Here’s what we’ve got for you:

• Newsletter: 12
• Non-profit: 9

While we’ve added another healthy batch of general-use newsletter templates, I think the big blip on the radar here is the expansion of our non-profit category, with easier-to-use, more stable templates.

You’ll find 3 different designs with 3 variations each, but they’ve all got one focus: getting the word out about your cause, and compelling others to help. To that end, each design features prominent donation buttons and social sharing toolbars. Depending on what your message is, you can either be dramatic in style…

…or you can serve up a more muted tone:

Or you can ignore the designs altogether and use your own style; as always, the templates are fully customizable.

That customization is handy, but sometimes you just need to send out content without playing the part of graphic designer. That’s why we continue to expand the ‘Newsletter’ category with a variety of different template options. Need to send a quick note to your subscribers, and want to stay classy? You can use this elegant template:

Maybe you want to send something a little more attention-grabbing in addition to your usual content, like a coupon. We’ve got you covered:

Combined with last month’s batch of 42 templates, and the month prior’s 33 templates, this month’s 21 templates bring us to a nice 3-month total of 95 new email templates. Not too shabby.

We’re already working on next month’s batch, with more non-profit templates, templates tailored for photographers, some that’ll work well for real estate listings, some new Halloween and fall-themed templates, and more coming down the pipe. Keep an eye out.

Here’s what we’re adding to the library:

• RSS-to-email: 9
• Fitness: 6
• Technology (iPhone & Android Showcase): 12
• Restaurant: 15

For this release, our focus was on creating some template variations for a category we felt was very under-represented within the library: restaurants. To that end, five designs were created and three variations for each of those designs were built, for a grand total of 15 templates.

These templates allow quite a bit of design leeway to make it easy for you to match your branding, whether you own a coffee shop or a burger bar. While we’re on the subject of entrepreneurship, let’s talk about the new iPhone and Android templates:

Using these guys, you can quickly get a campaign for your new app up and running, using a simple and elegant template design that puts your work up-front and center-stage without you having to expend too much effort.

Maybe you run a small gym or hold yoga classes. If so, boy, are you in luck! We’ve added a new pre-designed category, fitness, and its first batch of templates. You’ll find six templates that let you send out class schedules, news, and featured content to your subscribers:

Each template can be easily changed to fit your branding needs while still retaining a nice, clean design that will hold together across email clients.

For those of you who publish RSS content straight into an email campaign, we’ve added a collection of RRS-to-email templates that are easy to style and are pre-filled with the all of the merge tags you need for a solid RSS-based campaign:

We’ve also moved our Designer Templates – emails designed by web design titans like Veerle Pieters, Mike Kus, and Matthew Smith – out of their “Premium” section, making them available to everyone for free within the pre-designed library.

Finally, we’ve created an expanded look at our email template gallery, showcasing the hundreds of customizable email templates available within the application, made for everyone from beginners to veterans of HTML email.

Spin those campaigns up and keep an eye out as more templates keep streaming in – we’re not done by a longshot.

Starting with Mail Designer 1.1, you can now export the emails that you author to a MailChimp template with just a couple of clicks!

We are really excited that Mail Designer now works with MailChimp. It looks to be a great option for our customers that don’t enjoy coding HTML or would like an alternative to the MailChimp campaign editor.

The best part of this integration is that the text from the campaigns you export from Mail Designer are fully editable in the MailChimp campaign editor. Just in case you need to make last-minute changes.

Learn more about Mail Designer

see all the designs »

The designers we collaborated with on this project are a veritable who’s who of web design. They include: Khoi Vinh, Matthew Smith, Mike Kus, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, MetaLab, and Dan Rubin. If there were a design Olympics, this would be the dream team.

Sending your content in one of their designs is a bit like sporting an Armani suit. MailChimp users with a paid account will get to try each and every template on for size in the Premium section of the campaign designer at no extra cost. You’re going to look sharp!

The experiment only involved sending roughly 7,000 email campaigns over to be reviewed. But within the first 2 days, we started getting back some unexpected, yet fascinating results.

In particular, there were certain email templates that kept getting repeatedly flagged as spam by these human reviewers, even though they weren’t spam at all.

All these “false positives” had some common design traits, so we thought we should share our findings…

How Did The Experiment Work?

When Omnivore detected an email that had traits of potential abuse, we sent it to Mechanical Turk. A copy of the email (sans private data, like recipient information) was displayed inside of an interface that looked something like this:

In general, we listed some rules at the top, then presented the campaign below it, then asked the reviewer to tell us if the email violated any of the listed rules, back at the top of the page. User Interface snobs will notice that in general, this interface looks like it was QWERTY-fied (designed to slow users down a little). We could’ve used very simple “Is this spam? Yes/No” buttons, but you don’t want people judging too fast.

How Effective Was The Experiment?

The experiment went as well as you’d expect, using people who weren’t heavily trained on the intricacies of permission-based email marketing. Generally speaking, Turkers like to work fast, so they’re best for picking out the most egregious offenders (think along the lines of porno or pharma spam). To that end, they’re great at catching the really evil spammers who try to penetrate into our system and send extremely bad stuff that would jeopardize our deliverability.

But when it came to reviewing an email from, say, a reputable business that purchased a not-so-reputable list from a local chamber of commerce, the reviewers experienced some difficulty. So crowdsourcing is good, but not a silver bullet with respect to abuse prevention (we are still crowdsourcing, but the experiment has changed significantly).

Though we weren’t thrilled with the initial results, this exercise revealed a lot about how people look at email design.

21 Seconds To Decide

Mechanical Turk measures how much time people spend performing each review, so we can tell when people are just clicking random stuff and moving on to their next task. On average, the human reviewers spent only 21 seconds reviewing these “false positive” emails. Now, we can’t read their minds, so there’s no reliable way of telling if they bothered to check for “permission reminders” or “CAN-SPAM compliance” in the footers. But it’s safe to say they weren’t doing a very thorough analysis. I’d wager that most of that 21 seconds was spent reading the criteria at the top of the interface, and not the email itself. They definitely weren’t visiting the senders’ websites to see if there was a proper signup form, and testing to see if they used opt-in best practices. They were making relatively quick, gut-level decisions on whether or not an email “looked spammy.”

The False Positives

Below are some email designs that kept getting marked as spam by Mechanical Turk reviewers. Keep in mind that at the time of this experiment, none of the senders of these emails were determined to be abusive. Their email stats suggested they were sending permission-based emails. Their recipients probably knew the emails were legit — but our independent reviewers did not.

1. Want to learn Photoshop?

In general, I think the above email has got some layout issues that make it look a bit sloppy. Their images are breaking the template. At the top, where people are accustomed to seeing a logo, the sender only used text. In fact, the text isn’t even the company’s name, but a bright red “salesy” kind of question: “Want to learn Japanese or Chinese?” Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that you know your recipient, or what he’s interested in. Unfortunately, the Chinese characters don’t help their reputation much either. We’ve all received a bit too much of this in our inbox:

2. The Red Flyer

I’m sure that loyal customers of this local pizzeria were happy to get an offer for a free t-shirt:

But I don’t think our human reviewers liked the “hyperlink blue” verdana font, then the giant red “FREE” text below that (then the green text below that, then the blue text below that, then the gray text below that). Something about this email made it look more like a stock template for a flyer, not an email newsletter to loyal customers. I couldn’t help but think that the scrunched up airplane logo looked like those images that spammers try to skew, in order to get around anti-spam filters who scan the content of images:

Aside from the image quality issues, some extra copy could’ve been added to demonstrate that this email was being sent to their customers. Don’t get me wrong. T-shirt giveaways can be  extremely effective (here are some stats to prove it), but you should probably do more than just yell “FREE T-SHIRT!”

At the very least, an image of the actual t-shirt seems in order.

Here’s a nice example from ScoutMob:

3. Not Plain Enough Text

This email repeatedly got marked as spam by our reviewers:

You’ll notice it has no images. No branding, no logos, no photos.

Yes, one could make the case that plain, old-fashioned, text-only emails can be more personal, and therefore more effective under some circumstances.

But if you’re gonna go all-text, you need to go all the way, baby. Centered text, colored backgrounds, and colored borders look like you’re going for an HTML email look. But when you fail to include any logos or images, it looks half-baked. Like a spammer, getting all “Rich Text:”

Even if you don’t have a logo, one way of showing your brand is to include your website’s domain. But this sender used the bit.ly URL shortener instead:

In their defense, that’s probably because the link to the event they’re promoting was really long or something (webinar links get that way sometimes). The problem is that spammers are known to hide malicious links behind reputable URL shorteners (see: URL Shorteners and Blacklists), so that helpful little link just ends up hurting them.

4. Read it and Weep

This one was actually surprising to me, because I thought it was well designed:

The title font even looks customized (it’s not arial, it’s not verdana, and it’s certainly not comic sans). It’s laid out pretty nicely. The pink is a custom color, too. The only possible problem that I can see is that it’s extremely text-heavy, with zero images. To the untrained eye, it almost falls into that “not plain-enough text” category above, but this doesn’t look half-baked or sloppy at all to me. This email shows signs of actual craftsmanship and skill with typography (web design is 95% typography, right?). This sender’s subscribers are probably fine with all this text (the sender is an author, after all). But to our independent reviewers, this email apparently looked pretty spammy. In this case, I personally wouldn’t change my design or behavior. If I had to make recommendations, I’d consider adding elements that made it look more “newslettery.” Perhaps a small avatar of the author could be worked into the template’s footer, or some “share this on social sites” icons. If this is all about the written word, and images are forbidden, text can be ornamental too.

5. Set it and Forgot it

Senders that used one of our stock RSS-to-email templates seemed to get flagged the most:

As I write this article, we’re actually working on tweaking this template so that the header is more customizable (forcing the title to be ALL CAPS, in retrospect, was not a great idea).

But many of the bloggers who used this template didn’t bother customizing the RSS merge tags any further to include images from their posts. They didn’t customize the fonts, link colors, or anything at all, it seems.

I also wonder if, in some cases, the Table of Contents was so large, our independent reviewers didn’t bother scrolling down to look for real content. All they saw was a bunch of nonsensical looking TOC links. This happens if you update your blog frequently, but you schedule your RSS-to-email campaign to go out in weekly or monthly batches. Not that I’d change my behavior just for random Mechanical Turk reviewers. What your subscribers want is more important.

But there’s a broader lesson here on image vs. text balance. A similar example plucked from my spam folder in Gmail:

Why this is important to email marketers

When you send a lot of email marketing, even to a totally permission-based double opt-in list, you’re going to get some spam complaints from your recipients. It’s inevitable. Sometimes, it’s because they’re too lazy to click your unsub link, they think the “spam” button is the unsub link, or sometimes it’s because they forgot signing up to your list (maybe because you send infrequently, like me).

And sometimes, when your email is marked as spam, a human from an ISP, or a human from an anti-spam organization, will actually do a manual review of your email (See: “Who’s secretly reading your emails?”). Some anti-spam organizations use volunteers, who are driven by passion more than pay (nothing wrong with that, but you have to wonder how detailed their training is). We’ve experienced enough “your client’s email has been reviewed by our team, and determined to be spam, so we’re blocking your IP range” situations to know that those reviewers don’t always do a thorough analysis of your list management practices (not part of their job description anyway). This is partly why our own terms of use seem so strict to some. ISPs get complaints, they look at your email, and they make a split-second decision to “blacklist or not.”

So even if you do your list management right, and you design everything perfectly around your subscribers’ expectations, we always recommend that you give some consideration to this “secret” audience that also reads your email (See: “What makes a good permission reminder?”). Don’t bend over backwards for them, or anything.

It’s kind of like how your mother always told you to wear clean underwear, “in case you’re in an accident.” Take a good look at your email templates, and ask yourself, “If my email got reported as spam, and some spamcop laid his eyes on it, what would they think? Would mom be proud?”

Related:

• How your email design can get you blacklisted
• Stupid Email Design Mistakes
• How to avoid spam filters (the non-human kind)
• Want 700,000 HTML email templates? (more fun w/Mechanical Turk)
• Is your email marketing human?

A beautiful custom header, a clean display of prints available on her Etsy store page, and the best part?

Gigi Moore hardly had to lift a finger.

Using our new AutoConnect template for Etsy, Gigi was able to put this campaign together quickly and without having to re-create the design she’d already done for her page. MailChimp automatically grabbed the header and shop announcement from her store and she was able to select listings to include in the campaign.

Now her subscribers can view the illustrations for sale directly within the campaign and be tempted by her fantastic images.  Clicking on a listing in the campaign will automatically bring her customers to that listing in her shop so they can purchase.

I absolutely love the whimsical “Floating Sea” print.

Here’s what Gigi had to say:

I think a lot of Etsians will get a kick out of using this Etsy template. Having the ability to have your Etsy shop turned into an email, almost like a moving Etsy shop, is a great marketing and promotional option for all Etsy shop owners.

For information on this and our other AutoConnect templates, check out:

AutoConnect Templates from MailChimp

Even Kanye admits to being an email snob! Just say NO to Comic Sans.

Using the word ‘blast’ though? I can’t say we approve of that one, Kanye.

There are a few reasons we like this email. The boldness of the page background contrasts with the body of the message, drawing attention the content while still staying on brand.

The layout is a standard two-column template, but the video thumbnails on the right invite us to click through to see “more goodies”. They’re actually using MailChimp’s video merge tag, which makes it super easy to pull in a screenshot that links to your Youtube, Vimeo or Blip.tv video. Finally, the animated GIF displays the variety of mobile themes you can easily apply to your storefront, without taking up valuable space with tiny screenshots of each theme.

Curious to learn more about using animated GIFs in email? We’ve got a blog post for that.

Additional Resources for Integrating MailChimp and Magento:

• Magento Signup Plugin For MailChimp
• Magento Plugin Video
• eCommerce 360 Plugins (sync MailChimp with your shopping cart to show your email marketing ROI)
• Complete List of MailChimp Plugins (including support for numerous shopping carts and ecommerce platforms)

Over the past few months though, we were a little sad every time their newsletter landed in our inbox. The Think Vitamin email template wasn’t a bad one, but it lacked much of the visual impact of the Carsonified brand. Take a look at the Think Vitamin site and then check out their old template below:

Think Vitamin Newsletter Before

It’s obvious that the design was created using one of our “start from scratch” templates. Because HTML rendering in email clients can be so dodgy, these well-tested templates make a great foundation for those not skilled in the art of Email Jitsu. For Think Vitamin though, a resource for professional web designers and developers, starting with a stock template just wasn’t a good fit.

The Plan

As fans of the blog and the newsletter, we decided it was time for an intervention. Our goal wasn’t to redesign Think Vitamin, but to create a template that was more in line with their current website design. With this as my task, I started out the project in Photoshop. Using saved images and screenshots from the blog I was able to pull in the unique bits and pieces of the Think Vitamin site and arrange them to work in a single-column, 600px wide design. That was the easy part. The hard part was switching my brain from standards-based HTML mode to working with tables, spacer gifs and inline CSS. Fortunately, we’ve got some really helpful posts in these hallowed halls, and getting to tinker with the templating language made the whole thing kinda fun. Here’s what the new template looks like when editing a campaign:

Think Vitamin Newsletter After

Notice the editable regions outlined by red dashes. Separating the intro area, table of contents block and the main content area into individual editable regions allowed me to keep a lot of extra markup out of the way of the newsletter author. Another fun detail about this template is that I put some alt text on a spacer gif near that top that says, “Welcome to another exciting edition of the Think Vitamin newsletter. Please ‘show images’ in your email client or use the following link to view this in your browser.” By putting this message in as alt text, only users with images turned off will see it. This has the secondary benefit of providing a relevant intro for email clients like GMail that provide a few words from the start of the message. Yes, it’s a nerdy detail, but a fun one too. You can view the rest of the template (in all it’s table-based glory) by subscribing yourself to Carsonified’s Think Vitamin newsletter, or opening up Issue #15 that was just sent out last Friday.

Update: We weren’t the only ones who thought the Think Vitamin newsletter needed a makeover. Jeff at Indie-Preneur.com wrote a detailed post about their need for an email overhaul back in February. While I was already planning to use most of the layout and design elements from the existing Think Vitamin website, Jeff’s post influenced a few of my design decisions. Specifically, he deserves credit for the placement of the social and “view in browser” links up at the top of the email.

Follow these best practices and you are sure to create awesome emails that your clients will love:

• Your email layout should be no wider than 600 pixels for best viewing in various email clients
• Avoid using the following CSS in your templates:
  • Floats
  • Positioning
  • Background images (doesn’t work in Outlook and Gmail)
• Use this wonderful reference created by our friends at Campaign Monitor to see what CSS is supported in major email clients http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
• It’s a good idea to limit the number of editable spaces in the template to keep things simple
• Name all editable spaces consistently. The name you assign via mc:edit="somename" is used to create a field in the database to store the user’s content. If they switch templates after writing content, they could lose their copy if the editable space names aren’t consistent. Use the following conventions common content areas:
  • mc:edit="header – used to name the header
  • mc:edit="header_image" – used to name an editable header image
  • mc:edit="sidecolumn" – used to name an editable left or right side column
  • mc:edit="main" – used to name the main content space
  • mc:edit="footer" – used to name the footer
• Editable images should not be placed within an editable content container
• Set the @theme declaration in your CSS for the page background, header, footer and content space so templates can be quickly customized with the MailChimp color themes. See the template language docs for the correct names to be used.
• Be creative with the use of merge tags. Use the social merge tags to provide readers of your email new ways to connect with you and share your content. Use The table of contents merge tag (*|MC:TOC|*) to create an automatic list of links to the <h1> and <h2> headings in an email.
• Be sure to include the required CAN-SPAM info in the footer (*|UNSUB|* *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* *|LIST:ADDRESS|*)
• Include target="_blank" in links to ensure they open a new browser window or tab when emails are viewed in browser based email clients
• Include a link for users to update their subscription preferences <a href="*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*" target="_blank">change subscription preferences</a>
• Include a link to let users view the email in a browser: <a href=”*|ARCHIVE|*” target=”_blank”>view this email in a browser.</a>
• Include a link to your website: <a href=”*|LIST:URL|*” target=”_blank”>visit our website</a>
• Feature the forward to a friend link somewhere prominent <a href=”*|FORWARD|*” target=”_blank”>forward to a friend</a>. Make a cool button treatment for it where possible to encourage sharing
• Once you’ve created a template, put test it in a campaign and try customizing it by changing color, adding content, etc to make sure it will work well for others who might be using it in different situations.