It’s no secret that mobile readership of email is skyrocketing. In May of 2011, Return Path released a study in which showed an 81% increase in mobile viewership over the prior 6-month period. Then, in September, Litmus released its own study which bore out many of the same conclusions.

Litmus’ number was a little higher: 150% over the previous 6 months. I don’t know what the margin of error is in either study, but even being conservative and splitting the difference between the two numbers nets you a healthy increase. Either way, these numbers show that people are overwhelmingly choosing to view email on their Androids, iPhones, and iPads, and that means finding a way to optimize email for smaller screens.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that media queries are a way to optimize email for mobile devices, and MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow.

Now, chances are that if you do code your own templates, you already know what media queries are, you stopped reading at “MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow,” and have moved on to implementing media queries into your templates. For the rest, what follows is an overview of what a media query looks like, how to implement it into your code, and even how to set it up so that you can adjust the media query style rules within MailChimp’s campaign editor.

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A few weeks ago, email marketing expert Mark Brownlow discussed an interesting but quietly growing trend in 2008– the increasing use of animated GIFs in email. There are likely a couple reasons that this is true. First, animated GIFs appear to function in almost all major email clients, and second, because they seem to work.  A/B tests by BlueFly, for example, found an animated email pulling in 12% more revenue than the non-animated equivalent.

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Seth Godin’s got a nice rant about emails that say, “do not reply to this email, because nobody will read it.”

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/if-you-dont-wan.html

These emails bug me too—except maybe some transactional messages. I don’t exactly expect to hit “reply” for an Amazon.com receipt.

Anyways, if you’re sending email marketing (not transactional) messages, you really, really should setup a dedicated reply-to email address before you send your first campaign. It’s a step that we’ve noticed a lot of newbie email marketers forget, and it’s exactly why we wrote this free guide:

Your First Email Marketing Campaign

It’s a checklist that covers lots of other little things new email marketers forget to do. Hope you find it useful.