Wildly Appropriate

Borders eBlast Strategy: Go Long!

With such a tight and cunning subject line, there was no way I was going to leave yesterday's email blast from Borders unopened. Rather, I mentally flagged it as bacn, and when I finally got around to opening it I was amazed. While covering all or most of the email marketing best practices (html links to site sections at the very top, plus a link to a webpage version of the blast and clear unsubscribe actionables down below), Borders showed some bravado here by annihilating every received notion about users not liking to scroll and about how "good manners" in email requires brevity. I've created a PDF of the email as rendered by Gmail if you're curious to see just how long of a scroll Borders seems to be getting away with here. I think the seeminly simple design device of numbering the various sections of the layout works really well.

So... there you have it. A best-practices-ey email marketing piece from Borders that breaks some longstanding rules and to my mind, totally gets away with it.

BTW, Carl Collins is a generous and helpful person - he deserves a karmic reward, so if you see him give him a hi-five or a hug