Chris Hexton offers four tips to improve how your e-mails perform:

1. Write strong subject lines. You need to be relevant and clear without giving everything away.
2. Craft personal e-mails. That means both using your customer’s name—it really works!—and writing in a friendly, personal style.
3. Include a P.S. People read it, so it’s “a golden opportunity to make sure your customers read the CTA.”
4. Be careful with images. Not everyone’s e-mail program will render your beautiful, image-heavy e-mail, so make sure you have a text fallback.

Remember to test every technique you try, since your audience may be different. And always remember that you can spoil your perfect e-mail with a crappy landing page.

¶

Alex Chitu:

You might remember the [do a barrel roll] Easter Egg which rotates Google’s search results page. The query is so popular that it’s the first suggestion when you type “do a” and Google Instant automatically shows the results for [do a barrel roll] and triggers the Easter Egg… This is an example of [an] Easter Egg that disrupts the user experience and makes Google Search more difficult to use.

¶

Democratic technologists and online marketers have organized institutions to allow individuals to collaborate and share ideas–what Patrick Ruffini calls a “free market” of ideas. Republicans, by contrast, often rely on top-down direction and old-guard consultants.

¶

You should design web pages with responsive techniques instead of creating separate versions of the page for each device, Josh Byers writes. He offers three reasons to use responsive design:

1. It’s better for SEO. In fact, Google specifically recommends that you have only one version of each page.
2. It’s easier to maintain. You don’t have to make changes across several versions of a page, and you don’t have to create separate versions for each new device.
3. It offers a better reading experience. If you follow a mobile-first design philosophy, your content is optimized automatically for all devices.

¶

How should you describe the content in a personalized application? For example, do you label an e-mail settings page “my e-mail settings” or “your e-mail settings”? Dustin Curtis comes down in favor of the latter:

After thinking about this stuff for a very long time, I’ve settled pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that interfaces should mimic social creatures, that they should have personalities, and that I should be communicating with the interface rather than the interface being an extension of myself. Tools have almost always been physical objects that are manipulated tactually. Interfaces are much more abstract, and much more intelligent; they far more closely resemble social interactions than physical tools.

¶