indie_preneur

Think Vitamin needs an email overhaul methinks.

2.22.2010

By indie_preneur

I don’t like to overstep my boundaries often, if ever. But I felt compelled to do so this past Friday.

This was because I received my first email from ThinkVitamin after joining their mailing list earlier this month. ThinkVitamin is the blog of the extremely talented webbers from Carsonified. Their site and blog is extremely well designed and built, so I figured their email template would follow suit.

However, I was extremely disappointed when I opened their email only to find what I would describe as a cookie-cutter template that was being used. I found this ironic and slightly funny after reading an article on their blog about cookie-cutter websites nowadays. Besides the same colors (sort-of) used in the email and on their website, I felt nothing in the email continued the brand they had obviously worked hard to establish.

Here’s an image of their current template (click to view the full version):

Like I said, this template works fine if that is all you care about. However, if you are a brand-lover like I am, I’d really love to see this template evolve to reflect their web brand.

Here are a few things I would change:

• I would set this up to 550px width to help more of it be seen in narrower inboxes
• I would move the social icons as well as Unsubscribe and Forward at the very top (like copy on the current site). As most of their readers (I assume) are very web smart, there’s no need to say ‘E-mail not displaying correctly? View it in your browser,’ just a simple ‘View in Web’ should do the trick
• I would pull the logo from their website exactly as it is. Although in email you don’t want to add more height than is necessary, as this is an double opt-in email list (that I would imagine the list is well engaged), this should not be as much of an issue
• I would add a table of contents (with links) showing what is included in the body of the email (for those with a smaller preview pane)
• I would style the sections of the content more like their blog posts online
• I would change the typeface style to match those of online –> sans serif for headlines, and serif for body copy
• I would add the computer image as a background –> this will not display in all email programs, but it’s a nice touch and a sort of email graceful degradation
• I would add the social links at the bottom for repetition
• I would add the dotted content to the footer also like online

Here’s an image of how I would set up their template (click to view the full version):

Again, this is just how I think they COULD update their template. And more importantly, maybe they have a reason for doing their template the way they have it. I do feel they are missing a huge step in their branding process with their template being the way it is now, however.

What say you? Am I being too anal, and should I just mind my own business?

BONUS–I received an email from Kier @ Carsonified, and was informed about upcoming changes: Absolutely fair points about the newsletter. The main reason that we did it that way was to cover as many bases as possible in terms of email clients so you are absolutely right it is very “cookie cutter”. That said we are in the process of redesigning the whole site and will be including the design of the newsletter in that.

Post this goodness to twitter.

Tags: branding, email design

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 9:15 pm and is filed under email marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.