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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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.

Email marketers, from the novice to the expert, should always be looking for ways to touch their subscribers in a positive and effective way. There are a plethora of complicated and expensive ways to do this, including purchasing expensive lists and list building services, creating fancy and complex mailing campaigns, and generating robust and often overbearing reporting.

But as helpful as these higher-level endeavors might be, one should never neglect the low hanging email marketing fruit. This fruit will not only provide no-to-low cost wins, but also offer insight that neither breaks the budget nor strains the eyes.

Several simple email strategies include the following:

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Can you guess which brand added this sophisticated imagery to their email newsletter header to provide a fresh brand experience? Please vote below and click Read More to find out the answer.

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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.

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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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Can you guess which brand veered from their usual imaging and sent this patriotic email image to promote a sale?

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