With an ever expanding range of mobile and tablet screens to cater for, choosing the right type of responsive coding for your emails is an important decision for any marketer.

Two of the most popular approaches are adaptive coding and fluid coding. But which will deliver the best results depends on the design and content of each individual email or template. Here’s a general guide to which type of code you should use, and when.

First, in order to access Amazon SES, you will need to have or register for an Amazon Web Services Account which you can do here. Once signed in, you’ll be presented with an impressive selection of Amazon Web Services Products including Beanstalk, S3, EC2, VPC, CloudWatch, Elastic MapReduce, RDS, SNS. Initially quite a daunting prospect!

Welcome to The Alchemy Worx Subscriber’€™s Choice Award Q4 2013. As the busiest quarter of the year, there was no shortage of campaigns to choose from. But we’€™ve scoured through our inbox to narrow it down to 3 of our stand-out favorites.

Take Email-Worx as a case in point; 5 issues into the campaign, we can tell you that the average open rate is 56%. This has dropped from a high of 63% in issue 1 by an average of 2.2% an issue. The average unique click rate for the same period is 24% dropping from a high of 31% to 17% in the last issue.

Setting up triggered emails is an easy way to ensure your communications are relevant and timely as they’re based on your subscriber’s recent interactions with your brand, product or service. For instance, there may be simple actions or changes in customer behaviour that you can use as the basis for new triggered activity that complements your existing messaging.

When developing your subscription process, legal considerations are extremely important. Legislation (created with SPAM prevention in mind) will have a major impact on how or if consent is required; what information you collect; how you handle your data and even unsubscription.
In the UK, there are three pieces of legislation that you need to comply with – however, it is important to bear in mind that legal compliance is only the first step. Subscriber perceptions of your email marketing activity are just as important. The fact that your campaign is legal will not stop subscribers from hitting the spam button and damaging your reputation with an ISP.

“I have heard that ISPs are beginning to base reputation scores on engagement – how will this affect my deliverability?”

The first response I give to anyone who asks me this question is: “Says Who?” Swiftly followed by: “You have nothing to worry about.”

An Alchemy Worx’s study of over 600 subject lines across 200 million messages showed an unexpected relationship between click-to-open rates and subject line length, suggesting very strongly that past subject line analysis may have led email marketers seriously astray.