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
Apple iPad email design: an example of simple email design with a clear cta.
Being succesful in email marketing boils down to a few factors. The end factor is of course how much money you will make from the email channel, but getting there requires some effort. There’s deliverability, list management, campaign set-up and management, content creation and management…so many things. However, all of this will barely be noticed by the actual person receiving your email: the subscriber. They’ll only see the final product: the subject line, the from name and reply address, and the email design with content.
Depending on what you want to achieve with your email marketing, there are only a few tips that matter: these have been posted all over the web over time, but never been gathered in one single post. Here’s my set of email design tips to make sure you get the most out of your email design efforts. If you don’t handle the email design part yourself, show this to your agency or designer.
1. Less is more. If your email is plastered with content, menu-options, links to anywhere people will lose focus and interest. Prevent that from happening: get their attention and hold it within a few seconds. The worst email designs are the ones that contain a boatload of content and links but are unclear about what the receiver should do with it.
2. Be clear and specific. With every email you need to ask yourself the question: what do I want the receivers of this email to do with it? Reply? Order? Click through? Request more info, documents, samples? Have the answer before making the actual email. This will help in the overall process of creation.
3. The call to action should bring people to action, not confuse. ‘Click here’ won’t cut it. ‘Buy this now for $49′ is a lot better. ‘Buy for $49, next-day free delivery’ is perfect as a CTA. However make sure a CTA is not too long: make it as condensed as possible.
4. Test everything, everywhere: there’s no excuse for render, bad link or image errors on any platform, device or email client.
5. Make sure the whole path is right: an email marketing campaign is as strong as its weakest link. If a landing page is not clear on its purpose or what the visitor should do, it will fail regardless of how good the email design is. Make sure everything from A to Z is set up correctly, tested and tested again.
6. Avoid stock photos. As convenient as they are and as much as you paid for them, about a million other companies are using them. This makes your email content look bland and very much ‘me too’. Spend some time and money to get relevant, fresh photography done for your email campaings: it will most certainly pay off in terms of overall quality and uniqueness of your email design.
7. Together with less is more at point 1, having shorter emails sent more frequently (depending on what the subscriber has set for preferred email frequency) will help with two things: being top of mind more regularly and taking up less time per email of the subscriber. If someone needs 5 minutes to go through your whole email, that’s too long (exceptions allowing). Any marketing email’s purpose should be understood within 30 seconds (rather within 5 or 10) and someone should be acting upon it within a minute. If you can help someone spend less time on any email, make it yours while still reaching your goal. Double win!
8. Guide the subscriber’s reading direction: using arrows and/or flow of text and images will guide them to where you want them. Either the end CTA, the most important info + CTA or anywhere else. Examples here and here. Every email should be a funnel towards completing a task, not a maze of confusion.
9. When sending news-focused emails, make sure the most important part of a news item is in the email, with a clickthrough to the whole article. This doesn’t mean you have to put in the first few sentences of that article in the email: a good summary will help better to get a feel of the whole article and will make people click through faster.
10. Use animations where applicable / useful. It should not be the holy grail, but can jack it up a notch to make it a more rich experience. Examples here, here and here. This will work better for B2C than B2B companies because of Outlook 2007/2010 still partying like it’s 1999 and not understanding animated gifs, but still.
11. Make sure to use enough whitespace to help your email succeed on touch screens: a fingertip is a bigger touchpoint than a mouse pointer. Having small text links while maybe 25% (or more!) of your audience is using touch screens (small like smartphones and large like tablets) to view your email will not help them interact with the email. A clickthrough will fail and frustrate them.
Make text links bigger or even better, make them buttons with enough whitespace to prevent accidental faulty clicks. This counts for the service links as well! Don’t make your ‘web version’ and ‘unsubscribe’ links small and low-contrast just because they are service links.
There you go, 11 email design tips to help you succeed. As you may have noticed I haven’t included any specific HTML and CSS tips: I’m expecting the person implementing the tech part of your email designs to be fully aware of what can and what cannot be done in email client land in this case.
Good luck to all, and let me know if the tips have been useful to you! Any additions you think are missing to the above are welcome in the comments.
Tags: animated email, email design, email tips, tips
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
Imagine being a big company, let’s say Electronic Arts (revenue: $3,8 billion last year). Imagine launching Battlefield 3, and wanting to inform the correct audience about the game. Surely you have a marvellous email campaign set up to do just that, right?
Wrong, apparently. According to Loren Norman (and a few others) he received an email with the cryptic subject line “System requirements for PC players” which contained the message below:
Loren pointed out two things, besides never having asked for this:
The subject line really is marvellous – even though the sender name is Battlefield 3, the actual email does not contain PC system requirements! Next to that is the transactional part: this would only be possible had Loren been a member of the EA-network and/or a customer. Here comes the biggest goof: Loren notes that he hasn’t done anything with EA in 5 years…oh dear. Talk about bad list management.
Just recently I posted ‘It is not ok to start mailing an old list…ever‘ but it seems it was a wishful post – EA has gone the other way. There are more complaints too, so it doesn’t seem to be a minor glitch. Even worse, some people considered it a scam email, so it will not have been very helpful in the reputation department either.
Clearly EA needs to get its act together. The subject line is not acted upon in the email, the sender name (Battlefield 3) does not go with the information in the footer (sent to you by EA) and worst of all: they should have no idea of his existence anymore. Last they had business with him was over 5 years ago: that’s forever in fast-moving times these days.
Let’s hope there won’t be more of this from either big or small names in the business.
Tags: ea, email design, list management, privacy
Remember Email insight: Less is more from over half a year ago? Here’s part two. If you haven’t read that one, read it first, after that come back here. I will be reusing the graphic I used back then, but focus on one part: valuable.
I like it being in the middle of all the other facets – simply because without value, all other facets would be quite useless. You can be a very credible source for information on subject X, but when someone is looking for Y, you won’t provide much value, no matter how accessible it is.
Relating this to email marketing and the ‘less is more’ principal, it’s all about knowing what content to deliver through the email channel to the end user. You might be talking about the same product, but depending on the audience you could talk about it in three or more ways, making it desirable for all audiences.
Is it worth sending three separate messages about a single product, yet in different forms/sizes? If it will pay out in results, then yes! Don’t forget that knowing who you deal with will boost all results – simply because it will be easier to be relevant. Being relevant however is not the whole story.
Delivering the right story (relevance) doesn’t mean it will provide value straight away. Timing is everything in this case: when there is no option to select email frequency, an email should be delivered at prime time and without doubt about its purpose. If the call to action is unclear to the receiver, then you’ve already lost.
People are often paralyzed these days by choices and options. 40 types of spaghetti, 80 types of coffee. Choice was offered as a luxury and diversity thing in the beginning, but now it’s more of a burden than something useful or helpful. Narrowing down choices and making that one thing (your product or service) easily findable will mean the world to the subscribers.
Finally an email that will not eat up precious time but will make its point just like that. Yes, you can provide something valuable with less. Try it once, you will be pleasantly surprised with the outcome.
Tags: content, email design, kiss, subject lines, value
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
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:
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
|
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
Recently I had the privilege to meet and dine with Loren McDonald: he’s one cool email marketing VP from California USA. During the dinner we discussed many things including timezones, red light districts and modern tech but of course email marketing as well.
We got to the point where we discussed some advanced email marketing tactics, but also both came to the conclusion that quite some marketers are ‘blinded’ by high end features and email marketing tactics but don’t even have their basic stuff set up right.
That is just a waste of good email marketing space and time, I believe. In this case it is time to bring those basics to the attention of the audience: simply because it’s necessary.
So what are the email marketing basics anyway? Let’s get the other parts out of the way after which the basics will be left. What part of email marketing would be advanced or high-end? I’d say that anything involving automation is in the advanced department, as well as dynamic stuff (content, send times, subject lines).
In the high-end we would be talking about seamless total integration of email marketing into both your crm of choice and other marketing channels. Any prospect or client can cross over from one channel to the other without a glitch and you would be able to follow every single move.
For basics in email marketing I would consider the following:
- Email marketing plan
- Content plan
- Signup form(s) + welcome campaign (single primary automation falling under basics, imho)
- List management
- Email design & rendering
- Personalization
- Publishing schedule
Rule number one should be: get permission. Just recently I learned from an email marketing consultant she had a client who bought an email list for several thousands of euros, with zero as a result. Luckily now they are learning to do it the right way, but they could have started out right straightaway.
Putting the email marketing plan and content plan into action as part of the overall marketing plan will help everyone involved at your company to understand where this is all going before even a single email has been sent.
After that the contacts come into the picture: setting up signup forms and a welcome campaign, and correct list management. Personalization is something that goes wrong so many times, while it should be one of the most simple parts of basic email marketing. Nail it and keep nailing it until it becomes natural like driving a car or swiping your atm card.
Finally the email design and rendering as well as a publishing schedule should be set up and continually monitored and adjusted accordingly. Email clients change, your audience wants (re)fresh designs and you don’t want to lag behind. Stay in the loop on what’s good and bad with Outlook, Hotmail, GMail and the main browsers as well as mobile email clients.
At this point some would say: pah! I know all that. Why no cool funky techniques here? Because these basics get lost (or worse, never learned properly by online marketers) so often that they need and deserve attention. That’s why.
If you got all 7 of the above noted basics perfectly in working order, then you can give yourself 70 points and you’re fine. But if you’re lagging with some of them, or doing a half-assed job and only scoring 35 points or less then it’s time to get down to business and get your email marketing basics right. It is definitely worth doing so before you get to the more advanced email marketing stuff.
Tags: basics, email design, list management, personalization
