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.

This email from new Getty images offshot Thinkstock dropped into our inbox this morning. It’s pretty straightforward, but we like the blue box around the title area, and how it attracts attention by breaking out of the main page border – a simple but effective trick.

It’s also refreshing to see that all the copy bar the logo is in web text, when it could have easily been saved out as one big image.

Valentines season is in full swing, with the big day less than two weeks away. Here’s some of the best looking Valentines day emails we’ve seen so far.

Edit – make that 9 – we’ve added the obligatory Tiffany’s email.

Hotel Chocolat Valentine’s Email

Swarovski Valentine’s Email

Net-A-Porter Valentine’s Email

Original Penguin Valentine’s Email

Harrods Valentine’s Newsletter

Daily Candy (London)

Bang & Olufsen February Newsletter

Apple iPod Touch Valentine’s Email

More Apple emails in our Apple email gallery.

Tiffany & Co Valentine’s Email

With the hype and announcement of the iPad, Apple have been flavor of the week – so let’s take a look at some of their recent email campaigns.

There’s a lot that Apple gets right with their emails, and as a result they’re often sent around as good examples of email marketing. In particular they get bonus points for:

• Design – crisp and sexy product photography, clever copywriting and lots of white space make for a very effective combination.
• Engaging – most mailings have very strong and consistent calls to action, to either visit an apple store or shop online.
• Very strong message – Apple do a great job resisting the temptation to bloat their campaigns with excess products and information. There’s a great balance between providing enough content to inspire the recipient to click, but not too much to compromise the message.

However, whilst the brand and design are impeccable,  there’s curiously a few best practices that seem to be absent – the most obvious that come to mind are:

• The omission of any type of hosted link or whitelisting copy
• No personalization or obvious customization (they presumably have a fair amount of data at their disposal, why not use it?)
• Whilst the preview pane imagery is very engaging and effective, when images are disabled the experience is often much poorer.

Apple iPad announcement email

Apple Fitness email

Apple Black Friday email

iTunes New Music Tuesday email

Apple Holiday email

For more insight into Apple’s email marketing campaigns, take a look at Dominique Hind’s excellent review.