Merry Christmas! Well, it was for us as our Christmas promotion made the top ten of EmailMonks’ Best Email Design Hunt 2017. We’re really proud of this and thought you might want to know more about it.
Every year we like to send a message to our friends and customers wishing them a happy festive season. As we’re known as email experts this usually takes the form of a bespoke email. However, this year, we decided to go that little bit further to reflect the big changes afoot here at 1973 Ltd. We’ve been growing quite a bit as a creative agency and wanted to expand our yuletide message accordingly.
All good projects start by looking at the business objectives, and our Christmas campaign was no exception. We wanted to raise awareness of all the varied services and skills that we offer (not just email) plus use it as an opportunity to introduce everyone to our new team members. However, do this in such a way that wasn’t too sales-y at Christmas time.
So we got our heads together, chewed a few pencils, stroked our chins and came up with a few different concepts. Each idea focussed on a different core message and would be expressed both digitally or physically through print and real world gifts. Ultimately one option seemed much more pertinent than the others.
Our flourishing team gives us a multitude of skills and we wanted to show that we’re more than just a one hit wonder. Just like a band each member has a role to play and together we can perform many different songs. The UK Christmas number one in the year 1973 was Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade. This is a seasonal staple but we all love different Christmas tunes old and new. These songs can be very eclectic but they all share a festive spirit and come together to make a great album. So, this would be our present: a 24 track Spotify playlist (two songs from each of us) delivered via email and corresponding landing page.
The whole team got involved and the campaign was run as if for any client. This includes going through stages such as: content planning; wire-framing and copywriting; responsive design; CSS animation; website development and device testing. Extra effort was taken to make the final product fun and engaging through bold use of illustration and colour with subtle animation (with the relevant fallbacks of course).
This was a great project — both to work on and in it’s success. There are things we’d have improved such as the subject line, we probably should have mentioned the gift which is likely to have encourage a greater number opens resulting in more clicks. Even so, the campaign achieved a 40.3% open rate and 11.3% click rate which is not too shabby. We’re also very pleased with making the top ten, being featured on Really Good Emails and also EmailMonks 11 Quintessential Email Mantras infographic.
