Make your email marketing viral with Maxmail

One of the best ways to build your mailing list is by collecting referrals.

With Maxmail, when you send out a newsletter, you can include an HTML hyperlink anywhere inside the Newsletter by adding the #ForwardMail# tag. When the newsletter is sent to your subscribers, they will be able to click on the #ForwardMail# link (you can control the text label) and come to a landing page that looks like the one below.

At this stage your subscribers can forward the newsletter to their friends and also opt them into your mailing list for future mail outs.

Take a look at the following video tutorial to see how the entire process works out.

Maxmail

Email standards for HTML newsletters – Nobody cares

It’s been almost 10 years now since the broader web design world was introduced to the ideas, and the importance, of web standards. The Web Standards Project taught us all that we shouldn’t have to code the same page twice for Netscape and Internet Explorer. By designing to web standards, and with the help of increasing browser support, we could reduce the time and money spent coding and make lighter, faster, more accessible websites.

Unfortunately, just like that Celine Dion song from Titanic, HTML email rendering has been left in 1998. Getting even a relatively simple design to work in the 10 or 12 major email clients can be a very frustrating task, and support is getting worse, not better. It’s time for web designers and email client developers to realise that we need to follow the path that web standards for browsers has cut so clearly.
HTML email is here to stay

Designers, particularly web standards designers, have not shown a lot of love for the idea of HTML email. Key figures in the industry have spoken out against it, and the general approach has been very much ‘Don’t do it’.

Real time HTML Newsletter Acid Test

Does anyone has anything to say about the lack of Email standards with rendering of HTML emails across different mail clients?

I find it particularly frustrating trying to integrate an HTML email that is cross-mail client compatible.

So we have decided to build this new live Acid Test tool which will check for compliance across the following mail clients per HTML email.

Apple Mail
Eudora
Entourage
Outlook 2007
Gmail
Lotus Notes 08
Yahoo Mail
MSN Web Mail
Windows Live Mail
Mozilla thunderbird

The Acid test works along side the newsletter creation tool/HTML Editor which will process the HTML syntax of an email, check across 17 CSS properties that are partially/not supported across some of the mail clients and show the user a score for each mail client.

Have a look at this video tutorial to see how Maxmail provides you with a robust solution to combat the increasingly frustrating job of making sure your HTML emails look the same across every mail client.

We would love to hear your comments or suggestions regardnig an ACID Test of HTML emails – Help us improve it.

Maxmail Acid Test Demo