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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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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Stephen Sharp is the Creative Director at Experian CheetahMail. Every so often, he’ll be popping by to update us on the state of creative design in the email marketing world.

Over the last couple months, the email design world has seemingly evolved into a very safe and clean environment. Several designs that have come across my desk lately have all trended towards subtle and straightforward vs. aggressively eye-catching. Even direction from the client has been geared towards “tone it down” rather than the usual “make it pop” feedback. Not coincidentally, I’m currently working on a design concept that resembles a magazine grid rather than the typical flowing content structure of an email.

Is this design shift a reaction to the need for change and simpler times? Are we taking direction from the economy rather than the brand?

Before panic totally sets in, let’s examine this topic a little further from a tactical point-of-view.

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