The 2010 Email Marketing Awards – “The Trendies”

When you have been working on email marketing as long as the team here at Trendline has , you get a heck of a lot of emails. We are collectively signed up for thousands of email programs. We do this to keep our fingers on the pulse of the industry, monitor trends, and advise clients on strategies. We also just love email marketing. We can’t get enough email!

Since we see so many emails, we thought it would be fun to create some awards to celebrate those who have excelled at email marketing in the past year and brought enjoyment to inboxes worldwide. Taking some inspiration from Dunder-Mifflin’s “The Dundie’s“, we knew we needed a catchy name. So we asked our Twitter followers for suggestions. The winning tweet was from Scott Cohen, who came up with “The Trendie’s”. So, without furtur adieu, the 2010 Trendies. (If you won, please leave your acceptance speech in the comments section.)

Best Use of the Bulletproof Button: Skype

The bulletproof button is an important technique in email marketing design and HTML production to combat image blocking. By using HTML text and a image background, you can preserve the integrity of your button with images on or off. We felt Skype’s email to introduce it’s video calling ability on the iPhone really took the cake. If you need to explain to someone what and why the bulletproof button is important, there is no better example than this.

Images On

Images Off

Best Product Launch/Announcement Email: Scoutmob

Scoutmob is a company that really understands the power of email and doesn’t miss a single opportunity to have fun and create a connection with their subscribers (sign up for their program just to see the awesomely entertaining Lewis on their thank you page).  Their announcement of Scoutmob NYC came with one of the year’s great subject lines: we’re about to pee our pants. That led into this Trendie winning email:

Subject: we're about to pee our pants

Most Original 12 Days of Christmas Email: Impact Guns

Bam! Nothing says the Holidays than an good ol retail email campaign leveraging the 12 days of Christmas theme. This years “Most Original 12 Days of Christmas email” goes to Impact Guns which managed to make buying guns, knives, ammo and holsters well…Christmassy. The creative is simple and easy to read and give us that o’ so gentle reminder on what the other days were all about and missed. The color pallettes reflect a seasonal cheer and it even looked great with the images off. I have no idea what their budget is for email marketing, but I think their creative is pretty darn good even up against some of the big eTailers. Lets face it, buying guns may be a blast for some, but Impact Guns makes me feel that an AR15 under the tree can really add some Christmas cheer.

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Best Evolutionary Scroll: Columbia Sportswear

We loved this email so much, we had to give it it’s own category. There were few emails this year that jumped out of the inbox more than this. Great use of color & a unique layout, this email truly had a narrative. Many email marketers tend to jam the top of an email with content and calls-to-action, thinking their subscribers will never see what’s “below the fold”. The real purpose of the fold is to draw a subscriber in to scroll or expand the email in all it’s glory. Columbia took that to heart, and for that, they are now winners of a Trendie.

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Stay tuned for part 2 of the 2010 Trendies.

Grab an RSS Feed or follow us @trendlinei on Twitter. More winners will be announced next week.

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