The Email Wars

I found an email from Banana Republic very interesting this AM. I am not sure how many people might have caught it but it was a complete play on something not being right. As a matter of fact the email was “broken”. Now I did not catch it at first myself in my first skim as the size was on par with every other email they send. I thought something was out of whack but had to go back and look at it harder. Now did the typical subscriber notice that something was afoot? Did they notice and take action to find out more?

But what was it? The email itself was exactly the same size as all of their other ones. I had to actually hold them side by side to make sure as the image hat tip to the wide email format – sideways scrolling- makes you think it would continue on. I dove deeper into the image mapping and everything was going to the right places, so I wonder what percentage of the subscriber base actually found that arrow to the right and used it to go to the landing page.

Note that it is a interesting tactic to act as if something might have gone wrong, was cut off, or that more is hiding past the email itself. But I would love to know if people where actually drawn to the arrow.

As you can see from the creative they might have taken a little risk and gone wide with the 7 day a week approach. If you look to the landing page that the arrow takes you to, it is rather easy to see how they might have experimented and pulled this off. It would have been a good test, but not to steal any thunder from what we see here… this is a good test as well. I would have looked to do this in this way as well as the wide way and A/B test them here to see what the difference would be. And maybe they did and I was in one of the groups.

My only tip on this is I would have made the arrow work harder. I feel it was lost in the inbox as I was reading this email and I think with a different treatment it might have drawn me in more and made it clearer to me where to go.

What do you think about this? Was it effective? Would you have looked for more?

UPDATE:

I was forwarded this nice alternate gender version. I like the tie in the subject line and some of the other copy changes. Same campaign just tailored by gender all ecom in fashion should be as a default.

Nice work BR on getting targeted and focused.

I would have loved to have some actual scrolling ability in the email itself but I think they did a great job with the approach, copy and execution as a whole.