Email design Portfolio
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Email design
Email Campaign Concept, Copy, Design and Implementation for Luxury Family Hotel Brand
At this stage of my work for von Essen hotels I was developing the email marketing strategy from concept, through copy, to design and implementation. A headline that invokes curiosity through a question that connects with the target audience and makes them either want to answer the question or at least see why it is being asked, is a powerful copywriting tool for increasing email opens and encouraging interaction with the content. The headline is hugely important in all marketing and especially in email marketing, where it is all they can see and all that drives their decision to open the email (through the subject line) — and if recipients don’t open the email, you’ve failed.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- Email marketing strategy
- HTML email design
- Cross email client compatibility
- Copywriting for web

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Email design
Killing Three Birds with One Stone Using Email Marketing, Tweetdeck and a Facebook RSS App
We featured culinary events local to the hotels that attract sufficient attention from people who would be interested in such attractions and may also require accommodation. We linked each event in with a special break at the nearest hotel and linked the email up with these special breaks. The email is informative and interesting to the target audience, to the extent that it’s worth reading whether the target audience is planning a hotel break or not. Therefore they’re are likely to have an interest in the content of the email whether they are in the research or buying phase or not. Either way the offers and events are attractive enough to peak the interest of the reader.
Although it is fairly time consuming researching the events, writing the copy and linking them to the most suitable and available special breaks it’s well worth it. After creating these ‘demand generator’ based emails, I create a tweet for each event and schedule it to post at a suitable time using Tweetdeck. These tweets also feed through to our Facebook page using an RSS feed. We therefore saved time by creating content for our email and our social media accounts at the same time.
Although this email features large images at the top of the design, if you view the email with images turned off, you will see styled headings and text because the images are contained in span elements, which contain inline styles that style the alternate text on the images. Emails for a luxury hotel brand need strong emotion provoking imagery, but using the styled span tags and the alt text helps get around the problem of seeing nothing when you first open the email — instead you see the email headline, which is a key hook to catching the readers attention.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing

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Email design
Organising content for 10 hotels around key demand generators
The challenge with this email newsletter was finding key demand generators based on calendar events for ten different hotels, selecting the most relevant/interesting ones, while also weighing up which hotels needed featuring more than others based on booking numbers – and then organising these attractions into an attractive and useful email. One of the keys to hotel marketing is understanding where demand is in the surrounding areas of the hotels and marketing around these demand generators. You’re then able to plan email campaigns, social media marketing and SEO around these demand generators.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email marketing

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Email design
A Little Reminder: Christmas Gift Vouchers Email
Email marketing is a great way to subtly and fairly unobtrusively remind web users of coming deadlines, holidays and important dates. I believe emails shouldn’t just sell but should also be very useful to the end user. In this case, it’s just a quick, helpful reminder for anyone who hasn’t yet purchased Christmas presents for everyone on their lists, that they still have time to purchase a gift voucher online.
By using data analysis and email marketing software to see who showed an interest in a product but didn’t purchase, we can ‘remarket’ to those customers, reaffirming previously communicated messages, while leaving out the details they’ve already digested – so as to be helpful but not annoying. In this case we had already sent an email detailing our variety of gift vouchers and this follow-up email was sent to subscribers who had clicked but not purchased. Remarketing is also a highly effective method of marketing with Google Adwords.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email marketing

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Email design
A Diversion from the Practicalities of Parenting
This email was sent to a database of parents who had registered on a new mothers website. I decided to use a question as the headline/subject line in order to invoke curiosity. The website the subscribers had registered with is more about the practical side of parenting and less about leisure time. So I developed a headline and concept that invokes curiosity about something that might provide a welcome break from practical thinking. When opening the email the subject line is repeated with an image that invokes further curiosity and develops the feeling, with a call to action over the image simply saying “find out why”.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email marketing

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Email design
Fully Booked Hotels in Autumn: High Performing Email Campaign
I was briefed very broadly to design an email to increase autumn bookings for 6 specific hotels. I developed the concept, headline, content and design. Having studied copywriting that sells online, I chose to base the copy on an easily digestible list of ideas for readers to sieve through. Lists work well in web copy because they’re easy to quickly digest; and list based headlines tend to perform well because they’re straight to the point and tell the reader exactly what to expect.
I strongly believe in writing a compelling headline before writing copy body. This is particularly true in email marketing, where the subject line is extremely important. This email achieved a remarkable 40% open rate, most likely because it gave readers some quick snappy ideas for things to do on a weekend with no major national social calendar events. All six featured hotels were fully booked this weekend.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email marketing

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Email design
The Good Life Email for Luxury Family Hotels
This is a very large email newsletter for a luxury family hotel brand. The email encourages interaction with the whole family, with games for children and recipes for adults. The look and feel were designed to be friendly and informal and give the feeling of interactivity, with paper, paperclips and sticky tape. I experienced some difficulties with keeping the email highly graphical, while also including a large amount of text. At the time of this email campaign I was also introducing the brands Twitter and Facebook profiles to web users.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email marketing
- Copywriting

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Email design
Early Years Birdwatch email: Fun, colourful email for pre-schools
This is fun, vibrant email to a regular subscriber base. This group of subscribers are very good when it comes to opening, reading and clicking through, so we’re able to experiment with designs that might not work so well if sent to a less patient subscriber group. That means we can try larger headers and low content – image heavy emails.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01
- Email Vision Campaign Commander
- A/B Split testing

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Email design
Pea Green Things January Sale 2010 Email
We’ve tested a lot of variations in the emails I design at The Consortium. We’ve gained a lot of insight from the split tests we’ve conducted. We’ve tested different subject lines, different positioning of calls to action, button calls to action vs. text calls to action, different names in the from field and more.
In this email we split tested an image heavy email (pictured left), against the same email but with text instead of images with alternate text.
We found that the image heavy email worked marginally better in this particular niche, but the test results were not significant enough to draw solid conclusions. So we continue to test. This is an effective way of continually improving your work and the brands ROI. It has really helped build my knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in email marketing and other areas, such as Pay Per Click.
Skills/Software Used
- Cross platform compatible
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01 Transitional
- Email Vision Campaign Commander
- Split Testing

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Email design
Pea Green Things “What can you put in a Kitchen Composter?” email
I’ve designed and hand coded the emails for Pea Green things. All the emails I design and code are written to display correctly in as many email clients as possible, including Outlook 2007.
Skills/Software Used
- Cross platform compatible
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01 Transitional
- Split testing
- Email Vision Campaign Commander

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Email design
Early Years Festive Product Based Email
This is an example of an email based on an postal campaign — in this case festive special offers brochure. In this email we tested two different types of subject line.
Skills/Software Used
- Photoshop
- HTML 4.01 Transitional
- Cross platform compatible
