Less than 4 days after our Creative Director, Steve Sharp, explained how to design emails to be width-compliant on this very site, something very strange began happening to my email inbox. Every so often I would open my new messages, just minding my own business, when the strangest, most eerie feeling would come over me. I felt as if I was moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. Seeing the contents of my inbox, I realized what had happened. I had just crossed over into…the Twilight Zone.

What could cause such an unusual feeling? Why, it’s the latest Abercrombie and Fitch emails of course!

Yes, just days after Steve explained the rules of keeping email width limited to the tidy confines of the preview pane, Abercrombie went ahead and broke the rules, sending some of the widest side-scrolling emails I have ever seen. And I for one, think that this is a really clever idea because of the smart way in which it was executed.

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Sometimes, we at Email Responsibly like to share client success stories that help inform the industry-at-large about ways to improve their email marketing programs. Today we check in with our resident email design guru Stephen Sharp as he talks about a recent victory for the responsible email marketers over at Fit Pregnancy. Kudos to everyone involved!

Recently, Experian CheetahMail’s Creative Services team engaged Fit Pregnancy, a leading women’s magazine, in a creative challenge to increase readership and heighten customer engagement. Our challenge was to strategically design a new email template based on a slew of creative best practices and reporting data from previous campaigns, then test the results.

As a first step, we reviewed Fit Pregnancy’s campaign reporting data to identify strengths and weaknesses pertaining to the existing navigation and content layout. One major area of interest proved to be the ‘product recall’ link taking subscribers to an updated list of potentially dangerous consumer goods. This link alone garnered 50 percent of the newsletter’s average clickthrough activity.

To capitalize on this finding and provide subscribers with quick access to the information they most desired, our Creative Services team placed the product recall link in two places on the email template: above the fold in the form of an apparent, standalone button, and in the ‘News to Use’ section as a text link. A number of other navigational elements were also shifted around within the template design based on reporting data from past campaigns.

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I recently was taking a look at some email registration pages out there when I came across a nice little email registration feature that The Puma Store uses on their site.

In the lower right hand corner of their home page, an email subscription box awaits your email address. Once the address is submitted, a good looking registration page appears in a dialog box for the user to enter more details. After filling out that information, the user is sent back to the home page. The cool thing about Puma’s design is that after signing up for email, the area where the subscription field resided now displays a simple line of text, saying “Thank you for signing up!”

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The summer’s consistently warm temperatures and long hours of daylight drive American consumers to partake in a number of outdoor activities. In this post, Experian Simmons provides a deeper understanding of current trends and behavioral tendencies surrounding these activities, including vacation plans and popular summer destinations.

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It’s our job as email marketers to avoid simple mistakes that can ruin the effectiveness of otherwise well thought-out campaigns. Below you’ll find three real-life examples where fundamental email marketing elements – personalization, dynamic content, and captivating subject lines – have been used incorrectly. Sometimes even the best of us let errors slip through the cracks, so I thought I’d share some of these common pitfalls with you.

Inaccurate personalization
In the first example the subscriber’s name is replaced by an obvious piece of placeholder text – “Mr. Soandso.” (That’s email-speak for Mr. So-And-So, for those of you scoring at home.)

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Lately my team has been asked to provide insight on the appropriate width of an email. As I tell all of our clients, the answer depends on what the intended function of the email is, and whether or not it needs to be printed by the subscriber.

Our recommended width for emails that only need to be displayed onscreen is 650-700 pixels. By adhering to this guideline, marketers ensure that their full creative is presented to the user without being cut off by smaller monitors, elaborate email menu systems, or ad banner rails.

In cases such as order confirmations, ticket print-outs, or something the user needs to take with them for an in-store promotion, the email should be no wider than 600 pixels. This allows the email to fit within standard printer margins and minimizes issues at the point of customer contact (POS, ticket scanners, etc.).

Of course, not all marketers follow this rule. Take this example from Lucky Brand; weighing in at over 800 pixels wide, their creative has a good chance of sliding off the right side of the user’s screen. I would recommend trimming the width to conform to the 650-700 pixel rule to be safer moving forward.

As a general rule I would advise all email marketers to do a quick creative width test before preparing their emails for deployment.

It is becoming more and more apparent that email contests and online drawings must be thought-out completely before being executed. This is especially true nowadays with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, whose word-of-mouth capabilities expand the reach of such campaigns drastically and quickly, while also serving as a potentially treacherous criticism forum. Earlier this year KFC demonstrated what can go wrong with an online giveaway – their free meal offer not only brought down the website hosting the coupon, but the offer also inspired restaurant sit-ins, chicken riots, and overall negative feelings and publicity.

Now compare that experience to how the Staples Center , AEG, and Michael Jackson’s family recently tackled the huge task of distributing Michael Jackson Memorial tickets. The Staples Center, AEG and the Jackson family created an easy-to-follow, seemingly error-free, and clear process in the Michael Jackson Memorial ticket giveaway. They did everything right! Hopefully this model will set a new standard in large online giveaways.

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