Email Design Podcast #59: Email Scandals, A Preview Text Hack, and Sending Email via…Slack?

In the 59th episode of The Email Design Podcast, hosts Kevin Mandeville and Jason Rodriguez talk about recent email controversies surrounding Unroll.me and Adidas, a little-known preview text hack, sending email via Slack, and more. Be sure to follow along and join in the discussion on Twitter using #EmailDesignPodcast.

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In this episode:

• (0:27) Unroll.me catches heat for selling anonymized user data | Unroll.me’s response: We discuss the Unroll.me controversy which was revealed in a New York Times article about Uber’s business practices. Unroll.me collected email receipts from Lyft which in turn sold the anonymized user data to Uber who used that as a proxy to gauge the health of Lyft’s business.
• (8:11) Adidas subject line mishap: Following the Boston Marathon, Adidas sent out an email to runners saying, “Congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon!” Cue the social media outrage over the insensitivity given the horrific 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. We give our takes on how we think this may have happened and how egregious of an error it was.
• (15:22) The little-known preview text hack you’ll want to use in every email: We break down a neat little trick to use for preview text whitespace – ‌ . You simply have your custom preheader text as the first content in your email and then place this whitespace hack directly after it to avoid any unwanted content creeping into your preview text.
• (19:09) Slinky: A new Sketch plugin to export your Sketch design as an HTML email.
• (22:46) SendPulse for Slack: SendPulse introduced an integration to send email campaigns directly in Slack. We discuss if this is something users actually want and the potential use cases for it.
• (26:26) Email of the Week: Netflix’s recommendation email

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