The Email Wars

I am always fascinated with the horizontal scroll email. It holds a special place in my heart in terms of creativity and interrupting the typical inbox experience. Others I have seen are not in favor of it as they thing people will not know how to use it. I call BS on that.

Now I do not think it should be a staple unless it works for your email marketing programs but it can be effectively used as an interrupter at times during the year to mix things up and make people get re-engaged in your programs. Things get stale, people begin to get conditioned to your layouts, you need to mix it up once in a while. I am so conditioned that I actually find that I stop buying from brands where I am not enticed as the campaign look, layouts and offers are stale and consistent. I need some email shock therapy from time to time to make me wake up and convert.

I have covered many of these in previous posts, but this week Abercrombie and Fitch has hit me with a Tri-Fecta. Instead of scantily clad men and women (um boys and girls) they are hitting me with product emails that are horizontal. Although I am not someone that owns any AF I do think that they do an amazing job with the brand, photos, ads and enticing people to want to buy.

In looking at the three emails so far – they had two on shirts (both different shots) and one on jeans. Now although I loved them all, they failed me at the click through. They had me on the hook to explore until that click to product resulted in a home page landing destination to hunt and gather for myself. If you are going to show me a product take the time to link me to it or the category at least. Even taking the time with the jean email to code each pair to drive it to the landing page or even take me to men or women’s jeans based on my click not only helps me as a customer get to the point of conversion/transaction faster, but also helps AF identify if they do not already know my possible target gender/purchasing interest for future campaigns.

The last point is this. The emails started at 2200 pixels wide but the last one (jeans) measured in at 2650 pixels wide. Why does this matter? Well it only matters if Outlook 2007 is a place your subscribers read emails. It only allows without breaking, tweaking, killing the horizontal scroll experience. In tests we have run we have been able to actually go to 12000 pixels wide in many other email clients – but when is enough enough?

If you want to try this think about a 2-3 panel experience, use anchor tags to drive navigation to the right and start around 1600 pixels wide, then test getting sider and the impact. And on the height you need to say under 600 pixels so that the scroll does not go both ways. You want to only give one option. I would really test and try to stay around 550 high if you can.

So back to saluting them. I love these emails and I think that creatively they are perfect. I am hoping to hear a little about the results on a high level from them soon to share what I can.