The Email Wars

I subscribe to so many emails for the reason not that I am going to buy from most of them (sorry for taking your metrics down) but to see what different industries are doing and how I might leverage some ideas in campaigns we are building. It is a knowledge management approach. Since it is hard to get real time data in the email marketing world that you might get in other industries from books, you have to set up honeypots to track industry leaders in order to learn. 

But I was excited to see the change this week in the creative from The Body Shop. It was not a dramatic overhaul, but it did pop more to me. 

They moved and changed quite a few elements. The forward to a friend in the top right is now a My Account button. So does this tell us that people are not using the Forward to a Friend ability as much anymore as an email asset and they see that this change is better for their users? I would wager from what I have seen that the forward to a friend is not as important anymore as it used to be. Not a metric or conversion driver. 

They changed the amount of stand alone boxes/offers to focus on a bundling strategy. What do you think was the basis of this change? I would think that it would be from a result at looking at the site and conversion metrics based on what things people were buying. Good move. Also they can now appeal to a broader range of shopper who might not want the stand alone item that they are promoting, but like one of the others they see in the bundle. 

The color change to the layout was what first caught my eye. I had become so conditioned to seeing the same color types and this new layout allows them to get over the same email look hump and jump the shark with the ability to have more flexility and catch the eye. Now I am saying this only in hopes that this is what they are going to do. Time will tell. 

They also changed the alignment of the email. The older version was always center justified, never understood that. The new version goes left justified and that to me is just a better move.

The only thing that I would have liked to see what snippet text (pre-header) navigation at the top of this email making it easier to jump down into the offers you might like first. This can capture the attention faster and drive the subscriber into the email to take action.

The last thing I noticed was the addition of the “Shop Now” button. One of my favorites in any ecommerce email program. Before they had a text link at the end of the copy. Now this one POPS. 

What do you think about the changes? Is there anything you would have done differently?