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Balancing creativity and informality with readability, this entry is from Dave Glass of Fresh. We really enjoy the friendly feel created by the hand drawn elements and photography. At the same time, the structure holds together with consistent alignment and it remains easy to scan and read. Although the headings could easily be in text instead of images, the email has an inviting feel that leaves you with a positive impression. It's only Issue one for Fresh - keep up the good work Dave! Designer:  Dave Glass  |  See the complete design

A quick one for all our UK based customers. A recent Companies Act amendments now requires additional content to be included in every email you send. As of the 1st January this year, each email sent by a company must now include:

1. Your registered address (not just a valid company address)
2. Your company registration number
3. Your place of registration

On top of appearing in all emails, this content must also be included on your web site. From what we've read, this doesn't mean every page on your site, but just your about or legal page for example. You can find out a little more about this over at The Register.

As many of you guys know, we have a one-off manual approval process for all Campaign Monitor accounts where a member of our team reviews your campaigns, subscriber lists and permission practices before you can send any decent sized campaigns from your account. This process is one of a number of safeguards we take to ensure our software is never abused by the bad guys, and all you good guys out there are sticking to best practice.

The only drawback from our current approach was that it caused delivery delays for some customers at the worst possible times (as in, right after you’ve told your client you’re about to send their campaign). We’ve always shared your frustration about this inconvenience and have recently made some simple changes to our approvals process in an attempt to minimize these delays as much as possible.

Instead of having to wait for a member of our team to get in touch with the questions they might have, we now allow any new customers to get the ball rolling first by answering a few simple questions earlier in the process.

On many occasions, these answers combined with a review of your site, campaign content and subscriber list is enough for a member of our team to give your account the green light. This change effectively cuts the approval time in half for most customers. We made this change a week before Christmas and so far it’s been working very well. We’re always looking for ways we can stay out of your way as much as possible, and are really happy to have this one live.

Back in November we posted about our search for this years best Christmas emails.  We’ve been checking out all the fantastic email campaigns, and we’ve got 60,000 email credits to give away.

This year we again saw the full range of Christmas and holiday emails, from well written plain text messages to high impact graphical productions. Last years encouraging trend of companies donating to charity in lieu of a printed card seems to have grown further, something we would expect to see continue in 2007.

2006 Best Christmas Email Winner

In a crowded field, this years winner is not the flashiest or extravagant entrant. However, for elegance, readability and simplicity we could not ignore Glasshouse Multimedia‘s seasonal message to their clients. Click the preview below for the full email.

Glasshouse Multimedia, from Cape Town in South Africa, have produced here a model of effective HTML email design. The organic leafy background is a subtle holiday reference, avoiding that Christmas cheesiness. It also has the advantage of being relatively compressible, using only shades of green.

The body copy is all in HTML text, potentially avoiding spam filtering issues and remaining readable with or without images enabled. We particularly like the links to online stores, giving the email an additional practical benefit. Congratulations to the team at Glasshouse Multimedia; we’ve just topped up their account with 30,000 email credits.

Honorable mentions

We couldn’t stop at just one! The following three emails all stood out for us, and the designers behind each have had 10,000 email credits added to their accounts.

 

Vitamin

When a lot of companies go over the top with festive design, Vitamin chose a subtle, appealing design that highlights their well crafted message.

Primer Inc

Primer produced a fun email that took us back to our Primary School days, cutting out Christmas decorations with safety scissors. A simple idea that tells a story about the company behind it.

Three Sixty Media

Who says Christmas emails can’t be useful? Three Sixty Media manage to pack some business advice in with their greetings and their news, and all in an attractive, bold design.

Well done to all our winners, and we hope you use your credits for email campaigns just as effective as these ones. Also be sure to check out the winners from our 2005 competition and see how they stack up 12 months later.

What do you all think about this years winners? Have you seen something else that really worked this Christmas?