mark-pollard
Viget Labs email newsletter design - screenshot
Viget Labs makes cool stuff for the online world. I really like their website, blogs and emails. Always clean, beautiful, filled with good content and designed in a way that doesn't make the content fight with the 'creative' .
Analysis
The strategy here is mostly about cross-promoting blog content with space also allocated to events, jobs, some of their work. Each of their 4 blogs (they have one for strategy, creative, design and marketing) has a distinct identity and separate logo. Great strategy - sounds intensive but I have a hunch these blogs play a key role in generating work for the company.
I love the bottom left of this email - re-affirm what you're about, whenever you can. The design doesn't over-accentuate it but it's there if I want to remind myself why I thought they were so great in the first place that I should register for their emails.
Improvements
1. Up-top stuff - invite people to add the email send-address to address book (whitelisting), add a one-liner in plain html text telling me what the email is about (this is viewed in preview pane - can affect open rate), view html version.
2. Encourage forwarding and sharing more - Photojojo (website), for example, call out Delicious sharing in their emails. View PhotoJojo email.
3. Bonus always-there content. I really like this strategy from Smart Company (view email).
4. Swap blog content with left hand menu. Typically the top left side of a design is critical real estate (based on how the eye tracks) and when emails load in applications like Outlook, the reader's preview pane and email view pane may not always be wide enough to see the entire email. So I tend to prefer the most important, need-to-scan content on the left so it doesn't get missed in that 2-second window someone is thinking about reading on.
5. 'What's in this email'. They don't really need this because the email doesn't really 'contain' anything other than links back to their website. It would be great to see them using email as a key distributor of content (not just of links) - in which case a 'What's in this email' list at the top of the email would be useful because it would give people an idea of whether they want to scroll and read further.
6. Add or re-organise some of the blog links by popularity, recency. Add comments.
Any other suggestions? Post them below.
For more of this sort of stuff, read Digital Strategy on Twitter.
Screenshot 9 December 2008
Viget Labs email newsletter design - screenshot
Viget Labs makes cool stuff for the online world. I really like their website, blogs and emails. Always clean, beautiful, filled with good content and designed in a way that doesn't make the content fight with the 'creative' .
Analysis
The strategy here is mostly about cross-promoting blog content with space also allocated to events, jobs, some of their work. Each of their 4 blogs (they have one for strategy, creative, design and marketing) has a distinct identity and separate logo. Great strategy - sounds intensive but I have a hunch these blogs play a key role in generating work for the company.
I love the bottom left of this email - re-affirm what you're about, whenever you can. The design doesn't over-accentuate it but it's there if I want to remind myself why I thought they were so great in the first place that I should register for their emails.
Improvements
1. Up-top stuff - invite people to add the email send-address to address book (whitelisting), add a one-liner in plain html text telling me what the email is about (this is viewed in preview pane - can affect open rate), view html version.
2. Encourage forwarding and sharing more - Photojojo (website), for example, call out Delicious sharing in their emails. View PhotoJojo email.
3. Bonus always-there content. I really like this strategy from Smart Company (view email).
4. Swap blog content with left hand menu. Typically the top left side of a design is critical real estate (based on how the eye tracks) and when emails load in applications like Outlook, the reader's preview pane and email view pane may not always be wide enough to see the entire email. So I tend to prefer the most important, need-to-scan content on the left so it doesn't get missed in that 2-second window someone is thinking about reading on.
5. 'What's in this email'. They don't really need this because the email doesn't really 'contain' anything other than links back to their website. It would be great to see them using email as a key distributor of content (not just of links) - in which case a 'What's in this email' list at the top of the email would be useful because it would give people an idea of whether they want to scroll and read further.
6. Add or re-organise some of the blog links by popularity, recency. Add comments.
Any other suggestions? Post them below.
For more of this sort of stuff, read Digital Strategy on Twitter.
Screenshot 9 December 2008