OMMA Email Awards

The Responsys Creative Team brought home 2 of the 3 awards OMMA Awards for Creativity in the email standalone category for our work with Harley-Davidson and Lenovo.

These OMMA award are just a few of the nearly 30 awards we've pulled in the last three years for creative excellence.

Go Team!

Southwest - Text to Signup for Email

Southwest now allows fliers to sign-up for their click-n-save email program via text. This is especially convenient for travelers since they most often have a mobile device with them.

Here's a screenshot of their boarding pass with an ad for this new feature.

What Did They Do Last Year? 2008 Holiday SwipeFile

I've been tracking internet retailer websites for several years now, and I've decided to post several sites home pages from last holiday season.

The information is posted at SwipeFile.info . I'm actively experimenting with different ways to collect and display information and I'm interested in your thoughts on what is useful in these archives.

The archives currently posted are:

Accessories and Shoes - Coach, eBags, FOSSIL, Nine West, Zappos

Apparel - Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Gap, J. Crew, LL Bean, Old Navy, Urban Outfitters, Victoria's Secret.

Department Stores - JCPenney, Macys, Nordstrom, Sears, Target, and Walmart.

If you like what you see, or have trouble understanding how to use - just comment below, and I'll address the best I can.

Macys Uses Display Ads to Advertise Facebook Fan Page

Shows that Macys places a big enough value on it's Facebook Fan Page to pay money to drive people to it.

I'm sure others are doing this as well.

Welcome Message Gallery

In a quick (unscientific) review of clients I’ve worked with, the average welcome series generated 6 times the revenue per email sent when compared to the rest of their email program. The worst performing welcome message had over twice the revenue per email sent compared to the total program.

This post is a companion post to my ClickZ article on Welcome Messages.

I’ve collected a sample of 30 different companies. The top 20 Internet Retailers plus another 10 top internet apparel retailers. For each I collected:
- Email signup pages
- Welcome messages
o Images on
o Images off
o iPhone message
o iphone inbox

You can view the full gallery here.

You can view the different categories by clicking on the tags on the left of your screen. The most general tags are
- Email-Signup. Home page plus other email signup pages.
- Welcome-Email. Welcome email as displayed in gmail.
- Welcome-Email-iPhone. Welcome email as displayed on iPhone.
- Welcome-Inbox-iPhone. Welcome email preview as displayed in iPhone preview within inbox.

You can also search for company name or any other text you’d like to find. The text in the image screen shots are searchable.

A few observations beyond my ClickZ article:

American Eagle & J.C. Penney still use plain text messages.

Abercrombie and J. Crew still use the “One Big Image” version of an email.


Click the “800 Number” tag to see the few who use phone numbers in their emails. This works great for mobile.

-Zappos and L.L. Bean have clickable links to phone numbers.
-Circuit City, HP, and Office Max have 800 numbers but as images, so they do nothing to help out the most obvious need for an 800 number – the mobile customer.


Nordstrom and Wal-Mart have trouble using text nav bar in the mobile client.

Better Pre-Headers - Follow Victoria's Secret

Victoria's Secret was a client of mine in the late 90's. They were an innovator then, and are still one of the most innovative internet retailers. Of the top 20 internet retailers, they are one of only two companies that have more than one million fans on Facebook (FanPage Stats).

So how do they do a preheader? The first sentence in the inbox preheader is SELLING.

I can't stand the "problems viewing" pre-headers that dominate the marketplace today (like the one below from Costco).




Once you open the message on the iPhone, that pre-header is a clickable link. And that link takes you to a landing page that while not optimized for mobile, is actually pretty good.




Here's the landing page for the preheader link.






Now check the Costco message.




The landing page for the main offer, is a landing page optimized by internal search.

If you view on a mobile, you really should have bigger images. And also, think about formating so that you take the up the full screen and not waste space on the right, like the Costco landing page below.

Share with Twitter Facebook and Email

Website Magazine has a nice concise way to ask people to share any way they like

{Click to view full image}



Email Insider uses some nice concise buttons as well.