It seems like every holiday season we see companies explore new and creative ways to make their email campaigns stand out from the competition.

This year is proving to be no different. Recently Neiman Marcus Group has made its presence known in inboxes around the world by using large animated GIFs to capture user attention and generate response.

While this marks a new development for Neiman, who have traditionally featured static imagery in their emails, animated GIFs themselves have been around pretty much since the creation of World Wide Web.

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A ‘little wonder’ is a seemingly insignificant action or event that eventually has a large impact on your long-term situation. In the second installment of this two-part series, Jordan Lane looks at some email little wonders — simple ways to improve your email programs — and the key benefits from each of them.

Like diligently saving pocket change, there are some easy additions you can make to your email campaigns that can bring large rewards in the long run. Yesterday we looked  at two tips for improving your email header text. Today we’ll look a third piece of your email header, as well as some straightforward technologies that can bring long-term success.

Ask to add the ‘from’ address to the safe sender list

Email marketers live and die by their deliverability rates. Often times, getting one’s emails into the subscriber’s inbox consistently is a victory in and of itself.  Once an email has been delivered successfully, it is important to do what one can to ensure that future emails will also be delivered. By respectfully asking subscribers to add your sender address to their address book (white listing), marketers not only improve deliverability rates but also help ensure that future deliverability rates stay high. In many cases subscribers will gladly white list an address. Like the hosted version and mobile device link, it is a good idea to place the from address white listing request in the header of an emails. It might be beneficial to test the placement of the white listing request, hosted and mobile version links in the header. Does placing the links on one line or multiple lines produce better results? I’d recommend testing this out. Marketers may also want to consider also placing this reminder in the footer as well as the header of the email.

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