Are These the Best-Designed E-mails of the Year?

We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But that didn’t stop e-mail marketing services provider Smith-Harmon from releasing its second annual Email Design Look Book, a collection of its picks for the 20 best-designed marketing e-mails of the past year.

It’s an eclectic group, with Adobe Systems, the Canadian Tourism Commission, and activewear brand Horny Toad among those represented. The selections also spotlight a number of trends, notes Chad White, research director for Smith-Harmon parent company Responsys.

Two of the selections highlight the growing adoption of triggered e-mails. The abandoned-cart follow-up from home decor cataloger/retailer Pottery Barn opted for a soft-sell approach (“Thanks for stopping by… If you need any help completing a purchase let us know…”) and included an image of the abandoned item. The birthday-reminder message from Amazon.com included links to the shopping list that the recipient had created on Amazon for the birthday girl as well as additional suggestions based on that list.

“The Amazon e-mail was a fantastic example of what personalization can be,” White enthuses. “So often people talk about personalized greetings, but that’s just a bare minimum of personalization.”

E-mails from Horny Toad, hairstyling specialist Bumble + Bumble, and apparel and decor boutique Fred Flare were chosen for their strong personality and use of storytelling. Horny Toad’s newsletter introduced employees wearing their favorite Horny Toad items in whimsical photos accompanied by equally lighthearted copy. With the subject line “Big bangs theory,” the Bumble + Bumble e-mail opened with an illustrated guide to different styles of bangs and featured applicable products near the bottom. And the Fred Flare newsletter answered customer queries about some of the company’s more outré offerings (“Can you translate the [Cantonese] writing on the Warrior shoe box?”).

It’s notable, says White, that these three e-mails, with their quirky, tongue-in-cheek tone, were from smaller companies: “Smaller brands to a greater degree have to compete on personality. Larger brands tend to be much more risk averse.”

With more e-mails featuring animated GIFs—White says he’s seen an 87% rise in their inclusion—the Look Book offers as examples a Christmas card sent jointly from the Email Experience Council and Smith-Harmon that encouraged recipients to scroll from left to right rather than downward and an Easter promotion from food gifts cataloger/retailer Harry & David that showed a chocolate bunny being nibbled away. (The Harry & David e-mail had been singled out by E-mail Essentials as an “E-mail We Love” back in March.)

And with so many marketers continuing to have problems dealing with blocked images, a promotional e-mail from Nike was singled out for its use of colored boxes to provide visual interest should images be disabled. “It’s a nice example of how you can take that disadvantage and turn it into something intriguing that makes people want to enable images and keep reading,” White explains.

The most memorable examples, from the Canadian Tourism Commission and Brazilian water park Beach Park, required the recipient to do a fair amount of scrolling to get to the payoff. The former, under the guise of a treasure hunt, directed readers to scroll from side to side as well as up and down; the latter encouraged recipients to keep scrolling down (and down some more) to demonstrate the height of its 14-story water slide.

It’s considered best practice, of course, to provide as much vital information as possible in the first screen of an e-mail rather than to force recipients to scroll. And White notes that the Canadian Tourism Commission’s message did “break up” when viewed in Outlook. Even so, he praises these examples for “inviting people to experience and interact with e-mail in a way that was different from the usual experience… Once in a while it’s worth it to cast off best practices and try something new.”

One could argue that the hottest, cleverest, most stunning e-mail in the world is a failure if it doesn’t generate the expected response. But while White says, “We hope these examples get people thinking about new ways to create e-mails,” he’s not advocating using rule-breaking, radically different creative for every message. E-mails that depart dramatically from best practices are probably best used infrequently, perhaps for special announcements or events, as a way of adding spice to your overall e-mail marketing program.

White refers to atypical e-mails used judiciously within an overall program as “wakeup designs” and says that they never fail to generate a strong response. “Subscribers respond to e-mails that look different and act different. I can’t recall a time when we designed a really different challenger that didn’t exceed the control,” he says.

“If people do test [a rule-breaking or otherwise atypical design], I would highly suggest that they not see it and judge it as a single e-mail,” he adds. “Hopefully the e-mails that follow the wakeup e-mail will have a higher response than before as well.”

In other words, by sprinkling the occasional creative jolt of a message into your e-mail strategy, you’re keeping recipients on their toes, engaged with your brand, and curious to click on the subsequent e-mails to see what other surprises you’ve got in store for them.