I'll admit it, I am a Pinterest addict. I pin many things from fitness inspiration to movie posters I like.
What I have discovered today are images pinned from Sydney based company, Campaign Monitor. What an awesome discovery, many people have pinned work from Campaign Monitor and more specifically, email campaign templates. The designs that I got to feast my eyes on were inspiring and allowed for me to then have a play around with an email campaign template.
Using Postie Mail Manager (Campaign Monitor)
Using The Postie Mail Manager (PB Web Development's whitelable of Campaign Monitor), I was able to type copy into a pre-existing PB Web Development template and insert images. From the PB Web Development website I found content for my email campaign and inserted it into The Postie Mail Manager, while played around with the formatting. It was extremely helpful to use the inspiration on Pinterest to view what email templates have the potential to look like. Before that, I was a bit lost and creatively stuck.
Now after searching the numerous Campaign Monitor pins, I am inspired and want to keep searching for more templates, it has opened my eyes to a whole other side to Pinterest. It is amazing that there is more to Pinterest than weddings and beach holidays.
What looks good?
I have come to a conclusion that a large image as a header is the most visually appealing, but it all comes down to what images you have available and what the email topic is. I covered recent work undertaken and also a fun little invite to the CMS end of year mixer. With both these topics I incorporated images I pulled from this website, which made the email interesting and ideally more attention grabbing. A cool little trick I learnt about using a email management system is the ability to trace user clicks on links within the email and where they are located. It enables follow up emails to be tailored to users interests, which can gain more attention than a generic email.
Social Media Automation
Following email campaigns, I briefly learnt about social media automation. Unfortunately this was challenging as Feedburner.com has been taken down by Google, so we hit a brick wall in regards to that. Although we had that hiccup I learnt about RSS feeds and how we can automate Facebook and Twitter updates to occur when a website is updated by a client. This saves time but if you are a little bit of a control freak like me, you won't like it when the tweets are cut off, as the updates can be longer than the standard 140 characters.
Today inspired me to explore my creative side which I thoroughly enjoyed, and now I will probably spend the next week trawling through Pinterest searching for email template designs.