Email Inspiration: Fabric Newsletter

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..



  • Anonymous

    It is a nice looking email but can you really hold it up as an inspiration?

    On the plus side the social sharing is actually focused on individual items as opposed to the email as a whole, almost like segmenting your social message – very cool.

    On the down side it’s very very long, it feels like they are trying to do too much within the email – surely they should driving people to the site so they can purchase tickets? It would be good to know the CTR on the links further down the email.

    Interesting comment on the move to wider emails – what do you think is driving this and are senders having issues with response rates through mobile?

  • http://twitter.com/emailvoodoo EmailMarketingVoodoo

    Don’t you think that there’s way too much content in this newsletter? It almost seems like it’s dumping blog posts into dynamic content blocks.

  • http://www.elliot-ross.co.uk Elliot Ross

    Agree, there’s too much content for a lot of the modules – especially considering their flyers, which are generally quite sparse. Perhaps it is just generating stuff from the site, which is a bit of a missed opportunity. The content-to-call to action ratio isn’t ideal at the moment, although there’s a few in-copy links.

    I wander if they expect recipients to read it as an editorial based newsletter. As this content is already on the web, it’d make sense to drive people there, where it’s easier to read (also the target market is pretty familiar with the subject matter, so perhaps wouldn’t read all the text anyway)

  • Marc_Munier

    It is a nice looking email but can you really hold it up as an inspiration?

    On the plus side the social sharing is actually focused on individual items as opposed to the email as a whole, almost like segmenting your social message – very cool.

    On the down side it's very very long, it feels like they are trying to do too much within the email – surely they should driving people to the site so they can purchase tickets? It would be good to know the CTR on the links further down the email.

    Interesting comment on the move to wider emails – what do you think is driving this and are senders having issues with response rates through mobile?

  • http://twitter.com/emailvoodoo EmailMarketingVoodoo

    Don't you think that there's way too much content in this newsletter? It almost seems like it's dumping blog posts into dynamic content blocks.

  • http://www.emaildesignreview.com/ Elliot // Email Design Review

    Agree, there's too much content for a lot of the modules – especially considering their flyers, which are generally quite sparse. Perhaps it is just generating stuff from the site, which is a bit of a missed opportunity. The content-to-call to action ratio isn't ideal at the moment, although there's a few in-copy links.

    I wander if they expect recipients to read it as an editorial based newsletter. As this content is already on the web, it'd make sense to drive people there, where it's easier to read (also the target market is pretty familiar with the subject matter, so perhaps wouldn't read all the text anyway)