Spotted on Litmanlive’s blog, here’s a cool campaign from the UK arm of Krispy Kreme – a really simple concept but a great example of using clever, timely copywriting to drive the message.
Change of address emails are often sent when a company moves to a new email marketing provider, mainly in order to improve deliverability. Their purpose is two fold – the core message is for the user to add the new sending email address to their address book, whilst behind the scenes, sending a low-impact message message like this helps improve the deliverability reputation of the new sender (a process commonly referred to as IP Warming). These steps combined help ensure the campaigns are sent to the inbox and not the trash or spam folders.
Examples of these types of campaigns are often difficult to come by, but this example from UK hardware store Wickes serves as an example of some best practices. The overall shell of the email is on brand and will likely follow through to the upcoming marketing emails, with a prominent logo, navigation and links to social activity. The primary content is the instruction to add the sending email to the user’s address book, with detailed instructions for the popular email clients. Underneath there is a limited amount of sales based content, which is something that’s often missed in these campaigns. Whilst the key message should still be to update the address book email, sales content can still take secondary place – there’s a good balance here.
MoviePeg is a great little stand for iPad and iPhone (find out more here). Their valentines offer email borders on minimalist – there’s a very simple design, combined with a high-impact image.
The video call to action quickly drives the user to a landing page where they can watch a short video and purchase a MoviePeg online, and the text underneath really only serves as a back-up if images aren’t displayed. Whilst the copy is short and sweet, a simple tweak could be to pull the voucher code out into it’s own box to boost it’s prominence.
Amazon UK are taking an interesting approach introducing a Black Friday campaign to the UK market this year – Traditionally the UK has never really had such an event, perhaps an equivalent is the January sales. It’ll be interesting to see how successful it is for them, and if indeed the concept of ‘Black Friday’ is successful as a sales driver with the British public.
The Starbucks Card Newsletter is a great example of using full width background imagery in an email campaign – a useful way to add extra brand elements and style, drawing the email out from the regular email client page background. The main content area of the email is still within a 700px limit, so the extra background space will collapse down for those using smaller browsers.
In terms of the artwork, the coffee-bean-sack texture is on brand and follows the kind of textured look that is very ‘in’ at the moment on the web. Elsewhere there’s some standard newsletter fayre, perhaps it’d be good to bring the account management stuff up so it’s more prominent.
Unlike most background images, those applied to the <body> tag do work in Outlook 2007. A few other email clients don’t though, so it’s best to apply the background to both the <body> and a 100% width table, just to be sure.
