How ASOS engages through its email creative

Email campaigns we like to learn from

I recently reviewed how ASOS does a great job of engaging their audience both through email and social media marketing.  Here, I'm going to review one example of an email campaign I like, calling out what I think works well and not so well.

In the second part of 2011, ASOS seemed to make quite a few creative refinements to its email designs and this winter style campaign is a good example of the new approach.

Getting the creative balance right

Effective email design for a brand like ASOS needs to get the balance right between the visual appeal the brand offers with clear calls-to-action and offer. I think this creative gets this balance right:

Let's now go into some of the details:

The pre-header

Pre-headers are widely used in the US, but are not adopted so widely in the UK. This one is fairly subtle, but it's there:

“Free deliver and free returns on all UK orders”

As you can see above, ASOS positioned the preheader text nicely so that if the email is read in Gmail or on a mobile (as seen below), the preheader is seen either as a Gmail snippet or in the mobile.

This incentivises the recipient to open the email, rather than the more common functional preheader text of “If you can’t read this email…”, which is positioned below the marketing preheader text.

Going into the details that matter, particularly for mobile, remember that the pre-header will often show in the inbox or preview pane - the ASOS one works better than the HMV one I think.

Image blocking

Now let’s have a look at the email with images blocked. This detail is a big deal - blocking is the default setting on all email clients. As you can see from this image at the start of their campaigns last year, this can still be a problem when designers haven't considered the technology.

It's good to see this was soon fixed - the example below shows how the top navigation is now text and can be easily read and actioned. Then below this navigation, there is a very intriguing colour pattern – remember – images are disabled! Looking at the code, I can see that they’re using coloured cells. It certainly achieves its purpose and catches the eye!

The next thing we see is the offer, with the main call to actions placed not only within the preview pane, but also clearly visible and actionable. All other call to actions follow suit further down the email and are all visible and actionable with images off.

What’s next? I’d love to see them use video animated gifs (see here for inspiration) some models walking down the catwalk in full action within the email would be great. Or even with this email, they could have videoed the model pulling faces and converted this to a video animated gif – food for thought!!

Thanks to Kath Pay of Email marketing consultancy Plan to Engage for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Kath is also the Chair of Events and Communications Hub for the Email Marketing Council of the DMA UK where she edits the DMA Infobox Enewsletter.