About Face; Featuring Furniture

From: Room & Board
Subject Line: Create the perfect outdoor space
Date: Tuesday, April 4, 2006

This is a clean, nice-looking email with one small problem: the HTML text at the bottom of the message isn't rendering properly, appearing as a special character mishmash. When we view the code source, we see the font face is set to "sans-serif". It's much safer to use Arial or Verdana, and I'd advise everyone to choose one of those two for consistent results.

On another topic, I've noticed a number of Outdoor Furniture EDMs over the course of the past two weeks featuring full-width hero shots like this one. (In this case, the phantom gal on the right strikes me as somewhat strange.) While I like the beauty of a large hero shot, when one sends out a message featuring something expensive like furniture, I'd recommend also showing a few other products at lower pricepoints. Despite the recent Wall Street Journal article noting that folks are feeling more comfortable purchasing expensive products online, there is still some hesitancy on the part of customers to drop hundreds of dollars on an EDM. Showing a few less expensive items gives the customer the option to pick up a "quick little something" instead, driving more revenue.