In this first episode of email winners/failures, it’s time to highlight the design of Simple Shoes. They are a company that designs and sells shoes via their webshop. One of their most recent email newsletters looks like this:
Full version can be found here.
Why is this email so great? A few reasons for why I picked this one as a winner:
– Simple. It’s in their name but also the design: no cluttered layout, no gazillion text parts and buttons.
– Humour. They put in a play on the groundhog’s message (6 weeks of winter I believe it was) and are preparing for Spring arriving from mid March.
– Tie in with the website. If one thing is important to marketing for a company, it’s consistensy of company style and layout throughout all the marketing channels. This is a prime example of a fluid experience for the end user from email to website.
– GMail snippet and Outlook popup preview friendly. First line of email is ‘See all of our women’s New Arrivals at simpleshoes.com’ which will show up in the GMail snippet and Outlook popup preview. Excellent use of valuable extra space after the subject line.
-The product gets all the space it deserves. If you choose to put your product as wide as the whole email message, you surely are making a statement: our products are all important: the rest is secondary.
Five winning points, can this message do nothing wrong then? Well, it is quite image heavy: if one doesn’t download the images very little will remain of the message. On the other hand, it’s a retailer’s message who has a product to sell: by all means use as much imagery as possible (within common sense limits, of course) to get the message across. In this case that wrong point is of lesser weight than the winning points.
Well done Simple shoes.
