Fresh

Finding The Perfect Storm

Often email gets overlooked as a space for telling stories. The primary function is, rightfully, prompting action. However, sometimes the right mix of elements can come together to bring both of these things into one piece. This project was one of those opportunities, so we wanted to share it here.

Icebreaker is an apparel company focusing on a very special product that mixes the versatility of an outdoor technical product, the sleek aesthetic of an activewear product, and the sustainability few companies can boast with its refined merino wool fabric. They have a fantastic brand story and push the envelope with their presence, often using provocative and mythical imagery to support their ethos that reminds us that “it’s about our relationship to nature, and to each other.”

In this instance Icebreaker wanted us to help announce their newest line of clothing for the Spring 2010 season (It’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere). We took this opportunity to not only elevate the presence of their brand in email, but also to use some unique ways of getting their message across. We created two versions of this email, one vertical and one horizontal. Some background on why we wanted to try this out can be found on this previous post by Dylan over on Email Wars.

We were excited about trying out this technique, and thought this highly refined brand deserved an equally beautiful email. Fortunately for Icebreaker, the retail space often uses lots of imagery to communicate with their audience, so we could feel comfortable knowing this would not be out of line. We did, however, make sure we covered our bases with the standard preheader and good alt tags to make sure those with images turned off knew they were missing something important.

One of the unique challenges was with making sure folks knew to look for more content on the horizontal version. We tried to keep the main call to action within the normal viewing pane realm, but added a call to “explore the landscape” with and anchor tag that would push you to the right to reveal the hidden content.

Overall the response to the email was very favorable, with lots of great traffic to their site. Without hard analytics from the client to help make the outcome crystal clear, we can only report that the client was very pleased with the outcome and the resulting traffic it drove to their website. The vertical and horizontal email both performed strong, so the debate over whether one format will win out is still unclear.

Anyone have experiences using this horizontal technique? It may catch on in more places, but right now it’s just great to see a brand willing to take chances and keep their audience guessing what they will do next.