Email Design Inspiration: Apple Email Campaign Gallery

With the hype and announcement of the iPad, Apple have been flavor of the week – so let’s take a look at some of their recent email campaigns.

There’s a lot that Apple gets right with their emails, and as a result they’re often sent around as good examples of email marketing. In particular they get bonus points for:

• Design – crisp and sexy product photography, clever copywriting and lots of white space make for a very effective combination.
• Engaging – most mailings have very strong and consistent calls to action, to either visit an apple store or shop online.
• Very strong message – Apple do a great job resisting the temptation to bloat their campaigns with excess products and information. There’s a great balance between providing enough content to inspire the recipient to click, but not too much to compromise the message.

However, whilst the brand and design are impeccable,  there’s curiously a few best practices that seem to be absent – the most obvious that come to mind are:

• The omission of any type of hosted link or whitelisting copy
• No personalization or obvious customization (they presumably have a fair amount of data at their disposal, why not use it?)
• Whilst the preview pane imagery is very engaging and effective, when images are disabled the experience is often much poorer.

Apple iPad announcement email

Apple Fitness email

Apple Black Friday email

iTunes New Music Tuesday email

Apple Holiday email

For more insight into Apple’s email marketing campaigns, take a look at Dominique Hind’s excellent review.