MindComet

Banana Republic Unveils Interesting Enticement Call To Action

The email below from Banana Republic landed in inboxes a couple days ago and has made the rounds as a point of discussion on numerous email marketing blogs…. I can’t help but put my two cents in.

It’s a very clever (almost too clever) method of compelling users to click through via the arrow on the right side of the email’s design. Once the user clicks, the landing page displays all seven wardrobes for the ‘Chino-Week’ promotion. But was the arrow too subtle for the average BR customer to notice and click?

From what Dylan at theemailwars uncovered was that it was a gender-specific email to boot.

What do you think? Was this call to action and email in general effective or not?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Feb. 18, 2010

Fred Flare Wins My Heart

Attitude. Personality. Unique. Distinct. Fun. Consistent. This email is all of those things.

From the cute illustrations to the day-by-day breakdown of Bee’s items and the prices of said items; it all works. Even though the huge call-to-action of “FREE SHIP!“ is way below the fold, it still does the trick. If anything, this email basically made the fold disappear. I was so intrigued by the creative, I scanned the entire thing up and down numerous times when it landed in my inbox. You couldn’t ask for a better reaction out of one of your subscribers… well, I could’ve bought something, but I’m not a girl. Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it. So there.

The emails from fredflare.com are something to behold. It proves that you don’t always have to conform to a standard template or wireframe in order to get a reaction out of your customers.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 30, 2009

Must Subscribe: REI - A Lesson in Call to Action

REI has always been consistent in their email-marketing. They tend to try new things, which I always respect them for. For example, their implementation of animated gifs (as a replacement for embedded video) was brilliant. That is something I’ve been dying to test and apply to one of our future campaigns.

REI’s sales emails have the same look & feel (wireframe, font selection, etc), but differ enough from one to the next so each one grabs my attention in their own unique way. The email they sent on Friday afternoon sucked me right in.  See below:

Everything about this email screams “BUY BUY BUY!!! CLICK!!! BUY!!!!“ From the stark “SALE” text with the father and his two kids riding their mountain bikes to the “sale & clearance” navigation link to the sub call to action consisting of a “SUPER CLEARANCE”... they all get the point across. The point being, “click through and save & spend money with REI!“.

Some might argue this email is desperate and may come across as being a bit obnoxious and pushy… maybe so. But it worked on me, as I’m the happy owner of a new Half Dome Tent. I wasn’t really in the market for a new tent really… but I was compelled enough to click through, saw the tent, saw how much I was saving and couldn’t help myself.

I think a lot of B2C companies can learn from REI’s emails in general. Their call to action strategy is solid, but so are other aspect of their designs. They always include links for mobile / text versions, their email navigation reflects their site’s navigation and they embrace all of the major social media sites. All of these components are absolutely necessary for a successful email campaign.

If you haven’t already, you should sign up for their emails here.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 31, 2009

Pizza Hut Counts The Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds - A Lesson In Effective Call To Action

I really have to hand it to the marketing team or who ever develops Pizza Hut’s promotional emails.  Yesterday, a colleague here at MindComet forwarded me an email from the international pizza chain. When I opened the email, I was thrilled, confused, shocked and awed by what I saw… a clock, counting down in real time.

My initial reaction was something to the effect of “how’d they manage to get Flash to render in my Gmail account!?“ Then I snapped back into reality and realized that was an impossibility. Only Apple Mail can render Flash, which I wasn’t using at the time. I had to know how they pulled this off… I went into Sherlock mode.

Upon investigating this—which consisted of re-formatting the source code—I concluded that they were simply using animated gifs in a very clever way.

The seconds gif counts down, with each frame lasting one second. The minutes gif also counted down, with one frame for each 60 seconds… You get the idea; although the hours and days images are just static images. If you refresh the email, the minutes and seconds numbers revert back to “59:59”.  They address this inconsistency with fine print stating that the “clock does not reflect actual time”. So smart.

At any rate, this is an INCREDIBLY EFFECTIVE sales email… probably the best I’ve ever seen.  The entire email is one big, giant call to action.  See for yourself:

View the email hosted on their server to see the countdown clock in action.

UPDATE: The ‘day’ image has been switched from “10” to “9”.  The image url may have something to do with it:

http://www.pizzahut.com/countdownclock/?Get=Days&Expirationdate=5.18.09&clockimagesfolder=clockimageslarge

If you click on the link above, it defaults to “00”, but if you open the email or the web-hosted page today, it’ll read “09”. From the URL, it’s looking at the “Expirationdate” and counting down from 10 days compared to the date in the URL. If you change the 5.18.09 to 5.16.09, it’ll reflect the correct day! Tricky tricky!

Labels: animated gif, call to action, pizza hut

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Posted by MindComet on May. 07, 2009

Email Design Showcase

I thought I would take this post to present a few emails that I’ve been impressed with recently. The emails below have landed in my inbox within the past month and all have exceptional designs for their own unique reasons.

eROI: Sales / Marketing Blast

I love everything about this email, from the subject line, the content blocks & calls to action… Especially the overall design with the cutting board & bread.  They really seem to nail the tone with this blast—beckoning to join their team if you’re currently unhappy with your online marketing efforts and general presence on the web. I’d really like to know the stats for this email, what the terms of success were and how many conversions they scored.

Jupiter Images: Special Deal / Promotion

I can honestly say that I’ve never seen an email designed this way.  Although, it lacks any HTML supporting text (it’s basically just 3 images in their own table row), the idea behind the design is a winner.  The angles drew me in… I scanned the entire email and spent a lot of time below the fold once I got there, inspecting the smaller images carefully.  Points off for not hot-linking the “EMAIL US AT” call to action to the email addresses, but all and all great job.

Blue Sky Factory: Sales / Marketing Blast

I can’t remember ever receiving an email with a newspaper / traditional newsletter design.  And for that reason, this email really made an impression on me.  It may also be due to it’s simplistic nature, the small call to action on the bottom right hand corner, its good balance of imagery and text, or how it makes the case that email marketing still works and still consistently provides the highest ROI out of any other form of marketing.  Either way, it put a smile on my face.

If you have received any exceptionally designed emails recently, post them below!

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 14, 2008