This recent email from UK travel agent STA Travel shows that designers shouldn’t be afraid to make use of the page background in email. Whilst the overall width of this campaign sticks to a best practice 600px,  some clever coding with tables means that the hero image breaks out into the background area if there’s enough screen space available.

Clever innovations like this really help add value for those users that see them, and, if care is taken, can be made to degrade gracefully so they don’t negatively affect those users with smaller screens or less able browsers.

I know we talk a lot about best practice and not doing all-image emails, but sometimes it’s innovative to go against the rules and do something special. Like this promo email for a new 14 storey high water slide at Brazilian water park Beach Park. It weighs in at a hefty megabyte, and it’s 12,000 pixels high, but it works.

For best effect hold your scrollwheel and drag down..

Spotted on AdFreak.

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.

Welcome emails are a great way to make an excellent first impression to new subscribers to your email campaign. Here’s 10 we’ve received recently that do more than just confirm a subscription.

Update – We’ve also posted our top tips and welcome email best practice – take a look.

Threadless (Fashion)

William Hill (Gambling)

Banana Republic (Fashion)

Crate & Barrel (Retail/Fashion)

TypeTogether (Design)

NewEgg (Retail)

Eurostar (Travel)

Lonely Planet (Travel)

Electronic Arts (Gaming)

Dyson (FMCG)

Lastminute (Travel)