This email from Original Penguin has a nice implementation of ‘two click’ Facebook Like functionality. Clicking on the ‘like’ button in the email drives to a landing page with a similar design, which includes a working like button. Users can then use that to like the deal, posting a link to the landing page on their Facebook profile.

Unfortunately, as the integration supplied by Facebook is largely javascript, the ‘like’ action can’t actually happen in email, so marketers have to drive to a landing page and then encourage clicks there.

So over the past 6 months or so, web designers have been getting to play around with HTML 5, which is an update on the HTML standard that natively includes features like controls for audio/video playback and drag and drop. Traditionally, these kind of things have required a mixture of javascript and plugins such as flash, and as a result have not been available in HTML email, primarily due to security concerns.

However as HTML 5 starts to be supported by email clients and web browsers, it opens up the doors for a much richer experience for the user, and allows marketers to experiment with things like scrolling product boxes, and video & audio with controls.

Recently different email client providers have been moving towards supporting this type of technology, particularly webmail clients, who have been adding HTML 5 doctypes to their pages (this was behind the recent Gmail/Firefox issue). This week’s announcement by Yahoo Mail builds on that – as they’ve just announced a beta version of their new HTML 5 Mobile Webmail for iPhone and iPod touch.

If you’re on an iPhone or iPod touch, you can access the new beta by visiting http://m.yahoo.com/mail and tapping on ‘Preview the new Yahoo! Mail’.

Looking at the beta on an iPhone 4 really shows what HTML 5 is capable of, and where email clients are going – it’s exciting!

Above: this is the inbox view – you can see a carousel of photo thumbnails, which have been rotated and had a drop shadow added. You can gesture left and right to scroll through photos. These are custom published, so these are from my friends on flickr.

Below: there’s a similar view at the top of the email itself

Below: Here’s what’s really clever – when you click/thumb an image it opens into a nice lightbox style preview:

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.

A quick round up of some email marketing and email design articles from the last week.

Steve Jobs demos the iPad’s email client

All the pointers so far suggest that the iPad’s on board email client will be pretty good, and will even support pre-header text alongside the subject line.

The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing

Mostly focused on web as opposed to email, but is there something we can learn from this? Definitely something to test.

42 email design resources

An old but good list of email marketing blogs, reports and resources.

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.