Viewing all posts categorized as 'Creative Standouts'

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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Today I thought I’d call attention to a cool little creative trick I’ve seen Brooks Brothers do for a while now. As you can see from the image below, they insert a “headline” text link (“Father’s Day Gift Guide – Shop Now”) in the header of each email that summarizes the main offer from the body of the message.

This technique accomplishes a few important things worth highlighting.

First of all, by summarizing the main offer in the form of a text link in the header, Brooks Brothers gets their most important call to action above-the-fold where it is easily found in the preview pane. This is a fundamental issue for any email campaign, regardless of industry or the type of message.

Secondly, the text link in the header is a great way to grab the attention of text-only viewers, many of whom tend to be mobile users. Think about it: if you were Brooks Brothers, a retailer held in high regard by the business set, why not make your email campaigns as Blackberry-friendly as possible? I’d be willing to bet that an above average portion of Brooks Brothers subscribers view their messages on handheld devices due to the nature of their business.

When it comes to email creative, you can never be too attentive to the needs of your customers. Email header testing is a worthwhile investment, and I would recommend testing similar techniques to see what works best with your customers.

This week, Comedy Central adds some old-school creative flavor to their promotional messages for Important Things With Demetri Martin, a new hipster comedy show slated to precede The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Wednesday nights. I make no apologies for being a huge Comedy Central fan, and this email pretty much embodies that spirit.

Simply put, this could be perhaps the greatest call-to-action in the history of email marketing. After all, who needs graphic arrows, underlined text, or colorful buttons when you could have an actual human being gesturing towards a clickable area with a classroom pointer? Jackpot! Even better, it takes you to a streaming video landing page just as the image leads you to believe.

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