This past Thursday I received an email from Urban Outfitters made me positively giddy with excitement.

Much to my delight, the email explained that Urban Outfitters was promoting an exclusive partnership with The Impossible Project, a group dedicated to preserving the legacy of Polaroid film. Best of all, the email explained that the two entities’ interests would culminate in a series of limited in-store sales of the last remaining Polaroid cameras and film, rescued from the last Polaroid factory in the Netherlands. What a coup! Best of all, I learned that the somewhat secret sale was taking place the following day, just across the Charles River in nearby Cambridge.

And thus my fate had been decided: I would use the information gleaned from this informative in-store promotion email, venture towards Harvard Square during my lunch break, and return only after acquiring my very own special edition Polaroid camera and film.

But why describe a memorable experience in simple words when a set of photos could explain it even better? Let’s see how it all went down!

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Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit in Austin, TX, where a number of interesting discussions took place on the state of word-of-mouth marketing across the digital landscape.

Bazaarvoice is a partner of ours and has helped a number of our clients combine the power of user-generated content with email marketing. As I told a number of colleagues at the event, the real beauty of combining email marketing with ratings and reviews is that the numbers speak for themselves – according to a recent article by Mary Wagner of Internet Retailer, fifty-three percent of shoppers “prefer to see recommendations based on top ratings by other consumers” compared to only twenty percent who prefer to see best sellers. Likewise, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research recently stated that “two in five online shoppers are partial to retail sites that offer customer ratings and reviews,” and that “tactics like adding a link to write a customer review in the order confirmation email are the new standard.”

A few high-level takeaways I gathered from the event include:

• Product review submission/confirmation emails perform exceptionally well across the board, especially when it comes to open and clickthrough rates.
• User-generated content (UGC) not only drives sales, but also functions as a product development and inventory tool for some of today’s biggest brands, including Dell and Sephora.
• While it is difficult to predict which content will become truly “viral,” marketers can help guarantee ROI by ensuring that viral campaigns are initially distributed to a large enough group of people. That way, even if the campaign is only forwarded at a 50% rate of decay, the campaign reaches close to double the size of the initial recipients — half of which were essentially sent for free.

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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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