We loved this snappy monthly newsletter sent by Manchester based Connectpoint.

It breaks all the rules, but still manages to suck you into finding out more about each of the featured stories. As you can imagine, the click-through rate for each of their newsletters is very high.

My big suggestion would be to change the text titles into links as well. This will at the very least allow those recipients with images disabled to easily click each story to find out more.

Designer:  Paul Normington  |  See the complete design

This great looking monthly newsletter for the UK’s leading gardening employment supplier caught our eye recently.

The newsletter features loads of great content, including the “Excuse of the Month”, focusing on the best excuse they heard from a candidate trying to get out of work.

To ensure a consistent experience for each recipient, the team at Anagramme also customized the Forward to a Friend page for their client.

Designer:  Jared Telling  |  See the complete design

• It's most often the case that your subscriber simply opened your campaign multiple times. If you're sending interesting content, then more often than not your recient has come back to look at it multiple times.
• A subscriber could have a "Preview Pane" feature enabled in his or her email client. In this case, every time the campaign was clicked or scrolled to in the "Preview Pane", the subscriber's address displays as having opened the campaign. Find out more about how to design for preview panes.
• If the subscriber uses the email client to "forward" the email campaign instead of using Campaign Monitor's Forward to a Friend feature, any subsequent opens by those recipients show as another "open" by your subscriber.

When checking out campaigns to include our gallery, it’s always a rare treat to find an email campaign that combines great design with top-notch content. There certainly have been exceptions to this trend, and the Designer Shoes newsletter is one of them.

On top of promoting their gift certificates and popular products, the Designer Shoes newsletter also includes:

• An interesting shoe story sent in from one of their own readers, and an invitation for other readers to share their own stories.
• A great forward to a friend promotion that rewards those who spread the word.
• Links to common questions customers might have about shopping online.

As designers, we can often spend too much time on the visuals, and not enough on the offer or message itself. Kudos to Fresh Tilled Soil for getting the balance right.

Designer:  Fresh Tilled Soil  |  See the complete design

"Excellent service! You guys have done a really great job - we're a web design company and we just ran our first campaign through your system. The ease of updating and previewing was great for working with our client, and your interface is very nicely put together, good use of all the Web 2.0 stuff without being annoying. And the price really is very reasonable for removing all the typical headaches!"

"Keep up the good work!"

Ben Murphy, Octane Internet

We often get asked if Campaign Monitor checks for duplicates when importing subscribers, so we thought we'd cover it here once and for all. The short answer, yes. We never allow duplicate emails to be imported into the same list and if someone tries to subscribe to a list that they already belong to, they won't be added again.

This way a recipient will never get the same campaign twice and you'll never be charged for sending the same thing twice. Even if a recipient is a member of two lists and you send a campaign to both lists, they'll still only receive one version.