9 January – 42% of Marketers Never Use Responsive Design in Emails
ExactTarget surveyed thousands of marketers and it turned out that still over 40% of marketers do not use responsive design in their email templates!
Responsive email design became a hot topic in the summer of 2012 (according to Google Trends). Thankfully many businesses updated their email designs, but still many did not care in the beginning of 2014.
We started developing EDMdesigner in early 2013. Our goal was to help people create responsive emails. We are proud to announce that today EDMdesigner is the best and most flexible responsive email editor API in the market! We help a rapidly increasing number of SaaS providers and their clients to make responsive emails without any hassle.
What do you think, what will this number look like in 2015?
25 February – One Click Unsubscribe in Gmail
Image source: Business2Community.com
Gmail introduced a new, convenient way to help their users unsubscribe from promotional messages.
Many email marketers were frightened by this now feature. They were afraid of loosing their hardly earned subscribers. But those who sent always quality content in proper packaging to their subscribers never worried.
20 March – Animated GIFs in Email Become Sexy
Our fellow responsive email coders at Litmus came up with a great article about the use of animated GIFs in email. Animated GIFs resurrected and became the sexiest and most used technology in email. There were more companies using animated GIFs than responsive email design!
Will GIFs rule 2015 as well? What do you think?
1 April – Happy 10th Birthday, Gmail!
Image source: Betanews.com
Gmail was introduced on April 1, 2004 and in the past 10 years it became one of the most powerful email clients in the world. Gmail is not only a powerful email tool, but also a great advertising platform for Google.
We, email designer/coders, could speak about Gmail for hours. The team behind Gmail innovates a lot, but maybe not in the right way. The bad news is that Gmail doesn’t support responsive email technology at all. We hope it will change in 2015 and Gmail will support responsive design soon!
20 May – Outlook.com Introduces New Features
Outlook didn’t give up. They introduced new features like advanced rules, undo, in-line reply and chat to keep their user base, but it seems they were not so successful in their mission.
According to Email Client MarketshareOutlook.com lost roughly 1% from it’s market share. Outlook also lost over 4%, so it seems that 2014 was a bad year for the whole Outlook family.
1 July – Canada’s Anti Spam Law (CASL)
All email marketers were shocked by the brutal anti SPAM laws Canada introduced, but they had to comply with it. Those companies who collected their email lists with proper double-opt in didn’t have to worry though.
Did the CASL really work? Scott, our friend from Indiemark, digs deeper with Matthew Vernhout (Chief Privacy Officer and Manager, Deliverability at Inbox Marketer Corp) to find an answer to this question with under the following link.
4 August – Highest Open Rates in Years
Email open rates increased by more than 10 percentage points since 2011 and 25-35% open rate is becoming the industry standard. What drove this rapid growth? Check out our blog post about this trend!
August – The 2nd Email Design Conference #TEDC14
The mission of TEDC14 is to teach email designers, marketers and strategists how to produce great looking – and performing – emails. Unfortunately we couldn’t make it to Boston this year, but #TEDC13 was a superb event and helped us a lot in product validation.
Were you there this year? If not, you can purchase all recordings from Litmus or simply checkout this post with the takeaways.
22 October – Google Inbox Introduced
It’s not Gmail, it’s a completely a different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters. Google is trying to revolutionize the way we use our email, and wants to help us make more out of our Inbox. It seems that they did a great job, since many people around me shifted to Inbox from Gmail.There are many articles discussing how the new Inbox affects email marketers, please check out these to learn more:
- Google’s Inbox and What It Means for Email Marketers Part 1 and Part 2
- A First Look at Inbox By Gmail: What Email Marketers Need to Know
- What Gmail’s Inbox App Means For Your Email Marketing
- How Small Businesses Can Leverage Inbox by Gmail
Other Useful Stuff from 2014
- The Email Design Guide from Mailchimp
- Top 100 Email Marketing Campaigns of 2014 from Campaignmonitor
- History of Email Changes from Aweber.com
Did we miss anything? Tell us in the comments!
Our Year in a Review
I would like to thank the whole team and all supporters who helped us on our road. It was a really exciting and challenging year for us all. We made it from a closed beta to a professional, live product!
I would like to thank all of our partners for the guidance, feedback and support. We love you all, and we work for you every day. Thank you for trusting us and integrating EDMdesigner’s responsive email editor API into your software!
We will work hard to make EDMdesigner really the best and most flexible email editor API on the Globe. The good news is that we are on the right track, since there are companies reaching out to us on a daily basis!
We will take a little break and will be back with our next blog post and newsletter in the first week of January.
***We wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ***
