Apple Emails always seem to go down well – there’s a good balance of inspirational design and email best practice (although there’s a few simple wins that seem to get missed off). This one promotes the educational discount for students (and probably also targets parents/siblings of students too).

In a departure from the usual Apple style, the hero area is a full bleed photo, as opposed to the more regular product shot predominantly on white. This helps differentiate the education campaigns from the Apple store ones, and seems to be a running theme in non-store campaigns.

ps. please can I have a free iPad? (worth a try)

Not much to say here other than that this looks great, is a great example of best practice and is completely on brand – happy 10th anniversary threadless!

This has done the rounds over the last couple days, but it contains a clever trick to boost open rates. Take a look at the hero image area – it mimics a scrolling box you’d typically find on the website, complete with a “see more” arrow. Of course, this kind of thing only works if the landing page is engaging and contains the content you’re suggesting the recipient can scroll to – in this case it does.

Good work!

More blog coverage on The Email Wars and The Email Zoo.

Here’s four daily editorial based emails that really take advantage of the email medium, and do more than just blast out some content to an anonymous list. There’s some great examples here of how email can take advantage of social media, some clever ways to capture preference data and some examples of how third party advertising can be incorporated into email design.

Daily Candy: London

DailyCandy send a range of content driven daily emails, focused on your local capital city. The “save” functionality is really interesting – it allows you to mark the content in this email as a favourite, then in the “my account” area of the site you can view all of your favourite articles. A useful feature and something that helps capture preferences.

Flavorpill Daily Dose

There’s a few really innovative things in Flavorpill’s Daily Dose, that many email marketing campaigns could take on board.

First is the Liked it/Disliked it button – this is a really simple but effective way for recipients to feed back their preferences, and could allow the content of future editions to be tailored based on those preferences. Even if it’s not used for segmentation, this feedback is valuable when planning subjects to feature.

Another innovative and bold approach is to make the lead article the most prominent content on the page – even the branding and logo take second place. The retro calendar is a really nice touch too, and helps imply that this is one of a series, encouraging the reader to look out for tomorrow’s edition.

The Toilet Paper

The Toilet Paper covers a different subject every day, and provides useful articles, factoids and quotables for the thinking man. The retweet functionality is standard Share-With-Your-Network practice, but it’s viral effect has been maximised by applying it to the articles as opposed to hiding a button in the footer somewhere. The page that gets shared is still the whole email (as a page on their site) but with the addition of a subscription box, to capture new users to the list.

Honourable mention: LeCool London Selected

Le Cool do a great weekly “what’s on” email for certain worldwide Cities. It’s unusual in that it’s sideways scrolling, but it’s engaging and the content is always spot on. You can view the latest edition here.

Here’s a quick roundup of email marketing blog posts and articles from the past week.

We will get our new blog theme sorted this week, don’t worry!

Is email marketing becoming less relevant?

In interesting discussion on econsultancy borne out of the e-Dialog Email Attitudes Report, which suggested that 39% of UK consumers claim the marketing email they receive is less relevent than it was 12 months ago.

The Art And Science Of The Email Signature

Some useful tips, good best practice and a quick example gallery of html email signiatures.

E-mail Marketers Want a Piece of Geolocation, Too

Interesting thoughts on how geo-location can be used to increase the relevence of an email marketing campaign.

If you’ve got any hot tips for this week, or want a heads up on interesting things as we find them, connect with @iamelliot on Twitter.