Who knew I'd have to e-cross the pond to find some great email marketing design?
Your favorite SendLabs personality and mine - Mr. Brett - is a great designer and often will tell me and anyone else about design flaws he sees and how he could blow people away. Most times he's pretty spot-on, but we can't let him realize that to keep him humble.
I, however, am not a designer and stick to drawing out concepts with a pencil and paper, but I'm going to attempt channel Brett's energy through me in scripting out this post and telling you why this design works. Photoshop! Fireworks! Illustrator! Oregon Trail!
- Who?: Silvervision (U.K.)
- What the heck do they do?: DVD sales, focusing on WWE and combat sports
- Why am I getting this?: Traditional sales push email
What I really liked was what I call stacking, a term I coined while skiing in Sweden in 1964. This is where design is built around stacking boxes on top of each other, creating an easy-to-follow user flow. There are seven evenly-spaced sections here, each with their own look and purpose. To me, purpose is an undervalued term in email marketing. Too many times, marketers just throw in copy and pictures hoping that it all turns out well. All too many times though, there's no purpose for what they're doing other than to fill space. That's where great template design comes in and where sticking to your guns when it comes to email content can pay off. Have a vision for what you want to do.
The sweet spot features a large graphic and their main messaging which is a specific DVD (Live in the UK) at a discount. Scrolling down a bit takes you to a smaller image which a push for a different new release. A little further down, a sale and small individual graphics with different DVDs. Already, I've seen six different DVDs I could purchase and am aware of a big sale - all while not feeling overwhelmed. There's plenty of breathing room around the images and the offers are straight forward, not making the end user work hard.
As we close out, there is an graphic for an Eddy Guerrero DVD and right next to it, a graphic link to reviews of that DVD from the owners of the site, giving a human effect that people are actually watching these and giving their opinions. Honestly, how often do you walk into stores or get email from a company and get the feeling the people attempting to sell you services actually use the items? I know a lot of people have HD TVs, but will a Best Buy salesperson actually tell you, "I don't like this one at all" even if it's the most expensive?
Finally, we end with a goofy message about a free DVD offer and that's it. All in all, I thought it fit a lot of information in the email but in a layout that was easy to peruse, easy to dissect and easy to explain. I also thought the header with the 'Free Shipping' tag and the footer with the web links/credit card info was effective as well, looking identical to their website.
Technically, however, this thing is nearly all graphics so they fail in that area. There is plenty of potential for some text to be flowed in to help even out the text-to-image ratio, but that's my only complaint. Users clicking the links are sent directly to their respective product page and not just to the site, giving insight into what people are interested in. Reports are there for a reason, my friends...use the capabilities!
Overall, I liked Silvervision's email marketing efforts on this one. They had several offers, didn't overwhelm with any of them, had an easy-to-read flow and had the mechanics built in to track clicks on individual items. Other than the text-to-graphics ratio, I'd give this an A.