You will most likely be working in an agency or an in-house digital team managing email campaigns but want to start developing your own ideas. Ideally you’ll be technically minded and also understand the different channels to engage an audience online.

At the moment we’re a small agency with big ideas so you’ll have a great opportunity to help shape our future direction and grow with the company. Our work focuses on helping clients(many charity) engage their customers, supporters and members through digital channels such as email, web and social.

Your role will initially require you to:

• Manage email campaigns, including uploading data, updating creative assets and analysing results using a range of platforms
• Undertake email template design and HTML coding, this may also extend to websites
• Provide input on design, strategy and technology for campaigns
• Communicate with clients and keep them up to date with their projects and how to improve campaigns

Experience/Skills

• Ability to work to tight deadlines with changing priorities
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• HTML and CSS expertise essential – with hand coding skills desirable
• A good eye for design and ability to use Photoshop
• 1-2 years proven success in a digital role
• experience of email broadcast tools
• self motivated
• ability to be analytical
• It is likely that you will have a degree education.

So if you are ready for a new challenge, driven to create your own role, and have a genuine interest in a digital environment then this job may be for you.

We’ve recently been making adjustments to some of our clients’ templates to help them work better on mobile. We also consider mobile displays now as standard practice when designing emails from scratch for clients.

Some ESPs will be able to give you some statistics on how many emails are opened(and clicked) on mobile devices, you may be able to work out from Google Analytics or other analytics software.

Below we’ve listed a few areas of consideration when we’re optimising emails for mobile.

Optimisation rather than re-creation

Most of the changes we’re implementing are improving existing templates so they display better on mobile devices. So you don’t necessarily need to go to great expense re-creating your email templates. Quite often mobile email clients will scale fonts and zoom out of the emails making them hard to read and requiring the user to first zoom in. One of the easiest changes to make is to add a couple of extra lines of code that will help make emails display at the right size.

Codes such as

style="-webkit-text-size-adjust:none"

and defining viewports in the meta tags will help ensure that emails clients aren’t playing havoc too much.

Think ‘tap’ rather than ‘click’

This is perhaps one of the main design considerations for mobile emails and it recognises that fingers are less accurate than a cursor. A typical adult finger covers 45 pixels when pressed against a mobile screen which is quite a large proportion of a mobile screen. Ensuring buttons and links have padding around them will help avoid frustrating tap errors. Horizontal menus with more than 4 items may start to cause problems.

When creating content for emails think about keeping CTAs clear of the body text and if there are several try and separate them from one another.

Keep emails short

Making sure your emails are short is something that we generally recommend anyway, and this is even more pertinent when considering mobile emails. Fewer words, shorter sentences and clear calls to action will help recipients navigate your email. Also higher contrast between both colour and font sizes will make the right things stand out.

It’s worth considering that recipients reading your emails on a mobile device may not be sitting and their desk but doing something or going somewhere at the same time. This makes trying to catch their attention even more important.

Sender, Subject, Pre-header

When flicking through emails on a mobile there is quite a lot less real estate for you to say who you are and what your email is about in the Inbox view. So make sure your Sender Name is immediately clear and something your recipients will recognise. Also make sure that the most recognisable part of the brand name is first.

Subject lines will often get shortened so make sure you have the most important words or information toward the front.

Like Gmail, many mobile email clients also pull the pre-header into the inbox view. This gives you a further opportunity to capture attention. Having ‘view online’ or ‘unsubscribe’ in this space is a waste. Use your pre-header to support your subject line and main CTA.

Now what about your website?

So once you’ve sorted out your emails and people are clicking through do you know what they see when they get to your website? Is their experience of your website optimised for mobile? Perhaps it’s worth having a look at?

What next?

If you would like to find out more about mobile email optimisation or would like your existing templates updated just let us know.

Create a New Cover Image

The most obvious change from the old version is the cover image. This provides great opportunities for branding and to visually inspire and engage with your audience. The options are endless as long as you stay within the Facebook guidelines.

Create several different timeline covers so you can provide a fresh and inspiration experience for your timeline visitors!

Image dimensions: 851px x 315px

Download a free template for Adobe Photoshop.

No Default Landing Page Tab

You can no longer set a tab as a default landing tab. So for those who had set up ‘Fan Gates’ and special offers based on this, it now won’t be the first thing potential fans see. You can still use the unique urls of apps to direct people directly to the app from pages outside of Facebook as well as posts, status updates within Facebook.

Application Boxes

The applications you previously had as tabs on the left hand side of your page will now appear as boxes beneath your cover image. The order of these can be changed and you can also customise them with a specified image. Think about creating call to actions for these applications to engage your fans.

If you have more than three or four applications, users can access them by clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of the boxes. These hidden applications probably won’t receive the same amount of visibility as the main apps so be selective when choosing what to highlight in your application banner.

Application Image dimensions: 111px x 74px

Add Milestones

You can set milestones for current, or past dates. This is a great way to highlight key events such as major campaigns, achievements, launch of new products or other business milestones.

Milestone image dimensions: 843px x 403px

Pin your Posts

If your company has an important post, message, or offer, you can now “pin” that to the top of your timeline. It won’t be displaced when you post new updates or upload new photos. Just keep in mind that you can only pin something for 7 days. When you’ve pinned it, you’ll see a little ribbon in the upper right corner.

Highlighted Posts

You can set any post to be highlighted which means it will take up both sides of the page. This feature enables you to bring special attention to a particular post within the timeline.

Keep engaging your audience through Facebook

The ultimate aim of all this is to make your Facebook page more interesting and engage your audience. So once you’ve looked at these areas you still need to make sure you’re adding content, interacting, and keeping your fans engaged.

If you’re looking for some inspiration have a look at 10 excellent examples of Facebook Brand Timelines

 If you would like us to create some artwork, just ask.

So here’s the normal Google Analytics script with our added tracking:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
 _gaq.push(['agency._setAccount','UA-YYYYYYYY-Y']);
 _gaq.push(['agency._trackPageview']);
  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
</script>

The important part is the additional lines in bold, these are the same as the lines above them but with an identifying name, in this example we used ’agency.’.

Using this method you can also track events to different accounts using the standard event tracking method in Google Analytics. Again the difference is the additional line name preceeding the trackEvent

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'link', 'click', 'linkClicked']);
_gaq.push(['agency._trackEvent', 'link', 'click', 'linkClicked']);

The sort of people we’re looking for are:

• Email Marketers
• Email Designers
• Web Designers
• Web Developers – HTML, CSS, php, Drupal, WordPress

Making sure that each campaign has clear objectives will make it easier to evaluate whether it was a success or not. It will also help you make decisions about creative and processes. If your objective is to move your customers through the engagement funnel think about how segmentation might help this.

2. Less is more

If your landing page is cluttered with menus or your emails scattered with links your recipients could get distracted or just not know what they’re supposed to do. Get their attention and hold it by decluttering landing pages and focussing your email content.

3. Keep it short and scannable

People read websites and emails differently to printed items so make sure what you create is scannable. If you can, keep paragraphs to four lines and consider using the design to guide people through a page or toward the main call to action.

4. Follow the path

A campaign is only as strong as its weakest link. Understand and plan the journey someone will take from their first contact through to where they come out at the other end. This includes welcome emails, unsubscribe pages, payment processes and journeys within your site.

5. Test, and test

You should not only test that each part of your campaign works, across platforms and browsers, but also what your audience respond better to.

When A/B or multivariate testing make sure you have a clear objective(or hypothesis). Think about the various elements you can change to help achieve your overall objective – CTA text, button positions, copy length, landing pages. Etc.

View position description >

We’re also looking for contract and freelance Web Developers. Particularly those with experience in Open Source CMSs such as WordPress & Drupal. If this is you send us some details.

At the moment we’re a small agency with big ideas so you’ll have a great opportunity to help shape our future direction and grow with the company.

Your role will require you to:

• Manage email marketing campaigns, including uploading data, updating creative assets and analysing results
• Process and manipulate data
• Undertake light email template design and HTML coding, this might extend to website as times
• Input on design and provide insight into campaign results
• Communicate with clients and keep them up to date with their projects and how to improve campaigns

Experience/Skills

• Ability to work to tight deadlines with changing priorities
• Fantastic attention to detail – especially when working under time pressure
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• HTML expertise essential – with hand coding skills desirable
• Good experience of email broadcast systems.  eg. Silverpop(Engage), Campaign Monitor, DotMailer, Mailchimp…
• A good eye for design and ability to use Photoshop
• Knowledge and experience of using database / database management systems
• Hard working, enthusiastic, passionate about digital

So if this sounds interesting just send your details using the form below including a cover letter and CV and we’ll let you know if we’d like to chat some more.

In your cover letter if you could also tell us about a recent digital marketing campaign which you found particularly engaging.