Email and Cloud Computing

by michaelin Email & Cloud Computingon Posted on

Cloud Computing
HTML Email Templates and Newsletters

Pure CSS layouts are used to design my web pages, but that approach just won’t hold up in an email environment.

  • Have used Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, VerticalResponse and AWeber for all email campaigns.
  • I use CSS to format content, including font size and color, basic border and background color, simple padding and margin effects.  For the layout I use Tables.
  • Templates and Newsletters are always tested with images turned off (Thunderbird, Outlook and Gmail now has images turned off by default).
  • Web-based version of the email and a text-only or mobile edition are also created for maximun exposure.
  • All newsletters and Templates are checked through “SpamCheck” as a last test.
  • The three reporting categories on all campaigns are deliverability, conversion or sales and open rates.
  • Other reporting metrics which are used in all campaigns include Delivery rate, Open rate, Click-to-deliver rate (CTDR) and Subscriber retention rate.
  • All campaigns are measured with Delivery rate, Open rate, Click-to-deliver rate (CTDR) and Subscriber retention rate.

–
These “Best Practises” help insure that the Newsletters and Templates render correctly in all e-mail clients.

Gmail for Hosted Domains

G-Mail Apps for business including POP3, DNS, CNAME, MX records.

  • Set up Mail, Google Docs and  calendar resources, including creating team calendars and delegating calendar acces.
  • Set up domain alias to receive mail at an additional domain.
  • Enabling Gmail Labs and setting up Google Tasks and Gmail Offline.
  • Configure email signatures
  • Set up custom URLs and web address mapping
  • IMAP Migration of mail to Gmai with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 using Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook
  • Optimizing and troubleshooting IMAP configurations
  • Setup Moblie devices to received email – Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android
  • Whitelist or blacklist by domain name
  • Appended outbound footers to all messages
  • Developed an internal support process (i.e. form a help desk)
  • Notified all users about the upcoming Google Apps transition