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.
Fabric is one of the last great superclubs in London – putting on weekly events, selling music through their own label and providing a great series of cds and podcasts. Their weekly email newsletter is an oasis of best practice and intelligent marketing, in a desert of blast lists and cut and paste flyers.
The three column layout is interesting, and is something that works increasingly effectively as emails get wider (this weighs in at just under 800px wide). There’s a lot of social activity, allowing recipients to share individual events using Twitter or Facebook, as well as connect with Fabric’s presence on various networks. There’s good information hierarchy, as upcoming events get priority over ones further away. One of the drawbacks of a column based layout can be seen where one column is much longer than another, resulting in a few areas of dead space within the email – a tighter control of copy limits could limit this.
The immediacy and relative low cost of email marketing is well suited to this kind of industry, especially as the target market is very switched on to email. Here Fabric have set a high standard for event/night club email marketing – it’d be great if some of their competitors rose to the challenge..
Email platform provider Mailchimp have announced that marketers will be able to use the latest version of their web-based tool to incorporate Facebook’s ‘like’ functionality directly into email campaigns. The ‘Like’ functionality allows recipients to ‘favourite’ content and share it using the social network – it’s essentially a user recommendation system, which Facebook is using to build their own web search engine. We’ve seen something similar in Share With Your Network, which allowed users to post a link to web/email content via their status update – ‘like’ is an evolution of this which allows content to be aggregated more effectively across the site.
It’ll be interesting to find out how they plan to implement this – the existing functionality provided by Facebook is javascript/iframe based, which have never seen widespread support across email clients.
If they’ve managed to crack Facebook’s javascript based implementation then hats off to the team!
Below is an introduction video from Mailchimp, as seen on Mashable.
