Recently in Production Category

Sender: chasing fireflies
Subject Line: See what's cooking in our Toy Shop!
Date: Thursday, December 02, 2010

With so many people viewing email on mobile devices, the importance of a great preheader has become increasingly more relevant. In this email from chasing fireflies, the clever use of adding my name dynamically to the preheader made it stand out from the pack during my daily rapid scroll through the inbox, plus the copy had a cute and familiar feeling to it - like it could have been from a buddy... to quote Dale Carneghie from How to Win Friends and Influence People: "Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the English language".

Unfortunately, the nit-picking email marketer in me can't help but notice that the rest of the email's execution leaves room for improvement. The entire hero/body of the email is one image slice, that when clicked, leads to the toys landing page of their site and features a foosball table, not the incredibly cute kitchen from the email. The poor coordination between the email and landing page create further frustration as the main and secondary products are not labeled in the email, so it is another challenge to try to find them once you are on the site. Additionally, I believe that if one wants to be a player in the Email Marketing world, it's best to leave off the little logo for your email marketing platform (no offense meant to Vertical Response).


It is a seriously cute little kitchen though... Santa might have to be alerted! ;)

		From: Pottery Barn Kids Subject Line: Trick or treat! Costumes starting at $29 + treat bags ship free Date: Thursday, August 19, 2010 From: Nature Made Subject Line: Men's Health: The Benefits of Fish Oil for Men Date: Friday, June 18, 2010
A few tips for designing with HTML text: Use HTML-safe fonts. Using fonts such as Arial, Georgia, Verdana and Times will allow the copy to be coded as HTML text instead of as an image, thus allowing the copy to be viewable with images disabled. If you find system text utterly boring or off-brand, we suggest using your special font for the headline only -- just make sure to include an alt tag on that image when coding. Use solid colors behind HTML text. Outlook does not display background-images (images that appear behind HTML text). So keep that area free of gradients, patterns or images. Outlook does, however, show background-colors -- so the color behind your HTML text doesn't have to be white. In this example, notice that the image behind the system text does not show up in Outlook. Instead, you see a solid color (that you can choose). It's particularly important to apply a background color behind your images if your system text is white. Keep copy away from rounded corners. When designing with rounded corners, keep in mind that the portion of the box that includes the corners will need to be cut as an image. So keep your copy outside of that image in order to code that copy as HTML text. Know that HTML text will expand differently (horizontally and vertically) in different browsers. Therefore: 1) make sure to leave adequate room at the end of your paragraphs in case a word needs to jump to the next line, 2) don't cut your paragraph too close to images, 3) make sure your line height is at least equal to the font size and 4) leave some extra space below your copy block.

Without Yahoo Code	With Yahoo Code
From: Tablespoon Subject Line: Grill Masterpieces: 5-star BBQ Ideas Beyond The Burger Date: Monday, July 12, 2010 From: Tablespoon Subject Line: Fun and Frosty Drinks = Instant Summer Chill Out Date: Monday, July 19, 2010 Those of you in the email coding world may have noticed a recent change from Yahoo. If your links are all appearing blue, here is the work-around. Simply add a tag with the color directly inside the <a> tag. Example: <a href="#" style="color:#808080; text-decoration:none;"><span style="color:#808080;">Link</span></a> Happy coding! :)

You may have asked yourself: What is the standard email width, anyway? Hopefully, my findings here will help you answer that question. I have gathered emails from 47 popular retailers to see what width they use for their emails.

It appears most retailers are using a width of between 600-650px for your average promotional retail email, and 650-700px for more content heavy (newsletter-type) emails. I concur that these averages are a good standard. Here's why: 1. It's not TOO wide, so it's less likely that your subscribers will get a horizontal     scroll bar when viewed at low monitor resolution and in small email window panes. 2. It's not TOO narrow, so your email won't be painstakingly long in order to fit all     your content. Long emails will lose subscribers' interest (or overwhelm them).     Plus, you are less likely to fit all your relevant content "above the fold"     (AKA - within the preview pane vertically). The above survey was based on the following emails (in order by width): Endless.com: 548 | PetSmart: 550px | Target.com: 570px | RedEnvelope: 585px | Sur La Table: 600px | Shutterfly: 600px | Naturalizer: 600px | Macy's: 600px | gap.com: 600px | GameStop News: 600px | OfficeMax: 606px | Old Navy: 608px | Dinner Made Easy [Betty Crocker]: 609px | Kmart: 615px | White House | Black Market: 618px | The Home Depot: 620px | JCPenny: 630px | Sears: 631px | CHEFS: 645px | Staples: 647px | New York & Company: 650px | Pottery Barn: 650px | Gymboree: 650px | Express: 650px | Piperlime: 650px | Godiva Chocolatier: 651px | L.L.Bean: 653px | GUESS.com: 659px | Williams-Sonoma: 670px | NORDSTROM: 688px | Eddie Bauer: 688px | Ann Taylor: 692px | Bath & Body Works: 700px | J. Jill: 700px | west elm: 700px | Crate and Barrel: 700px | BananaRepublic.com: 700px | Alaska Airlines Insider: 700px | REI Gearmail: 700px | Apple: 700px | The Land of Nod: 708px | Abercrombie & Fitch: 716px | Martha Stewart Living: 725px | Coach: 735px | Forever21: 780px | Restoration Hardware: 784px | Costco News: 787px

From: Piperlime
Subject Line: Wonderful work shoes and sale now up to 50% off.
Date: Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Here, Piperlime uses smart, propped silhouette photography. The propping both contextualizes the product and helps prevent the image from looking too austere. At the same time, this type of photography allows us to avoid some of the tricky creative production issues that come with using environmental shots, such as matching type and color blocks to the photo (which would be particularly difficult for a brand heavily drawn in lime), as well as manipulating the image to make overlaid type legible. Smart stuff!

From: UrbanOutfitters.com
Subject Line: Who are you? And do you like Free Shipping?
Date: Thursday, August 10, 2007

This EDM uses a compelling offer to gather subscriber data. At the same time, it throws production values out the window in favor of humor. UO pokes fun at it's own categorization process, adding "Mama's Boy", "Blog", and of course, "Lindsay" and "Hilary" menu items.

From: J.Crew
Subject Line: Crewcuts has arrived.
Date: Friday, March 31, 2006

From: online@luckybrand.com
Subject Line: New Lucky Kid for Summer from Lucky Brand Jeans - Plus Free Shipping
Date: Wednesday, June 7, 2006



I understand experts have observed a cultural phenomenon wherein American parents are casting their children more and more in their own images, right down to the $120 designer denim. Here, two national retailers jump on the "Mini-Me" bandwagon. The forecast:
1) J.Crew: What TOOK you so long? I forsee success and many mini-polo-wearing babies. (I heard from a retail associate that Crewcuts merchandise is flying off the shelves.)
2) Lucky Brand Jeans: I anticipate a more uncertain future. While I don't know for sure, I would imagine Lucky's target demographic falls into a pre-marriage pre-baby-making age bracket. I see folks in tie-dyed Janis Joplin t-shirts balking at the thought of matching kiddies in Skull & Crossbones onesies.

On an unrelated note, Lucky Brand Jeans puts so much effort into their retail stores - the look, the displays, the whole experience is very unique and well-done. While their website and email campaigns integrate some of the retail location feeling successfully, the overall production quality is disappointing in comparison.

From: Scoop NYC
Subject Line: New for Fall: Tory Burch + Kooba @ scoopnyc.com!!
Date: Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Luxury retailers in particular need to pay attention to their EDM production values. While www.scoopnyc.com is a respectible-looking website, quality standards drop off on their email campaigns. This particular campaign body is coded as a single low-res graphic using an image map for linking. Image mapping doesn't work in several popular email browsers, disablings click-through for a substantial percentage of subscribers. The rest of the message was coded without browser-compatibility in mind, apparent from the random positioning of the search box, a stray call-to-action carrot, and even several special characters appearing in the upper-left corner of the message.

We can look at email campaigns as flashes in the pan, and from this perspective, details aren't so important. But we can also look at email marketing as an opportunity to cultivate an intimate, ongoing conversation with our customers. If we take this stance, what message does low production quality communicate?

We have to sweat the details and give customers the respect they deserve! They are the only reason you have a job!

From: Diesel
Subject Line: Give your money a holiday
Date: Thursday, June 15, 2006

What a fun, well-produced sale campaign. It manages to scream sale without screaming sale.

From: BananaRepublic.com
Subject Line: New casual pants have arrived + spring sale continues...
Date: Tuesday, March 28 2006

This is the second time in a single month we've had to scold BananaRepublic.com for their production values. This time, the violation is not only sloppy, it's weird. Check floating out the Banana Twins on the right. Double your pants, double your fun.

On a separate note, all Gap Brands websites were down again this weekend. Saturday was one of the first times I'd attempted to visit BananaRepublic.com since experiencing the aggravation of it's initial noncompliance with Safari web browser. On Saturday the site was not working at all, and on Sunday, while the homepage and category pages seemed to work, the product pages themselves were not functioning properly. I guess this is just another issue factoring into Gap's disappointing sales results. And yes, now you know I spent the whole weekend in front of the computer. Oy.

From: Athleta.com
Subject Line: Surf's Up and so is Athleta's New Summer Lineup
Date: Tuesday, April 4, 2006

While I find Athleta's consistent use of full-width outdoor photography appropriate to their product, the images are consistently undersaturated and dull, begging for whiter whites and brighter colors. Notice how the surf in this shot is a dull grey? It's depressing. Now imagine it a crystal blue. This is a happier picture: infinitely more effective. It's all about the PhotoShop Hue/Saturation, baby.

Additionally, I'm curious about the use of capitalization in the main body text. We should be grammatically incorrect only when it benefits the overall aesthetic or meaning of the message. I don't think miscapitalization improves this campaign in any way.

From: BananaRepublic.com
Subject Line: Hurry, last week to save 15% + new suits for spring...
Date: Tuesday, March 7, 2006

This email campaign was brought to my attention by Shinn Chen. Thanks Shinn!

In fact, two other collegues have also mentioned the following issue in connection with recent BananaRepublic.com messages: the image quality is too low. While there's something to be said for keeping images on the light side for faster loading, blurry product photographs and, in this case, copy blocks, do not a good impression make.

Additionally, over the past several months, BananaRepublic.com's clothing imagery has shown wrinkles. PhotoShoppers, employ the blur tool!