Roxy is a retail brand specifically for women who are into surfing and skiing. Their email campaign designs are often well crafted, and the email below is a good example:
The bright pictures and overall clean layout help in this email to get attention and have potential buyers shop directly.
Tags: email design, retail, roxy
I’ve been sorting through many New Year’s email campaigns, and so far two trends are (expectedly) visible: telling subscribers that everything is X percent off or part of a clear-out sale after the expensive holidays, or trying to tie in with people’s New Year’s resolutions on living a better life. One company that did something different is one that makes cases for devices: see the Otterbox thank you email below.
Otterbox uses the closing of 2011 and start of 2012 as an opportunity not to try to sell something, but to thank those who are part of their business. Read More
Tags: email design, otterbox, thank you email
Email Inspiration tells it like it is:
The email inspiration concept is simple, we send you one email per day everyday. Pretty simple huh! No big sales pitches or product launches, just one image to help inspire your designs and get your creative juices flowing.
Simple huh?
They’ve been sending out gorgeous designs every day, and one of my favourites includes this email design for The Colonial Theater promoting movies. Here’s three posters in the email:
Now they’re not really selling anything, except for one banner. The biggest promotion is the ‘subscribe here’ button, which gives you a new email inspiration every day with new design(s) by the featured artist. You can understand that I’ve subscribed to the list 
You can find Email Inspiration here.
Tags: batman, email design, email inspiration, graphic design
When you want to keep in touch with your audience, you have to make sure you are seen on the right platforms. Girl/Teen clothing webshop dELiA*s certainly understands this: they have dedicated a complete focus on mobile email to promote their new smartphone optimized webshop:
Recognizing where your audience is, is one thing: but acting upon it and promoting the new webshop solely for mobile is another. Over time dELiA*s has probably seen a steady growth in mobile visits, but maybe not in conversion. Even though they have an e-catalog app available, having the full webshop functionality available is one step further. This goes to show that apps aren’t everything: they can be nice and definitely fulfill a purpose, however a dedicated mobile website/shop can mean that much more.
Slight mishap in this email is the sub-headine: “…from any iPhone, Android, HTC, or any other Smart phone”. I guess the marketing department responsible for this email doesn’t know iPhone is a product, Android is a platform and HTC is a brand..but that’s slightly besides the point 
I believe it takes courage and getting priorities right to go all the way with a mobile site: it just goes to show that the future of online commerce is on mobile platforms, not on classic desktops.
Sometimes too much whitespace is just too much: content goes ‘floating’, missing structure make the eyes wonder. However, just like some emails work out fine when they’re all images, much whitespace can work out too.
Example: this Tall order Dior shoes email design from Bergdorf Goodman:
I know I would trip on the first step with these heels, which seem at least 10cm (four inches for the imperial people) from the photo. The product with the Dior logo work well in this case: no fluff needed.
Runner up / Bonus: this one is a bit more creative with the shoes and space:
Still, the same principle of simple email design holds true in this second email. Great stuff!
Tags: dior, email design, kiss, shoes
UGG Australia has been here before – with a summer lovin’ email. This time they’ve made it to the email winner’s category with a boots email design winner:
Just like the before UGG winner, the color coordination between photograph (which is a very cool Venice canal shot) and the text panel below is great: it gives a sense of cohesion and continuity. The UGG Collection promotion tells about being handcrafted in Italy, so what better way to promote than with an image on an iconic location in Italy? Following the Keep It Simple Stupid principle, there are no distracting price tags, deal logos or dates: this earns points too for this email design.
Again, like last time, a nicely photographed and color coordinated email design which is a winner.
Tags: email design, kiss principle, retail email, ugg
Back from time off, the email winner series now includes the Piperlime email below. It features some cool photography wrapped in a nice email design as well as very clear CTAs: “Make them yours” and “Judge for yourself”. I’d reckon those are better than ‘buy now’ or ‘read more’ actually.
The above email includes quite some nice touches – they all sum up to make it an email winner.
The points:
Animated header, smack in the middle up top. Here it is:
Furthermore, the header includes site-navigation that takes you directly to the designated area, in this case highlighting the Piperlime blog.
Next to that, the footer is cool as well:
Not only are the social media links set up, but also a ‘shop on the go’ option referring to a dedicated mobile site, but also the ‘Preferences, please’ item on the right. It says to ‘Talk to us’ to let Piperlime know which emails you want to get so you’ll get all the good stuff. Nice addition and I prefer every single company sending out email campaigns to have a preferences center: after all, stuff you don’t want in your inbox isn’t worth much to you, is it?
All in all a deserved email design winner in this case.
Reading the content of email marketing communications can be a pain sometimes. This can be caused by several factors: font type and/or size, contrast with font color to background color or even italics.
It’s important to recognize that not everyone has great eyes or huge 30″ screens to view and read content with great ease. The example below shows that high to mid contrast works fine with basic content layout and should prove easy to read:
What isn’t considered by many is the trouble caused by using italics with some font types and sizes:
The larger green font in the above example is quite readable, but the small font in grey below that is more difficult to read: this has to do with the font size and type used. When using other colors than black and white for font vs background, enough contrast should be pursued to keep it easy to read. The white text in the blue bar below is a good example: had the blue bar been made a lighter blue or the white text a smaller size, readability would drop quite a bit.
In the next part of this post some real-life examples (both good and bad) will be used to illustrate the contrast/readability situation. As with everything in email marketing, testing is of the utmost importance: what if your email campaigns don’t convert well just because you chose a font which is too small, or have a message style that is not contrasting enough? That would be a waste of precious marketing money of course.
It’s not often that you come across copycats in marketing, right? Then again, maybe you do actually.
Here’s an example of Apple.. I mean HP promoting its new TouchPad with WebOS:
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Why do I mention Apple? This is why. The Apple iPad (original) announcement:
And the iPad 2 announcement:
So why is this an email winner instead of failure when HP is clearly copying the style (sans the white background) of Apple’s product emails? Let’s just say it is better to copy something nice than come up with something bad. HP has skipped focus on specs of exterior and interior and moved on to focus on experience: keywords like power, connect, etc. Apple even uses words like magical and revolutionary. HP is not quite there yet, but selling the experience instead of the silicon. Even the last sentence is a bit of Sony style: ‘like nothing else’ Sony’s brand saying ‘like no other’.
In the future all product makers will send product announcement emails with just a tagline (‘solves all your problems’ or ‘will send your mother-in-law to another dimension’ ) and a [BUY NOW] button. Mark my words!
Tags: apple, email design, email winner, hp
After being put on the trail by mobile email design expert Anna from Stylecampaign I’m sharing this with you: TappGala. Not a single email design winner / failure this time, but a whole website on mobile interface design to dig in and be inspired. Galleries are defined through categories, with
Here’s what it looks like (Social Networking category):
While not specifically about mobile email design it does offer insight into some of the best designs of mobile interface – which can be directly applied to email design too, imho. Go on and have a look: it will be inspiring and worth it if you’d like to get to grips with interface design for mobile.
Tags: mobile email
