This week: A Little Art Goes a Long WayLast week I went to the Portland Art Museum to see the retrospective of Mark Rothko. Funny the things we see and relate to depending on where we are in our lives.... More

This week: A Little Art Goes a Long Way

Last week I went to the Portland Art Museum to see the retrospective of Mark Rothko. Funny the things we see and relate to depending on where we are in our lives. I have seen a few Rothko shows at other museums over the years, so it's interesting what resonated with me when viewing a Rothko last week.

I currently work on the Coca-Cola creative email marketing program and last year we redesigned the My Coke Rewards (MCR) email template to a mobile-friendly version, meaning 1 design template that displays beautifully on the browser and scales down perfectly to a mobile device. We do this by designing the template with more generous margins, larger fonts, all HTML text and minimal text. Every article is held within its own container, clearly delineated from the next. Check out the Rothko sample next to the MCR newsletter.


Both have single columns, clearly delineated containers and nice wide margins so things don't get messy and run together. Inspiration and ideas come from everywhere and anywhere but it doesn't hurt to go to the masters to glean some ideas from time to time.

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Weekly creative email design series focusing on email marketing design best practices. This week is eBay Sellers focused. More

Welcome to the 3rd edition of our weekly Fun Friday Email Design Creative Spotlight. If you haven't read the first 2, be sure to check them out here creative email design eBay and here creative email design 'My Coke Rewards'. As always our goal is to get YOU involved with the email creative services team and get the conversation going about what designs inspire you, call you to action, or prompt you to click that dreadful "unsubscribe" button.  Please, share your thoughts.

Alright, enough with the fluffy stuff, let's shine the spotlight on this week's email design, something we developed for eBay as a part of their 'Seller Achievements' program. The idea behind these segmented email messages was to congratulate all of the active sellers on eBay once they've reached a designated milestone.

We know that thanking users through email is a great way to engage with them, so layouts reflected an über-positive, trophy-like look and feel. As Jack Satta, Sr. Designer at Yesmail said, "We wanted to shout YOU'RE THE BEST to their most active users. Like a big, warm ray of sunshine."

The milestones varied and were bucketed into 5 different categories:

• Receiving a 5-star rating
• Longevity of membership  
• Receiving positive feedback
• Having a certain success rate (sales record)
• Reaching a certain number of listings made

We wanted to focus on 4 Key Areas of Email Design for this project:

1. Bright, friendly
In order to stand out, we chose eBay's bright color palette for this series. The messaging was also large and congratulatory to evoke friendliness and accomplishment.

2. Certificate-like feel
People often print these notices, so it was important for us to design them in a way that works beautifully on the printed surface, and even more so, on a computer screen.

3. Variations for subtle changes in achievements
To avoid the "I've-seen-this-email" response (and the dreaded delete), we changed up some of the subtle details and messaging.

4. Stackable and swappable tip sections
Since the seller tips varied in relevance based on the recipient and type of category he/she belongs to, they were treated like modules in order to make the content more flexible and easily added in or swapped out.

So now we want to hear what you think about this design, what do you like or what would you recommend? How do you use saying 'Thank You' in your email campaigns?

Want more email design? Be sure to check out our Email Design Look Book 2012 for more creative email inspiration.

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Welcome to the 2nd edition of our weekly Fun Friday's Email Design Creative Spotlight. As we mentioned in last week's creative email design post, we want to get YOU involved with us in the email creative services team. As we look... More

Welcome to the 2nd edition of our weekly Fun Friday's Email Design Creative Spotlight. As we mentioned in last week's creative email design post, we want to get YOU involved with us in the email creative services team. As we look for inspiration in previous email designs, we would love to give you a chance to be inspired and inspire us with your comments.

This week we focus on a mobile-friendly email we created for the 'My Coke Rewards' program. When looking at the open data we noticed Coke's open-on-mobile numbers were skyrocketing. There became a need to create a template that looked stellar on both pocket-sized and traditional displays while combining a personalized mega merge tailored to the individual. A points balance merge and a customized comic were introduced to keep users coming back for more and a sharp increase in mobile code entry was observed after the redesign. Best of all as Shaunmarie Gutbezahl, Sr. Designer at Yesmail said, "Big, bold, flat, and simple. And the code is light as a feather!"


There were 7 key areas of email design we focused on:

1. Enhanced personalization
We wanted to lead off with a personal greeting and design a large, highly visible area to display the member's point balance. After all, this is a loyalty program and points and rewards is what it's all about.

2. Simple and fun looking with short burst communication style
The new design reads more like a magazine--large editorial-style photos, eyebrow text for easy skimming, short headlines and brief body copy. Following this style also made it possible to create a mobile-friendly newsletter that scales down nicely.

3. Rewards in a grid (4, 8, 12, 16)
Our research proved that readers love browsing rewards and they will scroll through a larger quantity of rewards than we ever expected. We created a rewards grid that can expand and contract as necessary and offer rewards based on editorial content, points balance or anything in between.

4. Sticky content and author introduction
We introduced a monthly comic starring the Baxter family who are avid MCR members. We hope to archive these for our members viewing pleasure on one of the MCR social sites. Alongside the comic is a friendly message from the MCR Team. We included a handwritten sign-off to add a human element to the newsletter.

5. Mobile: Narrow body design and large type format
We restructured the width of the newsletter to minimize the amount of scaling required when viewed on a mobile device. We enlarged the text, CTAs and gutter spaces to ensure readability on mobile devices while still looking great in the traditional browser space.

6. Social : 'Likes', Reviews & Dispatches
We created a content space dedicated to social news and promotions from MCR's social various social media channels.

7. List based sections
We added html lists intermixed with the photo-enhanced editorial stories to mix up the template and add more information without cluttering the newsletter or requiring too much more scrolling.

So now we want to you to hear what you think about this design, what do you like or what would you recommend? Will you be signing up for Coke Rewards any time soon?

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Due to our recent email design awards, we decided to release our Email Design Look Book 2012. We love Email Design Look Books - they're great sources of creative ideas and a great way to focus and look at what we... More

Due to our recent email design awards, we decided to release our Email Design Look Book 2012. We love Email Design Look Books - they're great sources of creative ideas and a great way to focus and look at what we have done in the past. Going forward we want to make sharing what we are doing creatively on a regular basis a priority in 2012 in order to get YOU involved. With that being said, we decided to start a weekly post showcasing our email designs called 'Fun Friday's Email Design's Creative Spotlight.' Our goal is to get you involved in and in touch with the creative process, highlight why certain email campaigns worked, and add a little fun and creativity to your Friday afternoons.

So with that being said, let's kick it off with an email we created for eBay's Green Team. The idea behind this was to create an editorial-style newsletter with supplementary, non-product related "eco-content" to help further engage their audience. Our Sr. Designer Jack Satta emphasized, "Single-column, stacked sections with strong delineation are great for newsletters and a must-have for mobile."


Key Areas of Email Design We Focused On:

• Clearly readable emails with images off
• Very mobile-friendly
• Maintain brand/sub-brand look and feel throughout
• Stacked sections for easy scrolling and separation
• Hierarchy (postcard + subsections, or lead article+ other articles, treatment of Headlines, CTAs)
• Carried over site design

What are your thoughts on this design, what did you like or what would you recommend?
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We're delighted that Chad White and the Retail Email Blog mentioned one of our Creative Services Team's designs for HP Shopping in the 'Design Hall of Fame: 2011 Inductees.'Our clients at HP Shopping really pushed us to create a layout... More

We're delighted that Chad White and the Retail Email Blog mentioned one of our Creative Services Team's designs for HP Shopping in the 'Design Hall of Fame: 2011 Inductees.'


Our clients at HP Shopping really pushed us to create a layout that stood out. Their new Folio Notebook is an amazing product, and we wanted to show that with a "breakout" email layout.  Here's what Chad White had to say about it:

"I'm a big fan of email design best practices, but I'm also a big fan of occasionally ditching those best practices to stand out in the inbox. HP does exactly that in this email, where they jettison their preheader text, header, and navigation bar and increased their email width to 800 pixels from 570. Those changes helped put more focus on the hero image of their new ultra-thin laptop."

It's an exciting time to be a part of the Yesmail Interactive team, and, as we announced this week, it has been especially exciting for the Creative Services Team as we're a part of 4 awards in the last 3 months! 

• 2011 Email Hall of Fame: Retail Email Blog HP, 12/8 - Exclusive: HP's First Ultrabook is Here
• 2012 Marketing Sherpa Email Awards Best Triggered Email or Auto-Responder Series: Silver - Feld Entertainment - Welcome Series
• 2012 eTail Email Marketing: Best in Class Finalist - Webroot Newsletter
• 2011 OMMA Award: Best Email CRM Campaign - HP Customer Revival Campaign

While we would love to take all the credit, we have to thank our clients for continuing to strive above and beyond the ordinary and inspiring us to create innovative email templates.

Last but not least, if you happen to be attending the Marketing Sherpa event in Vegas next week you're in luck, I'll be there both days providing FREE email design audits in our dedicated clinic room. Be sure to register to here today as space if filling up quickly.

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