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.

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.

It’s another one for the “good but mostly images” folder, but this campaign from Bumble & Bumble just looks nice.

Taking a lead from the site, the creative is playful but stylish – and aside from the large image area there’s a lot of best practice going on, including the hosted link, pre-header, nav and some social activity.

Not much to say here other than that this looks great, is a great example of best practice and is completely on brand – happy 10th anniversary threadless!

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.