A couple recent email marketing articles that are worth checking out:

Twitterize Your Email Subject Lines

A really insightful post from Aweber about manimizing the size of your subject lines and making a few words work as hard as possible.

Adding Background Images to HTML Emails

Something that’s not as straightforward as it sounds in email code. Good advice from Campaign Monitor.

e-Dialog is Hiring

We have roles in our expanding Central London (Soho) office – I’m looking for web designers with good HTML who are looking to work on interesting projects for a kick ass client list. There’s graduate and mid level roles available, if that sounds interesting then get in touch – my email is on the sidebar.

e-Dialog London is also looking for HTML Developers, Campaign and Account Executives and Account Managers. Likewise get in touch for more info.

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.

A quick look at some single message solus mailings from the fashion/streetwear industry.

NikeiD

Gap

Net-A-Porter

A quick round up of some great recent email marketing and email design articles.

Design and Build Email Newsletters Without Losing Your Mind (and Soul)

Smashing mag’s great overview of some of the challenges and considerations you should make when designing an html email, plus a stack of examples.

Holiday 2009 vs. 2008: What Did We Learn?

Some take-outs from this year’s Holiday season.

The evolution of Wishabi’s monthly email newsletter

Interesting review of how a retailer’s newsletter has changed over time.

Email as a social stepping stone

Four key observations around social media and email, by e-Dialog International MD Simone Barratt.

Mashable: How to take advantage of social media in your email campaign

High level overview of how social charing and links to social media can be incorporated into emails.

The Four Agreements to Powerful Email Marketing

Four over-arching principles to apply to your email marketing campaigns.

If you’ve got any hot tips for this week, or want a heads up on interesting things as we find them, connect with @iamelliot on Twitter.

This short New Years Solus email from boutique hotel site Splendia is a great example of how social media activity can be combined with email in a non intrusive way.

The “Share on Twitter” links are high profile and above the fold, but their understated design doesn’t detract from the overall creative. Selecting the three most prominent social networks and skipping the rest can be a brave move, but will probably play off given their popularity. The ability to  “Share on Linkedin” is increasingly appearing in the Share With Your Network section of mailings – as Splendia typically caters to the professional and business market it seems a good fit with Linkedin.

Underneath the main offer in secondary modules are also links to Splendia’s activity on Facebook and Twitter. The modules are clear, easy to follow and explain why users should connect with them on a social network – these days simply saying “join us on Facebook” just won’t do.

Aside from social media implementation, there’s plenty that could be built upon here in terms of overall best practice – particularly the main offer and call to action, which are all held in one large image, and would result in a less interesting experience for viewers with images disabled.