Over the last few posts I have been talking about the migration steps Outskirts Press is currently involved in to transition our web presence to RWD (responsive web design). Last week I talked about the first milestone, landing pages.
Email communication is the second milestone, and this is such a large undertaking that it is on-going even as we proceed to the third milestone, newsletters, which I will discuss next time.
There are many ways we communicate with our clients via email, so transitioning our email communication to RWD is a big project. The main way we communicate via email is also the most common — when one of our authors writes us an email and we respond (or vice versa). Since this form of communication rarely includes graphics, and is almost universally in text-format, this type of email communication does not require a migration to RWD. Simple emails already look fine across all forms of devices.
The next type of email communication we have with our clients are “front-end” communications. These are a combination of automatic and “human” emails that communicate with our non-published authors. While the majority of these emails do not contain graphics, either, a migration process is necessary because many of them were previously formatted in HTML to “make them look nicer.” Well, they looked great on computer monitors and tablets, but were often too small to read on phones. Hence the necessity to migrate them to RWD, so they look great regardless of the device our authors read them on.
Another type of email communication is our trademarked Marketing COACH, which consistently provides creative, online assistance, coaching, and help to our published authors for literally years after publication. No other publisher offers anything like it. Most of these emails contain graphics and links (especially to our author community pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+) and therefore the migration to RWD was very important. Needless to say, changing years and years of marketing emails is a daunting undertaking, and this is a process that is currently on-going, even as the next stages are also being worked on. Here’s an example of a new Marketing COACH email in RWD as it appears on desktop monitors and tablets vs. smart phones.
The final type of email communication is our newsletter, which is distributed via email and also available on our website. We distribute two newsletters a month, at the beginning and middle of each month. Tomorrow’s newsletter will be our first newsletter in RWD, and one more milestone we’ve completed. More about the RWD newsletter next time…
President of Outskirts Press 