the U.S.”

We recently analyzed the stats for over 184 million emails sent from MailChimp and put together a report analyzing the engagement of recipients by email provider (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol, and comcast). We wanted to know if certain subscribers (such as hotmail users) could be expected to respond any differently than, saaaay, gmail users. 

Here’s a summary of what we found:

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