One thing that often gets overlooked when discussing mobile use of email marketing campaigns is where recipients end up after they’ve clicked. Whilst this email isn’t particularly optimized for viewing on a mobile (aside from a link to a text based ‘mobile version’ at the top), Sephora has done well to optimize their site and landing pages for use on smartphones.

It’ll be interesting to see how this mobile support may relate to their email campaigns from now on.

Update – see comments section for feedback with the design team.

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MTV UK’s new email newsletter broadly follows some best practice, but there’s a few tweaks that could be made to really make it perform. The design and branding is very strong, and neat tricks like the header and footer breaking out the main column serve to add depth to the design. Strong call to actions help drive to areas of the site, although they’re currently very low down – and there’s very little to drive clicks from the preview pane area. The ‘In This Issue’ box serves to draw attention to the articles further down, although the newsletter could be more enticing with more, smaller articles, across a wider range of interests.

Items to build on could include reducing the real estate that the all image header takes up, optimizing the preview pane area, (further) customizing content and adding social sharing.

Fabric is one of the last great superclubs in London – putting on weekly events, selling music through their own label and providing a great series of cds and podcasts. Their weekly email newsletter is an oasis of best practice and intelligent marketing, in a desert of blast lists and cut and paste flyers.

The three column layout is interesting, and is something that works increasingly effectively as emails get wider (this weighs in at just under 800px wide). There’s a lot of social activity, allowing recipients to share individual events using Twitter or Facebook, as well as connect with Fabric’s presence on various networks. There’s good information hierarchy, as upcoming events get priority over ones further away. One of the drawbacks of a column based layout can be seen where one column is much longer than another, resulting in a few areas of dead space within the email – a tighter control of copy limits could limit this.

The immediacy and relative low cost of email marketing is well suited to this kind of industry, especially as the target market is very switched on to email. Here Fabric have set a high standard for event/night club email marketing – it’d be great if some of their competitors rose to the challenge..

Blik produce easily removable vinyl wall art for use in homes and businesses. They have quite a cool, quirky background and have done collaborations with some pretty impressive brands.

Their weekly newsletter is always really visually appealing, and shows how you don’t always just have to go for a boring product shot. The call to actions are quite low key, which might be something to improve, but it’s an interesting idea to place the key sales content right at the top, even above the hosted link information – it may not be 100% best practice, but it allows for an impactful view above the fold.

Trade tool and hardware supplier Screwfix have a cheeky offer in their latest email – I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but it’d definitely boost open rates!

Elsewhere there’s lots of good stuff going on – they’ve got an effective email pre-header, a well formed navigation and buttons that drive to their social media activity.

Update – it was intentional, good work guys!