Jay Oram: 0:03 And that's something that we still find that people don't know about. And we still have clients that maybe they don't have a development team, and they just use the template that they've always had. And the first time they realize something's wrong with dark mode is someone who gets a new phone and opens their email and go, "Oh my god, what is this?"
Hillel Berg: 0:26 Today on Inboxing Jay Oram, senior coder and interactive email specialist at Action Rocket. Welcome to in boxing. This is a third episode of Inboxing. This is the Inboxing podcast. I am Hillel Berg, your host. Every week, we discover we host new guests from the Email marketing world. And today's guest is going to be a very special guest comes from the other side of email, meaning the coding side that we call the website or development, email development is its own thing. And it's got a whole especially wonderful community. And I actually am part of it. Yeah, it's a little bit about Jay, he'll give us an introduction, I think, but there's a little bit about him. Jay was a digital marketer, did a lot of digital marketing for some other brands. And then at some point, he decided he wanted to go like a little bit behind the scenes. And he joined up with Action Rocket, which is a wonderful email marketing. It's really an email comment, maybe he'll give a little introduction now to x pack it also, but only in Ross's agency that does email coding, and I guess you'd call it an email agency, based in London. He is a beautiful Queen's English, which is easy on American ears. And so without further ado, I'm happy to bring in Jay. Jay, welcome to the Inboxing podcast.
Jay Oram: 1:50 Thanks for having me.
Hillel Berg: 1:52 For sure, for sure. So you want to give yourself a little introduction.
Jay Oram: 1:57 I mean, you did a little bit. But yeah, I work for Action Rocket. So Action Rocket is a design and mainly design and code agency specifically for CRM and email. And so majority of the team of designers, but then we have a couple of coders who specialize in email. And the whole team is kind of built around the specializing in email with some strategy people, and some consultants and things like that. So that's what Action work is. And I'm a senior coder and interactive email specialists there. So yeah, so I basically code emails all day and specializing the ones that are a little bit more difficult. So that's what I do.
Hillel Berg: 2:33 That's awesome. All right. What do you find upsetting in your inbox, like, as a coder? What do you know, when you look at your emails, what kind of annoys you?
Jay Oram: 2:42 The most annoying is when you see an email that could be live text, but it turns out to be an all image email. And from a marketer’s point of view, all image email might look better, because the brand can be perfectly on brand with the brand fonts, you can mix the kind of layout around and it's not too much republican. And you can have much more control over everything. But from an accessibility and deliverability and coding point of view, an all image email could put you more into the spam box, people might not see it as much you can end up with the deliverability issues. If that happens too often, your emails will stop being delivered, or they'll be delivered slowly and things like that. And accessibility wise, if an email is all image, then you obviously, get they can't see everything that's in there, and you can't possibly describe it. So yeah, that's the most upsetting thing an all image email that could easily have been just a few more lines of code to have live text would be. Yeah, that's what I prefer.
Hillel Berg: 3:46 Do you feel like there's a big advantage to having custom coded emails like over you know, now there's like a wealth of drag and drop, like, almost like code your own email, like, what do you say the advantages are custom coding is?
Jay Oram: 3:59 A custom coded email shouldn't be the email that happens every single day. If you use a WYSIWYG editor or a drag and drop editor or your ESP editor, then they're kind of perfect for the everyday emails going out, or things that you send regularly. Something that you can have a template made and then put into your WYSIWYG editor. So something like text free email where you can put up your own code, but then use the WYSIWYG editor to kind of edit it or there's others like stripo or be free, there's so many out there now that you can kind of put your own template in. But then if you're a marketer, then you can still use it by just drag and drop. And then those custom coded emails, the special ones should be maybe something that happens a lot. So like a birthday email, for example, if you're a brand and you want to send an email to someone on their birthday, and maybe you should add an interactive element or something a bit out of the box, out of the normal, out of the inbox kind of craziness, you spend some more time on that but then you can kind of set it and use it over and ever again. Or if you've got a big launch, so yeah, brand new product or a new service that you're launching, maybe at that point, you would get a custom coded one. So you can either, I mean, custom coded, it's like, you can have a custom code, a whole design system. So get the template in and get all of your colors, all of everything and exactly as you want, and then kind of move that into your ESP system so that you can edit it freely. And or custom coded could be those like one offs, like I mentioned, and I think they're the benefits, definitely.
Hillel Berg: 5:30 Right, right now, for sure. And I think there's a lot, again, it's interesting, because I come also from that world, from the dev world. And I always think like, why not every email should be, like, custom coded with the more I see like, you know, building emails for other people. And using WYSIWYG editors like I say you can do a lot. Something has happened yesterday I'm amusing someone who helped me just you know, convert from the Mail Chimp editor and make it look more personalized custom. What's interesting is that I'm noticing even things that it from the dev world, like I would always like never use like bulleted lists, without using the, bulletproof bulleted list and it's been like tested and all the platforms. And it's like a huge article in [inaudible 06:13]. And she just was doing regular, without any custom code, just regular unordered lists and list elements. And I checked it on like all the major platforms, and it just worked. Like it didn't, maybe the email world caught up a little bit. Like there's no money [inaudible 06:31] out there.
Jay Oram: 6:33 Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of, there always the edge cases, I think that's the thing that it depends what you're coding for. And I think when we've chatted before about this, where if your audience is completely Apple, for example, then why would you bother worrying about the outlook 2007 or Windows, if your audience are not there, then you're not going to bother. And their custom coding lets you kind of choose the level of support that you want to do. And progressively enhancing emails is kind of the whole idea of what the developers are doing. So we can definitely get a plain bulleted list with no colors, no links, that can all work everywhere. But as soon as you want to add a custom bullet image, or if you want to add different indents, different padding, during margin, all around it with other bits and pieces mixed in maybe inline images or something like that. That's when all of a sudden it doesn't look right in Outlook. And then you need someone to come in and do the specific email hack or whatever it is that gets it right kind of thing.
Hillel Berg: 7:36 Yeah, and I think that really comes in more when you're getting a custom design. And design isn't exactly the way it comes out in code. Yeah, and this is what I am specifically talking about is really just like a text email. So yeah, it doesn't really matter. You know, we're using bullet lists is really a hack. It's not looking like a list, it looks like something else entirely, then you definitely need custom coding. All right, what was your biggest email mistake as a custom coder?
Jay Oram: 7:59 So it happened just before I started as like a full time custom coder Action Rocket, I was kind of dabbling in the coding part. And a friend was launching a new online magazine. And he was using an online publishing editor thing that I'd never seen before. And we put in, everything that was correct. And then you click the button that said preview, and we thought that preview means it would send us a preview or it would bring a preview up on the screen. But in that particular program, preview actually sends the email to everyone. And yeah, so we obviously, yeah, yeah, exactly. So all of a sudden, we were really confused as to what had happened. And luckily, there was nothing bad in it. And it didn't take us long to realize what happened. And then we kind of quickly put together the correct email and sent it out with a oops, kind of thing. But yeah, the brand new online magazine launch with 1000s of people who, yeah, the first email they got was a load of just lorem ipsum kind of mixed in with random images. So it wasn't perfect. But yeah, that was kind of the biggest kind of thing that went on.
Hillel Berg: 9:05 Right. You know, give yourself a pat on the back. Because that doesn't sound like your fault at all, you know, button that sends the email. It is just ridiculous.
Jay Oram: 9:15 Yeah. But before I press anything, now I double check what it does first.
Hillel Berg: 9:21 Check the documentation. Always good idea. What's your biggest win, you know, like an email you're super proud of?
Jay Oram: 9:27 There's two, really, there's the win of coming, in an automation journey from someone that's been handed, from Dev, to Dev, to Dev to Dev, and there's loads of fixes and loads of bloated code in there where someone's gone in and said, "I want something to be read." So they've just added a big, make it read important thing in there. And stripping it down to a brand new kind of way of single column coding, not very much code in there. stripping something that was like over 100 kilobytes and making Gmail cut it off down to kind of 10, 20 kilobytes, and then using that same design and template throughout a whole journey, and the whole thing looked great from start to finish, and integrating with the ESP, and with the personalization and the data that they'd set up, that was a massive win, the first time that ever happened where everything from the welcome all the way to like the six month, thank you kind of email, everything was put together. That was a really big thing for me anyway, and but again, the strategy and the design and the client and everyone all joined up and everything, and was like a really good feeling. And then, obviously, like a big, massive interactive email that I've done, either with Pizza Express, one that just came to mind was we worked with Babylon health, who launched an app and in New Year, they launched like a health checker. And we did an interactive AMP email for them, and the CSS interactive email. And when we put that out there, it was one of the first kind of AMP emails that went from Braze was ESP. And they got, I think it was a 50 or 60%, like uplift in click throughs. And then also a 20%, or something like that 20% increase in app use just from that email, so having an interactive email that we really worked hard and use new technology, and then also seeing the results from the other end is really good. And something that agencies often well, particularly in our kind of development, I imagine you've probably seen that the same, you don't often get the end results analysis, you kind of get, we want the design to look perfect, you get the amends, you get the rendering issues, but you never hear about the click through gets better, or the results of what you spend months and months working on. Yeah, we often don't get that. So when we do get that it's really nice to hear. So yeah, that's definitely a big thing for us.
Hillel Berg: 11:50 Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about, I mean, I don't know, I assume most of our audience doesn't know too much about amphur email. What is it and how can people use it?
Jay Oram: 12:01 So, amphur email is just an extra bit of code that Google, an open source that started at Google, it's no open source is, an AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages. If you go to Google and you search, normally, those little news icons that come up with the little stories, they're normally AMP pages, and they've just been made specifically faster with lighter code, and work great on mobile. So they realize that that also converts well to email. So the same functionalities that are available, majority of the functionalities that are available for those AMP pages, they've made available for email developers, and you have to have a separately coded email as well as your HTML and your plain text email, 11 AMP email. So it's something extra to do. But it allows you to make things a little bit more interactive inboxes that previously weren't. So because Google was the first people to kind of start it, Gmail and Gmail app support AMP emails and mail.ru is another one. Yahoo and AOL are going to support it. So more inboxes are supporting AMP. And ESP are starting to support it as well with, breeze was one of the first ones and spark post was another one. And MAP have said they're going to support it. So more ESP is coming online. So basically, it's those interactive emails that you see only working on Apple, where you get like a cut, tap to reveal or a carousel, and those kind of things can now be bought into Google and used in Gmail. But they also add in a little extra, where you can actually pull in live content. So if you had a, like an online store with loads of products, if something sold out, you previously, obviously we have an HTML email, if it's sold out, it would just be in the email and it would be wrong. And if you had it live connected, then it could just update to the next product. So it's another dimension of something to be added. But it's been around for a couple of years, but it ESP have just started to kind of give it support. And big ESP like breeze and Salesforce, they're starting to roll out support in the New Year. So hopefully more people will be trying it, at least and then we'll see it appearing more and more in inboxes as well. So yeah, another aspect of interactive email that can, people can get interested in.
Hillel Berg: 14:23 Yeah, my own experience, like yeah, to register to use it or something or some kind of registration? Jay Oram: 14:30 Yeah, at the beginning there was a you had to get whitelisted with each inbox, so you had to be whitelisted for Gmail, then you had to be whitelisted for mail.ru and etc. But they've made that much easier now. So you just have to get whitelisted once and then it works anywhere else does. And white listing is a lot easier where before there was lots of things that you have to meet. Now it's things that every email probably already has like, if you've already got demark SPF already set up, if the domains that you're pointing to where your domains rather than someone else's. And I think it was something I think the spam score had to be a certain level before. And it's not as strict as it was. So a lot more emails should be able to be whitelisted.
Hillel Berg: 15:16 Yeah, I mean, I see that my own, for my clients, I mean, just another example of something that we can use as developers is the promotions tab code. If people aren't familiar with this, but there's actually code, you can find in internet, there's a few different platforms that like, you know, make it easy for you, buddy, I look this up Google promotions tab.
Jay Oram: 15:38 Yeah, fresh inbox, got a tool where you can literally.
Hillel Berg: 15:42 I used it just forgetting the name of it. But yeah, fresh inbox has a tool. So just do promotions tab fresh inbox, and you'll find this tool. And when you actually do if you have access to custom coding I can explain this well, but basically, your subject lines, your email will sort of like float to the top. And after some time, either because it's a client of yours, or it's an interest of yours. But you might have seen this already in your Gmail or like, let's say travel or food recipes, it'll come up in categorize them, in one, in like a blurb of three or four emails that came into your inbox that day. So if you have this code in your inbox, you could have a banner, a full banner in your Gmail, that's promoting whatever you're promoting. And it's like a tremendous resource, I do it for my clients. But it's amazing, because I'm like, seeing it with my clients. And like, it's like all recipes. And like, booking.com, and my client, like, of all the travel emails that I'm getting. So it's definitely seems like something that's underutilized out there. But I guess, something to think about is that for the most part, many companies are just using the WYSIWYG. And there's often no way to insert that kind of thing into the WYSIWYG. I was even surprised certain ESP is are stripping, that code out of and you know, they're nervous about it. Yeah, actually, I remember when I first started using it, I couldn't use that two formats, JSON. I think its JSON. JSON was getting stripped, which sort of makes sense, because sort of like JavaScript, but the other was microdata, and it's really just devs and lookups. And it doesn't seem like anything harmless. Like, it seems totally harmless. I don't know what the fear is, why USPS be stripping? I'm pretty sure. [Inaudible 17:27] I'm pretty sure they strip it up.
Jay Oram: 17:30 And they definitely strips the JSON version. I don't know if you could get the microdata one to work. I can't remember.
Hillel Berg: 17:35 I tried like six months ago for a client and it was definitely strip.
Jay Oram: 17:40 yeah, I feel like, they should like Mail Chimp should be building that into their editor, right?
Hillel Berg: 17:47 Yeah, its easy for people. Like why not? It's a matter of putting in a logo URL and a banner URL, that's it, text, maybe your subject line, you're like, "Hi here," because they have with the subject line.
Jay Oram: 18:00 But the subject line on the front name is all pulled from the email already. So it is literally the image and if you've got a deal or something, so it shouldn't be much.
Hillel Berg: 18:08 Make it easy for people to, take advantage of these amazing tools.
Jay Oram: 18:11 Yeah, in email that we send, we actually because we just experiment with it. Anyway, that was one of the first places we just stuck the code to see what would happen. And what I know, because obviously, I read it every time because I send it. And there was a couple of times I didn't read it. And then a week later, it pops up at the top, like as a promotion, like you said, and with the banner and stuff in my inbox. So obviously like to know that an email that I always read. And if I miss one, it's going to highlight it at the top for me, why would you not want that on your email? That seems like [inaudible 18:47].
Hillel Berg: 18:48 It's a great feature. And it just lets you pop up to the top of a, you know, bubble up like everyone's trying to stand out in the inbox. And there's no better way to stand out and using that promotions tab feature.
Jay Oram: 18:58 There's actually a cool tool as well from, I think it's called it's from peak inbox. And if you use them, you can track how many times your banner actually [inaudible 19:09] Yeah, and you can track clicks on it as well. Because then they figured out a way that you can do that. So that yeah, that's another and I think you can use that tool to create the code as well. So you can kind of get everything from them. And the image on there. And then yeah, you can see how many times it's actually used, so you can get that all the analytics and data that you want as the marketer to prove that something's working, and it's worth the effort, and yet peak inbox have got that sorted. So yeah, another tool that you can just go and have a look at.
Hillel Berg: 19:39 Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Would you have like a top five tips, email tips in general?
Jay Oram: 19:44 Yeah. I have few. So, one of the big ones is think of the recipient. So who you're sending to should be the top of your mind whenever you're creating an email, and especially like, what do they want? What are they going to get out of your email and if you're just sending, like the latest thing, and that is not going to interest and they're not going to open it. So obviously, it's another thing is the content is important. So yeah, the first thing is what do people want. And the second one is the content you're putting in there needs to be worth their attention and their time, and lead to big things. And another thing that I don't understand why people don't do it is personalization in an email, I've seen loads and loads of studies about it. But like, if you just add someone's first name in a subject line, often they get a higher open rate than if you don't, and so don't do it every time, obviously. But if there's things that you can test, then even just the simple personalization of having a first name in a subject line, used to give it a go. And then obviously, the more personalized an email experience can be, the more chances of someone wanting to open your email. So those three things are good. Another thing, and number four, I guess, is listen to your whole team. So, even though you're in a marketing department, and you're doing the marketing, listen to your coder, or your developer, or listen to your designer, or listen to the social media intern that you've just got started and see, if you get as much information as possible, then you'll know more. And you definitely feel like smaller companies that maybe have less staff, and they're kind of working closer together, things seem to move quicker through the system to get into emails or the information that the person that's packing the boxes in the warehouse knows more than the person that's making the emails knows. And if everyone's talking to each other, you'll definitely get a better. I think that's all marketing anyway. And but you know, it kind of adds to that.
Hillel Berg: 21:38 Yeah, absolutely. I definitely feel like I agree strongly on that point, that there just wasn't enough, you know, when I worked in Dev, like no one asked me what we can do with email, or how we should design the email. But it was also on me, I should, you know, say, "Hey, you know, let's talk about..."
Jay Oram: 21:53 Yeah, and that kind of that brings us on to number five, which is, progressively enhance your email to make it better for the people that you can make it better for. And like we said earlier with the, and if you know, your audience is all using Outlook and Lotus Notes, then maybe limit the amount you're progressively enhancing it. But if you start there, and everyone gets a great experience in Outlook, then the next thing to do is add some hover effects to make it look a little bit better in Gmail, add some rounded corners, something like that. And then the next thing is include ads, a bit of movement and a bit of animation and CSS transitions or animations to your already existing design template. And that would look that little bit better in an Apple Mail or something like that. And smaller progressive enhancements, I think are good. And there's no reason why every email should be a massive carousel, hover, tap to reveal thing. But if every button just has a little hover effect that matches your website, then that just brings in the brand a little bit more to your email. So yeah, those are the kind of top five tips there.
Hillel Berg: 22:58 Yeah, there's a lot of good ones, and a lot of them stand out. And for some reason, my head like I was thinking [inaudible 23:04] was kind of reminds me of American football, you get an American football, and I say like, "Take what the defense gives you." So think of ESP is like what they're the defense, like defense in Apple, little, easier with, it's a tough defense outlook. You can create one email that really will show a beautiful email on every platform, and that's really the goal really what happens, and then on the hands of personalizing, yeah, just, it's upsetting to me anyway, I think when we see companies that have a lot of customer data on like, your personal life, like, I know, companies, they should know, the ages of all my kids, and they should stop sending me, the most personalized email experience, a company, I've been shopping for my children, you know, from every age. It shouldn't be guesswork, it should just be like, “OH, for that kid," or even asked me, what is age of my kids and they can send you, Oh, we have a great, you know, for that, same age, my kids [inaudible 24:05] in an email and I think, I hope that maybe 2021, we'll see a lot more of that.
Jay Oram: 24:13 Yeah, one of my favorite personalization was from Major League Soccer in America, where the MLS League has hundreds of football clubs, there's so many in America, and but when you sign up, you sign up and tell them what team you support. And then the emails are tailored with the colors of your team and the news towards your team. Because obviously, if there was hundreds of football teams, every time I open the email, I don't want to read about everyone else's news. I want to read about what my club does. So getting that data really helped them to kind of give me that personalized experience. That data is like it's not like my birthday and my mother's maiden name and my password, its literally just a football team that I like so yeah, no one would have qualms giving over that kind of information. And I'm sure there's [inaudible 25:00].
Hillel Berg: 25:00 Yeah, like you said, and that makes the entire experience like so much more enjoyable. Because it's not like a, I guess, we're both talking about is that when people use email like a billboard, like, just the blast of something, and we'll hit some people, you may get a personalized experience like that everyone's interested, because everybody talking to them. And I guess that's like number one tip is talk to your audience, talk to the person you're targeting. What do you feel like are the top pitfalls?
Jay Oram: 25:25 I have this and I fully admit to it, and my managers always are pulling me back, I have that shiny syndrome, where something comes up that's brand new is kind of, like, parallax email, or kind of inter, AMP email was a perfect example where Google launched it, like May 15. I was out there coding and trying to figure out what it was. But there was no ESP that could send an email. So it didn't matter what I was doing. And that...
Hillel Berg: 25:54 Could you even test it?
Jay Oram: 25:55 Sorry.
Hillel Berg: 25:55 Could you even test it?
Jay Oram: 25:57 Yeah. They had their own, like developer window that you could create and it give you a preview. And yeah, I think you could send it to your own Gmail, and that was it. And you can only send one email. But yeah, that kind of, you don't need to even adding all these interactive things is not going to make your click through better, or your open rate better, or anything really, all of these things should enhance what the user experiences. And that's what it should be used for. So don't just make an interactive carousel because you can, the interactive carousel should be there because it conveys more information to your audience, and it gives them a better experience in your email. That's why you should use those things. And yeah, that's a top pitfall I see is emails that are filled with stuff that you don't need it, over complicating a message, that kind of thing, another big one is just so much stuff into an email. Like, I can see my look in your face, you've had this before.
Hillel Berg: 26:57 Like today, a new client, they showed me their newsletters, like a page and a half of scrolling, a big paragraph of text, and then some pictures and some other things, like, break it up. And I'm for sure, you know, that's what we're in the business for. To make things better, you know, and for sure, some of the audience doesn't read that paragraph. And they wouldn't rather not see it and just said, and so another one see that we can pictures and things like that. So [inaudible 27:25] maybe a few weeks but...
Jay Oram: 27:28 One of my strategy, the Strategy Team, the head designer, Gary, who I worked with, and they had, like, whenever they talk to our clients, they really share that email on your mobile is like another app, it's another social media app. And your phone is constantly being bombarded with notifications and updates. And you only get that split kind of 10, 20 seconds before someone's distracted by something else. So if your email doesn't have that, open it, draw you in that first 10, 15, 20 seconds, then you've lost it. So it doesn't matter how long it is, you need to get that opening perfect. And every email is different I listen [inaudible 28:10] it's called now. But I get an email that is a really long, it's just basically loads and loads of text. It's one big massive magazine article. And I love that and I read it, but that one specific, one I always open and read, but other emails that have got a tiny little paragraphs of text, sometimes I don't read that, because I'm not interested. So it's definitely testing who and how you send it as well. And yeah, like you've said before, if you AV tester, a long email or a short email, you'll find what your audience wants. So yeah, definitely focus on what's there.
Hillel Berg: 28:43 Do you guys out action rocket, you know, run AV tests for clients, or like, are you selling [inaudible 28:49]?
Jay Oram: 28:51 We try to, we have majority design and Dev. So we don't often see the kind of strategy side of things. But our strategy team is grown in the last year, and a couple of clients we've worked with a bit more. And they are often the limitations are there ESP isn't set up for it. Because we often don't deploy for clients. We just hand over their finished HTML, and then they do the deployment. And we might not see that next part of it. And so, but we do work with them to figure out what they should AV test and what they can do better and things like that. And then we have some clients, we do work with them on the results. But yeah, there's definitely, yeah, I think that's probably more what your agency's kind of working towards, rather than, ours is definitely more [inaudible 29:35] that kind of side.
Hillel Berg: 29:38 Yeah, definitely, in our agency, that a huge part of like, the whole strategy is AV testing, you know, because we want to set up automations and we can constantly be improving. You know, it's like that 1% a day. It makes a huge deal at the end of the year, definitely a strategy everyone should be using.
Jay Oram: 29:52 Yeah, it is growing definitely. Like we're not there with all of our clients, or....
Hillel Berg: 29:57 You're not there, the full agency, really just a part of it. Do you have any favorite brands?
Jay Oram: 30:02 [Inaudible 30:07] been an old favorite. B&Q one of the first people I saw that used the check box hack to kind of have no tab. So having them come in just to see what they're working on is like a nice interactive.
Hillel Berg: 30:17 What is B&Q for the people, who not have being to UK?
Jay Oram: 30:21 B&Q is, I didn't even think about that. A B&Q is like a home improvement, so tall, glue paper and like that kind of thing. So it's not something that is like shout out, like I really want to watch see it. It's kind of like, I'm doing decorate at home, I'll click on the B&Q and see what paint brushes they do or whatever. And but their emails seem to put across like information and ideas in a really nice way that it's a really interesting one to look at. And another brand I really like is an espresso, the coffee capsules, the kind of yeah, their brand is really nice brand throughout the whole of their emails. And I think they have like a nice standout kind of, it's not your run of the mill coffee kind of thing. It's an extra step up to get an espresso coffee. And I think that comes across in their emails as well.. And they're kind of really interesting. And they're the ones I like to receive and look at. So yeah, I think.
Hillel Berg: 31:17 What's your email client? You have an Apple device, I assume?
Jay Oram: 31:21 So I actually have a pixel or Google Pixel phone. So, Gmail is where I receive all my own emails. But yeah, we work on Macs Action Rocket. So yeah, Apple now is there and probably the same as you I've got six mobile phones on my desk, and two PCs, and a Mac ready for testing. So if I want to see an email in anything, I can see it in whatever I like, anyway.
Hillel Berg: 31:44 That's like the big brands like you really need to do real device testing, as opposed to just like [inaudible 31:50] it or using a software?
Jay Oram: 31:53 We found that the best thing to do is use Email on Acid or litmus test. And then the final check is just to send it to the light devices just have a peek and see if anything's changed. Sometimes it is quicker for us to update devices, then wait for the Email on Acid or litmus to update their renderings. And we want to get the latest as soon as possible. But also, there is sometimes we actually use Email on Acid and Litmus. And we also have clients obviously have their own so return path or something like that. And often, that email might look slightly wrong in a couple of different ones, but for different reasons. And the kind of final test is to send it to a live device and see what the actual email client is doing. Especially some older versions like Android 567, those kind of older androids. They're not as common on Litmus and Email on Acid. But we've got the device in case we need it. And some of our clients say like, we know, we've got a 10 15% audience on Android seven, and so [inaudible 33:00]. So yeah, we've got them all in case we want them and just buy out. Yeah, testing starts with Email on Acid. And then what we can't do an Email on Acid, we will do in Litmus or the opposite way around. And then yeah, we'll send it to all of our devices. And then once we're happy, we actually then give it to another coder. And they do the check all over again, to make sure we haven't missed anything. [Inaudible 33:21] and no, it's just, there's only two of us. There's two and the code team [inaudible 33:27]. And then yeah, fingers crossed by the end of that we've caught [inaudible 33:33].
Hillel Berg: 33:33 Something you mentioned a little bit earlier accessibility. So you want to talk a little bit about that. What does that mean, we're talking about accessibility in email?
Jay Oram: 33:41 Accessibility is how someone can access the content that you're giving. And obviously, you want as many people as possible to see your email or receive the information from your email as best as possible. And for the UK, we know that 20% of the UK have some kind of disability. So that's one in five people have something that could possibly stop them seeing or getting your email as well as possible. And then Elliot Ross, you mentioned earlier, he also kind of brought up in one of his talks that you do get situational accessibility issues as well where maybe you can't reach your phone, because you're holding a baby or you've got one hand, you've broken your arm. So it's not a permanent disability, but you've broken your arm and you can't access, you can't use two hands or partial hearing loss or something like that. So accessibility is just about using all the tools and code and design possible to make your email as accessible to as many people as possible. So things like making the text nice and clear. So you're not using a font which is all joined together and difficult to read or squashed up or the fonts really small. So it's harder for people with eyesight problems that can't see things. And the contrast is there so that if some people maybe are colorblind or they have other issues with seeing or maybe they're looking in a low light environment or something like that maybe they can't differentiate between colors. And so if your text is like a light gray on a white background, sometimes that's really difficult to see. So making sure that contrast ratio is there. And then also on the other kind of more extreme side is if maybe you can't see it at all. And you need a screen reader or a tool like Alexa or Google or something to read your email to you. And if your email is made up of a load of images, which don't have any alternative text, or maybe it's made up of loads of devs, and they're all in funny orders, so read your email out in a really weird way. And that possibly isn't the best experience for all of your recipients. So accessibility is just about from the design, making sure it looks great, and everyone can see it. And it's all clear. And then in the code, making sure that there's all the things that are necessary for everyone to be able to read it. So that's kind of, an Action Rocket, we start at that base level of it has to be accessible. And then we make all of our design choices and coding starts from there. And so we use semantic tags. So h1 to h6, or however many you want to go to, and then paragraph tags, and making sure we have area tags and section tags on things so that everything makes sense to a screen reader and added extras like that styled or text, in case the images. Because another thing, like I mentioned before about all image emails is if someone has images blocked, maybe they're a business and they've blocked images by default, or the first time you've sent them an email, if your email is all images, and they block them completely, then maybe there's nothing there. And so the all text, we can actually style it to look like the rest of the text in your email and make it look nicer and get the important information across as well.
Hillel Berg: 36:51 Yeah, and they could be opening your email in an elevator. You can start, you know, just slow to load.
Jay Oram: 36:57 Yeah, exactly. [Inaudible 37:00] Yeah, like, because some people use the argument of, "Well, I work in central London, there's 5g, there's brand like super speed, Wi Fi, there's Wi Fi on the trains, why would I ever need to worry about sending like a two megabyte gift or something?" And then you say to him, "Well, what if you go into a tunnel?" Or Yeah, like you said, you go into a building where the signals not very good, or the one time you open it, you're in the countryside away on holiday, and all those situations. And then also, if your audience is global, then there's different accessibility at all over so yeah, it's something to think about.
Hillel Berg: 37:36 I was shocked. A friend of mine sent me an email and asked me about video in email, and she sent me an email, and there was a GIF. That was like, a minute long GIF. It was like 20 megabytes, I was like, and “Who the heck send something like that?" That seems insane.
Jay Oram: 37:52 Yeah. Also, if you've got a, there's Dylan who works at Litmus, he shared with me a website where you can put in your website, and it will tell you how much it costs in different places of the world to download all of the information. And so I'll find that and share it with you so you can share with people but yeah, it basically like you put in your 10 kilobyte all text email. And you can see that across the world with maybe someone who doesn't have access to Wi Fi, and they have to use cellular data, and they're on 3g, and it costs them so much money to download a megabyte. And you think, "Wow, that's the big thing." Whereas, if you sent a 20 megabyte gift that could be their whole mum data wiped out. Yeah, definitely. Got to think about those kind of things.
Hillel Berg: 38:37 Yeah, no, it's definitely not something I was thinking about. Now, there was a big hubbub this year, I think, towards the summer and sort of becoming everyone was talking about dark mode, and how that's affecting the email world and it affected everything, really have nothing to do with Corona really. But the dark mode is definitely here. And it's gonna be here and get more and more popular. Like, the deaf community started dark world know, like I said, like growing up, only people are using like those dark background editors for coders. But now it's getting much more popular because it's easier on the eyes and batteries. The next thing is, oh, my God, the latest version of Android. Whenever I got low battery, my entire Gmail went to dark mode, it probably happened around June or July.
Jay Oram: 39:24 Dark mode, it's been around for a long time, but it's kind of hit the mainstream in the last year, isn't it? So, I think I read that one of the earliest apps that ever used dark mode was an app called reader. And its purpose was that you could download website pages to read later. And they were the first app that when it got to nighttime, or you said you was in a dark room, you could switch to dark mode, so it would switch the background to black and the text white. And that was kind of the first app where dark mode was like actually called dark mode. And originally it was for reading in the dark and then obviously, the first computer screens ever came out with black with the green letters on. And that was just because they couldn't make a white screen. That was nothing to do with trying to make it dark. But yeah, like OLED screens, like you said, the latest screens, if you're using black, it's less battery power. So that made sense. And the real push for email client seems to have come from operating systems. So Apple and Android said, the like, around summer, your app, if it doesn't work on dark mode, we're just gonna force it to do dark mode. So then that was it. Everyone had to do whatever Apple's dark mode was or create your own custom styles for dark mode. So that kind of work pushed it to. And yeah, and like you said, my android on the latest, where is Android 1112. And that has, as soon as I turn Battery Saver on everything goes to dark mode, including Gmail and my wife's phone actually came default dark mode as an Android. So yeah, there's possibly a lot of people that are using dark mode more than we're using it before. And yeah, from a developer point of view, it meant that all of our designs overnight, possibly changed. And we didn't have as much control over how they looked. And that was kind of a scramble for a couple of months where people were trying to find little ways to target different things with CSS or if there was ways to override it and do bits and pieces. And yeah, I was kind of what, me and you were on email geeks. And everyone was kind of chatting back and forth about, "Oh, I found this media query prefers color scheme. I found this meta tag about doc proposed, doc ally." And then yeah, all the other ones are like the data attributes that Mark found for Outlook. And then ever, like loads of people started to cramp up with it.
Hillel Berg: 41:43 Referencing there.
Jay Oram: 41:43 Yeah, Mark Robbins. Yeah. I think Remy was one of the first people to find the kind of preferred color scheme. And then obviously, litmus came out with the first article on how to deal with it. From Alice Lee. And then shortly, I wrote a big article for Campaign Monitor and some stuff for Action Rocket as well to try and kind of get as much information all together that the whole community kind of found, and then more people kind of had it.
Hillel Berg: 42:10 I made my own article. And there's a lot based on what you did.
Jay Oram: 42:13 Yeah. Like everyone trying to like came together, as we normally do in the email community to go, "Oh, my God, everything's kind of hit the fan, what do we do now." And everyone kind of worked together to try and solve things, which is a really nice thing to be part of. But yeah, and then Action Rocket, we then took that on board. And probably the same as yourself there, the minimum we do now is to make sure that it looks not broken in dark mode. And so on the worst possible place, which sometimes there's a tossup between windows 10 now in dark mode, and the office 365 app in dark mode, and we make sure that everything works, and it's readable. And you can see everything whether that's by making sure images are PNGs to begin with, or making sure dark, thin lines have an outline or something like that. And right the way up to, we can make a totally custom dark mode version show in clients that will support the CSS. So we work on that range. But yeah, the basic is it will work and it will look [inaudible 43:15].
Hillel Berg: 43:18 Should never break, it's a good rule. All emails every show [inaudible 43:23].
Jay Oram: 43:23 What we'll start from anyway. But yeah. I mean, it was a big shock. And I think a lot of people, but it just needs to be on marketers minds, I think. And that's something that we still find that people don't know about. So we still have clients that maybe they don't have a development team, and they just use the template that they've always had. And the first time they realize something's wrong with dark mode is someone gets a new phone and opens their email and go, "Oh, my God, what is this?" Yeah, so it's still no out there. So the more people that know that dark mode is a thing, and it's definitely, definitely good.
Hillel Berg: 44:01 Yeah, for sure. I really love what you did in your article, specifically, it's just that little, putting a white line around, you have dark logos, or a white line around it. And then in the dark, it was really awesome.
Jay Oram: 44:12 Yeah, and it's not a big change. Another thing that marketers shouldn't worry about is that dark mode doesn't mean that your whole system needs to change. It's just that maybe like, if you have a dark logo, I can remember which one I saw there was like a brand that was a really big brand. And but their logo was just like a black circle with the icon in the middle. And then in dark mode, it disappeared. Sight point is the lack of web design, and Information Agency. And those guys there, loads of them, actually, there's quite a lot of dark logos, and they all disappear on that dark background. So just by adding an outline, like you said, it will just means you don't lose your logo, which is obviously a really important part of the email. So social media icons as well, the little white there, little black F or the little black bird for Twitter, just totally disappear on black background.
Hillel Berg: 45:05 Yeah, I think we had a guy that you had a Twitter bird in a circle or something like that. Yeah, this is the bird disappeared.
Jay Oram: 45:14 If you want people to click on stuff they need to be there.
Hillel Berg: 45:19 Alright, is there anything you want to add or remove? You have any questions for me?
Jay Oram: 45:26 Like obviously, I code whatever someone needs me to do. But what's the way that you code emails like as a starting place? Like where do you start from?
Hillel Berg: 45:35 Oh, yeah, that's a really good question. Because I don't start with a PSD. I'm not a designer, I don't consider myself a designer, but like, I do a decent design, because you've been building emails from a PSD for a while, you know how things should more or less look. So I use, like, the hybrid method on all my emails with custom CSS wherever needed, to move things around and, and you play with it, fun about emails, and the fun side of email is that you could put table on a table and just make everything work somehow, you just add another table inside it, and then, that'll work or you know, things like that. But yeah, I mean, that was such an eye opening thing, like for me is talking about like in I think 2015. Now we can get Gmail to work. Because Gmail was such a bugaboo until that hybrid method came out, Nicole Merlyn, God bless her soul. But yeah, that was, I mean, I didn't really consider myself a developer until that article, like, I was using, like WYSIWYG, and we buy like an Envato, templates. And we were like, in the end, I don't know if they bloat them on purpose. But like, there's so much code, and this all boilerplate kind of stuff. And just for someone who's not used to that, like you're afraid to do anything except change the text. And then like, if your text a little longer than what they had in the template, you just broke the whole thing, I give you like a little title if your title is a little longer than, you broken. So at some point, it's like, you know what, this is really frustrating. I want to know how to code and I just rebuilt our template using that method. And that was how I really got started. Yeah, if you start doing that for like, three or four years in a row, then you really know what you're doing. But yeah, for my clients, yeah, I just build using that hybrid method, you can get as creative as you want. That's sort of the fun part of it.
Jay Oram: 47:24 Do you have a specific tools as well? Like, I know, you spoke to Avi recently about passwords? I think so.
Hillel Berg: 47:31 Who do I speak to?
Jay Oram: 47:33 Avi? For about yet about [inaudible 47:37]?
Hillel Berg: 47:36 Sure. Avi Goldman. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he's working on that. What's it called? Dispatch. Is it called dispatch? No. [Inaudible 47:45]. Yeah, I don't know everything. I did some real mill, package. Yeah, he did an amazing thing. I was very impressed with his tool. Because there are so many things I use, my main tool is Litmus building. I am in builder all the time. But it's always like there's things that bother me in Litmus, you know, like just stupid things like grammar check. I'm using Grammarly in everything in the rendering window, it can't read it. So what happen is, and this is such a frustrating thing, I build an email for a client. And I do my own check. But like, there's no [inaudible 48:24]. It's also thing about international stuff. Because the guy writing the content, he was actually Australian. So he spelled it his way and the audience is really American. So it shouldn't have any, using it, for color or things like, so. So what happened is when I'm copying it over, and it pulls up the text version in the ESP, and then Grammarly is taken over, and it's like, "Oh, yeah, you got misspelled, need comma there." And you just have to go back to the code and fix it all up and put it back again. So this [inaudible 48:53] sample and I spoke to Dylan actually, Dylan Smith, from Litmus, we had a call and he actually gave me like, I don't know, $10 or $20, from Amazon for the courtesy. Yeah, the other thing I actually asked him to do is we can get a, take a screenshot directly from builder of what you just put in, you know, you probably do the same thing, because you have to get approvals. Right? Are you taking pictures of the email that you just coded?
Jay Oram: 49:16 Yeah, well, I use, either parcel has got the kind of, you can send the link or there's email preview that you've probably seen that as well. And that you can just plug in the code and it will send you a screenshot.
Hillel Berg: 49:29 Oh, yeah, I heard of that tool.
Jay Oram: 49:30 Yeah, that's super handy. I mean, I do also use for the inbuilt developer tools in Chrome that you do a full page screenshot as well. So it kind of depending on where I am.
Hillel Berg: 49:42 More late, like more recently, I have one client but like about, I don't know, six months to a year ago. I wasn't really using and I learned a lot with this client because she kept asking for different things. And she was so like seven emails with the same like eight bullet points. And then I changed one but not the other seven. I was like, started to make partials and never used partials before really until then. I use a lot of, they use it all the time. All the time like crazy. Yeah, exactly. You have all your shortcuts, tab button. You know, things like that. One call, two call, three call. It's makes development really easy. Yeah, what I'm doing is I'm doing a preview onto Apple Mail and then opening it in Digg and then taking a screenshot of that. Just to see more work than it should be, but yeah, Avi Goldman, he incorporated all the things. I thought were missing them. I wish him a lot of luck and give him a domino. He's got a shout out here. A lot of people got shootouts in this episode, so we should tag them in when we publish this. But yeah, I see there's other I mean, I never tried stripo or any design tools, but stripo really just drag and drop. Right?
Jay Oram: 50:54 Yeah, you can do some custom stuff with it. And yeah, there's mainly drag and drop. And then yeah, I mean, there's so app out there now that I don't think I can name them all, [inaudible 51:04].
Hillel Berg: 51:03 Yeah. You know, dispatchers doing, they are doing some kind of thing with video.
Jay Oram: 51:08 No, perfectly. No, no, I've heard of it. But I'm not properly looked into it.
Hillel Berg: 51:11 I haven't probably look into as well.
Jay Oram: 51:12 Because many things coming up.
Hillel Berg: 51:14 Yeah, now because a lot of cool stuff happening. And something I'm personally working on and trying to get into is the b2b world more. And there's a lot of cool opportunities there in terms of video, video replies, things like that automated replies that our videos are very cool. There's a lot of platforms fighting for that traffic, for that capability.
Jay Oram: 51:35 I've heard of playable.
Hillel Berg: 51:36 Oh, yeah, I haven't heard of playable. But I've heard a bunch. I think it's called Bongiorno or something like that, or, something like that. But yeah, I've heard good things about it. I'm looking forward, recommending it to clients, and then seeing our work exactly. There's a lot of exciting things a great time to be an email, I feel like, there's a lot of exciting things happening. And I think more and more companies and businesses are realizing that like it should be a huge part of their strategy.
Jay Oram: 52:03 This year is probably helped as well, if more people are, than last year, more emails definitely gonna be used more.
Hillel Berg: 52:10 Absolutely, all these stores that couldn't just depend on store traffic to drive revenue had to, in order to, overnight, really try to drive revenue with email and became their main focus. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jay Oram: 52:24 No. Thank you.
Hillel Berg: 52:26 Yeah. Tell your friends about it.
Jay Oram: 52:27 Yeah.
Hillel Berg: 52:29 All right. Have a great one.
Jay Oram: 52:31 You too.
Hillel Berg: 52:32 Happy New Year.
Jay Oram: 52:33 Yeah. Happy New year.
Hillel Berg: 52:36 Cheers. All right. That concludes our show for today. Thank you so much for joining us for Inboxing. We'll be back. We don't know yet who our next guest is but we know we're gonna have Calf Pay January 20, sets in three weeks. The just published a brand new book called Holistic Marketing. It should be a really, really interesting episode. But we're hoping to do another few episodes even before then. So stick around, you can get updates on my Facebook page. It's Hillel Berg Marketing on Facebook. It's facebook.com/email marketing consultants, and I am also on YouTube. It's a little harder to find. And that's it. Yeah. Happy New Year to everyone and good night.