Emailology for Anthropologie

Received my weekly/biweekly email from Anthropologie today. This store is amazing and they have amazing emails to match, but I must warn you, not everyone can pull this kind of amazingness off. Here are three risky things you can try once you've established your brand and you're ready to move your creative to the next level.

 

1) It's an extra wide email. Previously, they've sent emails in the 650-700px range, but this one is definitely on the plus side of 700px. This isn't terrible, but not all ESPs are created equal and somewhere someone is wondering why they are scrolling horizontally. A good rule of thumb is about 600-650px.

 

2) There is no "header" because they've cleverly tucked their logo into the creative. The creative itself is nothing to shake a stick at. It's a lifestyle image photo, made to look like a drawer filled with odds and ends. It's a testament to their brand and style. Love it.

 

3) No text (short of some required and best practices verbiage, but we'll point out that error in a second). Not including text is for the bold and well branded. If you're having deliverability issues, you need to ensure that you're using a good ratio of text to images. Chances are most people aren't seeing your images and without any text to read, the email will look broken. Worse, your unsubscribe rate will begin to climb. Who wants broken emails?

 

Here's the email. Isn't she beautiful? Makes me want to break out my glue and button collection and go nuts. 

 

Now on to the bad parts. Two things.

• Broken view online link
• No snippt/intro text

Maybe you've been living in a bomb shelter until now and you don't know what a view online link is. It's the little link you click when your email looks messed up. Well, I clicked Anthropologie's and it was a relative URL instead of an absolute path, meaning it didn't take me anywhere. Ooops. I'm going to go out on a limb and blame CheetahMail for this one.

 

As for the snippet text, maybe Anthropologie didn't want to "clutter" their creative by adding a simple line of text at the top of their email, but this is what their email looked like in my inbox.

 

 

The subject doesn't allude to any sale or special deal and it might not get as many opens as it could have, but more importantly, the precious real estate to the right of the subject line, also known as the snippet text, was completely wasted with the "Having trouble viewing this email?" line. They could have easily said something about the new summer line being available. But no. They sacrificed the extra sell for their creative. Overall, the email gets points for creativity and standing out, but didn't score so well in the standard best practices category.

 

Stay tuned for later this week when I discuss a neighborhood clothing boutique. Watch out North Park!