The Email Wars

I was hinting last week that we were going to go horizontal in an email campaign. Well after a few weeks of testing and finding out what can and can’t be done in all the email clients… we threw the long ball… the whole width of the field. GO LONG BABY was heard throughout the offices.

We wanted to present the weekly RSS fed Zinio blog email in a way that stood out, as Zinio as a publisher of digital magazines is doing just that. It was part tribute, part marketing, part torture, but pure fun. And voila here we are, radical email marketing.

So what we learned thus far.

1. You can go wide and get the reads.

2. You need to test test test and then test again. 

3. Outlook 2007 is the only real pain the arse with a max width of 2200 pixels before it starts crushing your creative and giving rendering issues. 

Oh yeah and we made a traditional look and feel in the vertical presentation format, but that is just like making sure you have a back up quarterback in place for the big game. Nice work eROI team for challenging convention and doing something different. Know comes the fun part, sitting back and watching how people are reacting and interacting with the email and content. I wonder just how many people in the publishing world were slightly surprised by the format and how many had to think for a little bit to see how it worked… Oh to have a video camera in some offices…

What do you think about this layout and the idea of mixing up the presentation of email? Tell me.