Around almost every holiday, brands and stores launch marketing campaigns with the goal of promoting sales, generating buzz and reminding the world that, “Hey – we still exist.”
One of the most important marketing tools going today is email, where the stakes are perhaps biggest: brands have to strike the right balance between spammy/informative, fun/cloying, design smart/confusing. If people sign up for your email list, they’re more-or-less willing to at least hear you out, so a poorly constructed email is truly a missed opportunity. Here are some July 4th/summer email campaigns (all clothing related, just to narrow the playing field) that we think are doing it right.
Uniqlo
For a clothing retailer without an online store, Uniqlo’s mastery of all things digital (its Pinterest page is awesome, if you haven’t seen it) is all the more impressive. The “Summer Festival” email campaign matches the visual style of Uniqlo’s stores and logo with a clear red and white color scheme, elegant design, and sale items easily laid out. It contains a lot of info – a calendar, product images, even an in-store drum show schedule (!) – but is successful because no single element detracts from any other, and it’s all easy to understand and navigate. Not easy to do.
SuperHeroStuff
Starting with the intentionally-cheesy Photoshopped sunglasses on Wolverine, which conveys a welcomed sense of humor about comics and superheroes, SuperHeroStuff’s email grabs your attention. And the imagery flows nicely, from Wolverine to the “Save 13%” banner and back again. From there, it’s all messaging, as their summer sale is successfully driven home with nicely placed copy above the main image, inside it, and below it.
Original Penguin
Original Penguin’s campaign is among the best we’ve seen in email design aesthetics this summer. The smart incorporation of the Original Penguin logo into a vintage-looking American flag lets you know what this email is about even without copy (of which there is little), and it matches the brand’s tone effortlessly. These things can be easy to screw up – the font color is too close the background color, the logo looks tacky on the flag, etc. – but Original Penguin’s email hits every beat perfectly.