Today we’re featuring a nice little email newsletter for teetonic, a Scotland based non-stop t-shirt design competition where you can rate and buy your favourites.

The email highlights the most recent tees to be printed, includes some great offers and encourages their readers to head to the site and get voting.

Based on our recent guidelines about using images for calls-to-action, they might want to consider offering a text-based alternative in some places to ensure none of their recipients ever miss anything.

What are you waiting for… start rating your favourites.

Designer:  Paul Derwin  |  See the complete design

A few customers were recently having a problem using Japanese in the subject line of their campaigns. Testing for problems with a language you don't speak is always going to be a little tricky, so I want to give a big thanks to Jeremy Hedley who's been extremely helpful in nailing a few issues with Japanese campaigns (even going as far as testing the results across multiple platforms and email clients).

So, thanks to Jeremy's help, subjects with Japanese characters should work fine now - but please be cautious, a number of email clients won't handle the characters properly. Based on the results of our tests using default settings, the following email clients DO NOT display Japanese correctly in the subject line:

• Outlook
• Outlook Express
• Hotmail (basic US account)
• Yahoo! Mail (basic US account)
• Eudora (PC version only)
• Lotus Notes

The following email clients DO support Japanese characters in the subject line:

• Gmail
• Mac Mail
• Eudora (Mac only)
• Microsoft Entourage
• Mozilla Thunderbird

Unfortunately the problem isn't going to go away for good until support for these characters is added to many of the popular email platforms.

This great looking email announcement from Nomis caught our eye recently. The email was simple, looked great and contained a compelling offer for all those soccer… ummm, football fans out there.

This campaign goes to show how effective a simple, attractive email campaign can be to build buzz and excitement around the launch of just about anything.

If you’ve ever wanted to design your own football boot, head on over to the Nomis site and sign up today.

Designer:  Michael Randerson  |  See the complete design

"My God, you've thought of everything! This is a really great system you have here. I love the interface as well. You've obviously done your work in the usability and design department. I'm proposing to use this for a few of my clients as we speak."

Brian Collins, Stick Stone Design

I’ll admit it. I’m a huge fan of predominantly text-based HTML emails and probably give them a little too much weight when considering the designs we feature in this gallery.  But given our recent design guidelines on using images in email, it’s pretty easy to understand why.

A perfect example of this kind of design rolled through Campaign Monitor recently via a monthly newsletter sent by customer experience consultancy Zurb. This email does a few things very well:

1. A summary of the contents of the email appears in the top left of the email, perfect for most preview panes to encourage the recipient to open the email and read on.
2. All headlines and calls -to-action are text based and will display clearly even if images are disabled.
3. This design stuff is important, but most importantly, the content is top-notch. We loved the idea of “Just show me, I’m not a big reader” that lets the recipient go straight to their site to find out more if they’re interested.

We’re seeing more and more of these kinds of campaigns being sent of late, which is so encouraging. Keep it up.

Designer:  Bryan Zmijewski  |  See the complete design