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.

Blik produce easily removable vinyl wall art for use in homes and businesses. They have quite a cool, quirky background and have done collaborations with some pretty impressive brands.

Their weekly newsletter is always really visually appealing, and shows how you don’t always just have to go for a boring product shot. The call to actions are quite low key, which might be something to improve, but it’s an interesting idea to place the key sales content right at the top, even above the hosted link information – it may not be 100% best practice, but it allows for an impactful view above the fold.

Trade tool and hardware supplier Screwfix have a cheeky offer in their latest email – I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but it’d definitely boost open rates!

Elsewhere there’s lots of good stuff going on – they’ve got an effective email pre-header, a well formed navigation and buttons that drive to their social media activity.

Update – it was intentional, good work guys!

Sometimes in the pursuit for perfecting best practice, email designers end up overlooking simple ideas like making the products we’re selling look as desirable as possible.

Here’s 5 recent emails that all take different approaches to displaying product photographs, but all succeed in making the item on sale look appealing.

Dyson Newsletter

Gu Chocolate Puds Competition email

H&M “Beautiful T-Shirt” Email

KidRobot New Product Newsletter

John Lewis Newsletter

This sideways scrolling email from UK department store Selfridges is another example where breaking the rules can result in something different and appealing.

Sideways scrolling emails can look cool, but can have rendering issues in certain email clients. We found in recent tests that the scroll bar can be intermittent in Outlook 2007, and severe rendering issues occur in Outlook 07 on anything more than about 2200px wide (this is just shy of 2000px). We also found intermittent issues in Hotmail around the scrollbar showing, so as a best practice it’s a good idea to ensure some kind of call to action is within the horizontal and vertical folds.