Tag: email

Don’t Design Your Emails

I do hate HTML emails with passion.  They are always too heavy, often bloated, render horrible, and just plain annoying.  I miss the old good days, when email clients were warning users that their signature was too long, spanning more than 4 lines.  Today, everybody is sending out HTML emails whether they need to or not.  Whether it’s for the signatures, corporate branding, or the “marketing value” or the “professional look”.

Finally, there is someone on my side of the fence, who actually tested the effects of HTML emails and suggests that plain emails are more efficient even for the marketing purposes.  Read the whole thing – “Don’t Design Your Emails“, especially if you are involved with email marketing.

The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email.

[…]

The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.

Replies to welcome emails were tripled. Cold emails were getting 30-35% open rates and 3% conversion rates, which is incredible.

MailChimp vs. Amazon SES + Mailwizz

Here’s an interesting story of moving away from MailChimp to a combined setup of Amazon SES and MailWizz, which resulted in overall 92% reduction of the monthly bill.  Given it’s not the same functionality, but if you are technical enough and your requirements are simpler than all the functionality of the MailChimp, this looks like a good alternative.

Smart Reply in Gmail

Google Blog announces that Smart Reply feature is coming to Gmail on both Android and iOS.  It has been introduced earlier in other products like Google Inbox and Allo, and is apparently so useful that about 12% of all replies in those applications are done with the help of Smart Reply.

There’s also a link to the Google Research Blog article which has more details on the technology behind (machine learning, artificial intelligence, native language processing, and all the usual suspects).

Morphos – morphological solution in PHP for English and Russian

If you ever had to deal with morphology in English, you probably found one or two libraries to help you out.  But if you had to do that for Russian, than I’m sure you are missing a few hairs, and the ones that you still have are grayer than they used to be.  I’ve got some good news for you though, now there is Morphos (GitHub repository).

Morphos is a morphological solution written completely in the PHP language. Supports Russian and English. Provides classes to decline First/Middle/Last names/nouns and generate cardinal numerals.

Just look at this beauty!

var_dump($dec->getForms($user_name, $dec->detectGender($user_name)));
/* Will produce something like
  array(6) {
    ["nominativus"]=>
    string(8) "Иван"
    ["genetivus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["dativus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивану"
    ["accusative"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["ablativus"]=>
    string(12) "Иваном"
    ["praepositionalis"]=>
    string(15) "об Иване"
  }
*/

Just this alone can make user interfaces and emails so much better.  But there is more to it than that.