Email Marketing
What makes a good subject line?
Subject lines are an important part of your email, so here's how to not mess them up.
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Taxi is the sum of hundreds of small parts — all of which make a big difference to how you make email.
Whether your work is creating and building an email's content, or making the Email Design Systems (EDS) for your team — email is full of technical details that slow you down, risk causing an error, and distract you from creating great work. The last thing you need is to be bogged down in technical details that slow down your workflow. To speed this up, you'd usually call upon technical experts to help out, but this would slow up their workflow too. And the cycle continues.
We at Taxi, being #emailgeeks ourselves, understand this. That's why we spend a lot of time working with our customers to understand what makes email hard, and we build ways to make it easier. So, whether you're a marketer or an email designer, you can be confident that what you create will be as you intended. Let's look at some of the ways we help you:
Images are a fundamental part of most email designs, and custom imagery or illustration can make your emails shine. However getting these right isn't always straightforward, as each email client, platform and device seem to have minds of their own when it comes to rendering them. Including an image with an unwelcome attribute is easily done too, especially since finding out what attributes your image has before you upload them is tricky. Don't worry, Taxi has a plethora of features to prevent broken images. Here's how we help!
For those not versed in the technical details, a colour profile is what computer graphics use to display colour in anything visual and rotated images are exactly that - images that are turned in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction.
Whilst useful in many aspects of design, when it comes to email they can cause problems:
Note the difference in how the image is rendered. The left portion is how the photo should look, and the right is what Chrome shows if the image is using a CMYK colour profile
Our new and exciting Expectations feature is a great way to prevent and warn you about these potential pitfalls (and more!). Short messages will appear to let you know so you can fix the issue there and then. And (even better), if uploading from your browser, Taxi will automatically fix the colour profile and EXIF-rotation for you! Read more about how Expectations can give you more control over your Email Design Systems.
Taxi can detect, and notify you about, what types of image files you upload to your emails, such as .jpeg, .psd, .png etc. This may not sound like much, but it's a saviour against accidentally uploading an incompatible file type like .psd or .zip and having them not appear properly in your final emails!
Google recently tightened its rules around mixed content, effectively blocking all images that aren't hosted on secure servers. If you're hosting your images on HTTP, that means they might not display for subscribers reading them in Chrome.
When you're hosting your images with Taxi, you can rest assured that they're provided via a secure connection — so that you don't run into any issues. Learn more about image hosting with Taxi.
The meat of any email - your copy is important to get right. But despite all the spelling, grammar and readability checks you put it through, this could be undone by technical aspects you hadn't even thought about. Taxi has your back here though!
Text copied from external sources can carry across mark-up code that you may not have anticipated. This could be rich text (bold, italics etc.) or text colour. Taxi will automatically tidy up the code behind this to limit or eradicate any chance of the extra markup causing problems further along. And even if you don't use Taxi, we are still here to help with this! Use our 'What does it paste?' tool to check your copy's mark-up, and it's completely free!
Who knew using foreign letters and characters in your copy can cause headaches? Forgetting to convert these so that they are supported can mean they just don't show up, and this isn't a result anyone wants! But does anyone remember this? Our Product team at Taxi have so you don't have to. Taxi automatically deciphers the native format of the email text and then converts it to UTF-8 on export. That means foreign characters will render reliably, without you having to change your copy editing workflow.
Creating multi language emails is hard! (Yep I said it.) But Taxi supports right-to-left content, meaning you can control the layout of your campaigns for both RTL and LTR languages from one Email Design System. Taxi Syntax enables you to switch between two directions, supports punctuation, numbers and design formatting. Sending multi language emails doesn't have to be hard anymore!
Email Design Systems form the building blocks of your emails, containing all the editable information, guidelines and controls you want to give your email marketers so they have the best and easiest brand experience they can. Here are some of the small things Taxi does to achieve this.
When you upload the HTML for your Email Design System, we scan it for things that might cause issues. These include:
It's very easy to make a typo or leave things in HTML that aren't supposed to be there (victims of copy & paste). The EDS Syntax checker will let you know if you leave anything between the head tags and body tags, which can cause some oddities in certain browsers.
Taxi doesn't want to pre-empt what you 'may' have meant to do and change it automatically. It's your code after all, and we always say we don't touch it! Instead, Taxi is designed to scan your code on upload and let you know about what may be an unintentional error.
Taxi also checks on any mistakes in the Syntax (our proprietary code that wraps your code, telling our email editor what to do with it). Meaning your EDS is 'double-locked'.
We're all human, and mistakes are bound to happen. The fact that Taxi tells you if your Email Design System has any Syntax errors and where these errors are is an amazing time saver. It makes it so much easier to update your Syntax and get your EDS up and running as quickly as possible.
When checking Syntax, Taxi also suggests what you might have meant to code. This helps you not only identify a potential problem, but guide you to a solution. For a full list of what messages you could see when uploading code to your EDS, see our help centre.
Taxi has many more features to make sure that your emails work and to counteract the many hidden issues that can face email creators, and is always adding more. All without the need to have technical experts on hand to discover and fix them, as this takes up time and resources better placed elsewhere.
To find out more, why not visit our website and discover just what Taxi can do for you and your team.
Taxi helps marketing teams make better quality email, quicker, at a larger scale.
