Some of the examples below will make sense, apply for a significant number of people, and maybe even inspire your marketing efforts. Other examples are absolutely subjective to my own odd preferences for what I appreciate in an email.

Design and User Experience

Personally, I like when emails both look nice and are intuitive to interact with. It seems like that should be fairly simple and easy for most companies, but apparently it isn’t.

Most emails I receive from smaller brands aren’t the best, though I don’t necessarily want to call them out as they are working with far more limited capabilities. The design is awkward at times, which may result from using templates and how the email comes through depending on which service a person uses.

I want to be able to click (nearly) anywhere within the email and get to the website, when quite often it’s just an image that takes me nowhere. I frequently find myself clicking around an email trying to find the place that will take me to their site. On top of that, not all brand URLs are as simple as their-name.com and if the URL isn’t in the email I might just give up.

A company having a lot of resources doesn’t always translate to a nice design or experience either. HBO, for example, has shockingly bad emails considering the size of the company (in my humble opinion). I don’t keep many of their emails around, and the example below might not be the worst I’ve seen, but I still don’t think it’s great.

I have questions:

Why is it so bad?!
Why is there this tiny text above everything else?
Why is there so much horrible gray space around the rest of the actual content?
Why do they have these horrible dark gray blocks at the bottom with light gray text on top?
Why?

No matter how limited your resources are, it pays to keep a close eye on visual balance and user experience. With very minimal effort, your marketing email quality can beat HBO’s—I believe in you.

Content

Beyond design, when I sign up for emails and stay on the list, I am interested in the content, of course. Design, as mentioned above, falls into this. But I also look at grammar, spelling, and whether the email has a clear point.

Some companies want to include as much as they can in an email, but I find this often makes it so chaotic I’d rather just delete it. Organizing content into blocks is certainly helpful the more content a company wants to include. Emails from Vulture, a digital media outlet, often have a prominent story at the top with smaller sections below linking to content in music, movies, television, etc.

I also enjoy emails from smaller businesses like Catbird, a boutique jewelry store in NYC. They often send out emails with guides on wearing jewelry and personal interest stories about people in NY. They treat their subscribers to the occasional playlist as well.

The variety of content that any company includes should fit in with their product or service. That doesn’t mean it always has to strictly relate – but at least fit with the brand and audience. It might be fun to consider how that can be expanded from time to time to keep people interested.

Frequency

There are plenty of resources to help determine the best frequency, and many CRM tools that help track customer engagement to segment how often you should send emails to certain groups. Check out Seventh Sense’s blog on this topic if you need a few tips to start.

I don’t have much to say on this point other than if a company emails too often I am unsubscribing. And if I have tried unsubscribing multiple times and waited for it to take effect and I am still receiving them, I will mark them as spam and the emails can die there.

My Favorite Emails

All right—this part is absolutely subjective. Why I, Kayla, subscribe to certain email lists and will remain on those lists isn’t always easy to explain.

Personally, I hate the way companies and brands have tried to act like they are your friend or now sell “authenticity”. It feels phony and I’m not interested. I also tend to like things that are odd. Maybe that will help explain some of the list below.

Insane Clown Posse

Probably one of my favorite email newsletters I receive. I feel a little burst of joy every time I see an email pop up from them, and in my opinion, it is not frequent enough. They livestream on Twitch and the emails they send for each one are glorious.

First, look at an email sent out around Valentine’s Day:

And an incredible announcement for a new music video:

What more can I say? Why would I ever unsubscribe?

Guy Fieri

First, if you don’t have Guy Fieri merch you might want to get some.

Second, if you go to the store to get yourself some merch and you want to sign up for emails this is the sign up:

Obviously I was in.

And then for an actual email—the background picture is perfect. Also, Nirvana x Guy Fieri? I’ll stay on this list, thank you very much.

Goop

A lot of people say Goop is out of touch, but honestly they don’t know what they’re missing. To start, its marketing is honestly designed pretty well, at least in my opinion. The emails are all clean, organized into easily digestible blocks, and have beautiful imagery.

Prices that are mostly insane to me, though honestly this stuff is toward the lower end of items they often do list.

Where it gets fun for me is the content. My absolute favorite are the gift guides.

I liked the 2021 holiday guide so much that I still have it saved. How else would I find out about Psychic School at Nuurvana?

With the subheading “Intuition tuition”. Love it. $33 a month, too–Goop’s dollar bin.

Another incredible discovery:

For those reading in America, that’s $32,230 (right now in summer 2022 at least, while the Euro is on par with USD). I have no idea on taxes, shipping and other fees. Want to keep your kids active but make sure people know you’re not poor? Get this! Rich mom energy, indeed.

What Makes a Good Email?

This varies, of course, and your brand and audience are always important to keep in mind. Some things should be obvious though: good design and clear, well-written messages are two I would keep in mind. The design shouldn’t look the same for everyone – an audience looking for camping gear isn’t looking for the same email Goop sends. Although those audiences could overlap, I mean I certainly like camping and laughing at Goop emails.

If you know your audience, and hopefully you do, investing the time in developing better emails is well worth the effort.