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.

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.

The subscription confirmation email is the perfect chance to welcome and congratulate new recipients of your email newsletter, but it’s often neglected. We’ve signed up for a ton of mailing lists so we can provide great examples of email creative, but we’ve found that marketers either miss a trick  or simply don’t send anything.

Yesterday we posted 11 great examples of engaging welcome emails – here’s our top tips to improve your welcome and confirmation emails:

Welcome your new recipients

“Thanks – you’re our hero” is what Lastminute.com told us in their great welcome email (back in 2007, and we’ve read their emails ever since).  Granted, that’s a lot down to their tone of voice, but it shows that there’s better and more friendly ways to welcome your eager new readers than just saying “newsletter confirmation”.

Add Creative

You’ll be surprised how many subscription and welcome emails are just plain text affairs, without even a basic link to the merchant’s website. Granted, there may be  deliverability concerns around sending full html to a new subscriber (although if you have a good reputation there’s nothing to worry about here), but this is a golden opportunity to introduce subscribers to your branding, and even encourage them to convert.

Give a reason to open your newsletters

Tell your new subscribers what you’ll be sending them, when, and why they should look out for your email. It’s an easy way to boost your open rates as your recipients will know to look out for your newsletter.

Add Personalisation

At the very least you now know your new recipient’s email address – custom publish it in somewhere to confirm you have the right address. The chances are you also know more of their data, so greet them by name. If you’re running any kind of membership club users are likely to archive the welcome email as it’ll contain useful information (username, password, preferences etc.).

If you have a preference centre then link to that so your recipients can tell you what they want to hear about.

Whitelist Instructions

Now’s the perfect time to ask your new subscribers to add your send address to their address book, contacts or safe list. This marks your mailings as safe and helps you avoid the spam folder. For any given webmail client, the aggregate of how many users do this will also boost your reputation across the whole service (ie. If enough people do this, it’ll improve your reputation even for people who don’t whitelist you).

An offer

If you’ve incentivized people to subscribe to your list with a discount offer, here’s where you should tell them about it and encourage them to engage with your site. Don’t go overboard, but there’s probably even scope to include a small sales piece.

Links to previous newsletters

Filling up your welcome email with products and offers probably isn’t the best way to go, but if someone’s just subscribed to your list the chances are they’re pretty engaged and want to know more. A quick link to your most recent emails will help them find out more, and might even help them convert.

Take a look at some of the examples we picked out yesterday for more inspiration!