We received this question recently from a customer:

When does WC plan on building sophisticated send controls and segmentation logic so that email can be scheduled based on time of day by time zone or by same day of week / time of day?

Glad you asked! We’ve already got that in our platform. Here’s the catch when it comes to sending by timezone. You must already be collecting time zone data at your point of intake. There is no email service provider in the world that can guess with any degree of accuracy what timezone a subscriber is in once they’ve already subscribed.

There is a solution for building a Javascript into your web forms that will attempt to detect a user’s timezone on a subscription form, which you can then pass into your database. You will need a developer’s help to integrate it into your website. Add the Timezone Detection script from Jon Nylander to your website via Javascript and then populate a hidden field named Timezone on your email subscription form.

Here’s a working example, which should tell you what time zone you’re in as you read this blog post:

Once you’ve collected timezone with your subscription forms and stored it with your database, all you need do is create different segmentations in the WhatCounts platform by that custom timezone field you’ve collected and send to the appropriate timezone segmentation at the times you want:

We hope this fairly technical tip is helpful to you as you grow your list.

If you need assistance implementing this and you’re a WhatCounts customer, talk to your account manager about hiring our Professional Services team to do the implementation for you. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer, consider becoming one today.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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One of the hottest trending terms in email marketing is responsive design, a form of design of your email marketing that will help you achieve better results on mobile devices. Let’s examine today what it is and the basics of it.

What is responsive design?

In a nutshell, it’s design that adapts itself to whatever is being used to view it. A responsive design, in theory, looks as good on a wall-sized super-HDTV as it does on your iPhone, and offers similar functionality.

Responsive design in itself isn’t anything new. If you’ve done any HTML in the past 15 years, you’ve made a table, and you’ve at some point specified that the table’s width should be 100% rather than a fixed number of pixels. That’s the most basic form of responsive design: show something at 100% of whatever you’re viewing it on.

How does responsive design work?

What makes responsive design different today from eras past is that we have a lot more control over how things scale themselves up or down, as well as many more screen sizes and shapes. This is accomplished through style sheets that are designed to scale up or down, or even switch out based on what kind of device is being used. Here’s an example of a CSS3 stylesheet that adapts based on what kind of screen it’s being viewed on:

// Desktop computer or bigger screen
@media only screen
and (min-device-width : 640px)

{
// put styles here
}

// Mobile Landscape
@media only screen
and (min-width : 481px)

{
// put styles here
}

// Mobile portrait

@media only screen
and (max-width : 321px)

{
// put styles here
}

In this example, you’d have 3 different sets of styles that displayed your email or web page 3 different ways, depending on whether you were looking at the content on a bigger screen or a mobile, and in which orientation the mobile was in.

How to get started with responsive design

The simplest and fastest way to start thinking in terms of responsive design in your email marketing is this: convert everything you do into percentages. Take a look at every email template you’ve got right now, and see how many references there are in it to specific widths, heights, and pixels. With the help of a graphic designer or good graphic design software, work to eliminate all of those absolute numbers by converting them into relative percentages.

Here’s an example.

Example of responsive:

Obviously, doing some really fancy things like change entire layouts is beyond the scope of this article, but thinking and designing in terms of percentages is the place to start in order to get your email marketing templates to be mobile-friendly.

I hope this article gives you the necessary starting points you need in order to get started with responsive design in your email marketing. As always, for WhatCounts customers, talk to your account managers today about converting your existing templates to responsive designs and we’ll help you get things rolling with our creative services teams. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer, contact us now and we’ll be happy to help you be more responsive in your email marketing.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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