Mar 03 2009
Where To? Urban Outfitters Knows the Way
I just loved this email I recently received from Urban Outfitters, and thought I’d share some of my thoughts about it with you all.
Scrolling through my inbox, the main image of the Urban Outfitter “Where to?” campaign grabbed my attention above all the others. For those of us on the East Coast, it’s been a long winter. Nevertheless, spring is in the air, and Urban Outfitter’s image of the ocean popped out at me. The creative inspired me to open the email and daydream a little about being on a beach where I could forget about the economy and relax.
The “Where to?” campaign is a great example of using attractive photography and creative marketing to engage your subscribers to open your emails.
Because I took the time to look at the picture, I saw that Urban was advertising friends’ top picks for the season based on their travel plans. Their approach of using friends’ favorite items was a clever take on viral marketing, used in this instance to market a number of different products. Even if the recipient does not have any trips planned, the items fit different personalities as much as they fit the destinations selected.
The marketing effort is also well supported. The email links to landing pages from which you can toggle between the picks as well as the product detail and purchase pages.
I wondered if the “friends” were really subscribers or if this was just a marketing effort, so I continued to look for this campaign elsewhere on the web. I was happy to discover that Urban had included the campaign on their Facebook group page and on Twitter.
I don’t know if these “friends” are actual fans of Urban or if this is just a fun idea. I’d also love to see them go even further and open this up to their fan base to use their picks. Either way, it works!
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Sara,
Did you see the creative from UO the other day? It was pretty cool looking and extremely unique. I plan to blog about it tonight. They have some cool/weird looking emails, but I am sure they are really engaging their audience. I am not an UO type of dude, but I find their emails fascinating.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Are you referring to the Spring 2009 email? I also thought it was an interesting display of imagery. It worked well the way they displayed the images in a static format and but they were still able to mimic the video. The video is pretty hip too! I’m also not their typical audience but I’ll admit, I was so interested in the Where to? campaign that I bought a great pair of sandals! I never would have seen them if I hadn’t found the campaign so engaging!