From a designer’s point of view, emails could be described in their broadest sense as a series of rectangles with content inside of them. Just think of your email template’s wireframe — it’s a series of black and white-filled rectangles, right? When you think of it, nearly everything designed for viewing on a screen follows the laws of the rectangles and color fills, but that’s not necessarily the way it has to be.

A recent design trend that I’ve been intrigued by is the use of textures, uneven edges and off-kilter layers to create a more organic feel to email campaigns.

American Eagle has really been at the cutting edge of this trend. Their campaigns use all three of these techniques, plus handwritten fonts and drop shadows (rather than frames), to make their imagery stand out in the inbox. The innovative use of curled photographs and plaster background textures add even more intrigue to the design. I love the way the background texture blends into the white naturally.

Going one step further, American Eagle’s sister brands are getting in on the fun as well. 77kids utilize a linen-style background rather than a plaster one, along with heavily distressed photo borders and paper clips. It’s a unified look for the master brand and the individual brand, and manages to look home-made yet modern. Read More »

To the chagrin of Dallas Cowboys fans everywhere, the Minnesota Vikings recently advanced in the NFL playoffs. A friend of mine is a diehard Vikings fan and received the email below just as the game ended. (For the record, I verified that my friend is not a bandwagon jumper or Favre follower – but is a 100% certified and valid Vikings fan.)

NFL shop.com did a great job with not only the creative, but the subject line, the time they sent the email, and the segmentation. As far as I can tell only those with a preference set as being a Viking fan received this email.

The subject line was: Your Minnesota Vikings Just Won – Order Now & Get Free Shipping Over $75

Camping World's email template before the redesign.

Recently, Experian CheetahMail’s Creative Services team worked with Camping World in a multi-variant creative test of its monthly product email template. Our main challenge was to deliver 3 finished designs that adhered to creative best practices and incorporated learnings from historical campaign data, and then test these three designs against a control version over the course of two campaigns.

As with all redesign projects, our first step was to analyze historical performance data to identify any  strengths and weaknesses pertaining to the existing navigation and content layout. We then generated several wireframes to clearly map out the navigation, content organization, and product area layout options that the new designs would encompass.

One of the key areas of Camping World’s email template targeted for improvement was the main product section. Traditionally, this section loosely grouped items in a grid-like structure without considering product type or cost. We also found that the feature section took up too much vertical space within the template, pushing the main product section down below-the-fold.

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Email design starts from the top down.

If you stop and think about it, it’s a logical statement – that’s how the email loads and is presented to the user. Therefore, what you want the user to see first should be placed at the top of the email to grab their attention and inspire interaction. This sacred area of your email template is called the “above-the-fold” area and can make or break a design.

Since you only have, on average, 400-450 pixels of vertical space, this area doesn’t give you much room to toy with the images and copy needed to truly feature your content. Factor in some additional space for a logo, main navigation bar and perhaps a refer-a-friend link, and your header section is starting to resemble a layer cake rather than an email that’s designed to attract the user.

With so much going on at the top, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical aspects of the “template” rather than the creative, eye-catching promise of the “design.” To help gain some critical distance and assess the challenges properly, let’s review some examples of above-the-fold sections. Each sample below has been vertically measured at 420 pixels which is a good average number of what the user will see before they have to scroll:

Lego does an excellent job at building an efficient and good looking above-the-fold area. Not only is most of the main featured section displayed in the preview pane, but a smaller sub-feature section makes it in there as well. Utilizing a clean design with minimal copy and navigation, Lego’s template works harder than most at getting the user to interact from the start. Read More »

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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