2008 Christmas email competition: We have a winner!

Published February 19, 2009 by Mathew Patterson

Christmas? In February? We're a little behind the times, but today we can announce the winner of the 2008 Christmas email competition. The Campaign Monitor crew has reviewed literally thousands of campaigns to make this decision, and we all agreed on our favorite.

Congratulations to the team from Six Degrees Digital, in Melbourne Australia, for designing and sending this winning campaign:

Screenshot of Six Degrees Digital's winning email

How we chose the winner

As we reviewed all the Christmas and holiday emails, there was plenty of great looking images, but with little text. The problems of image blocking are well known, and the 'one big image' approach to design is fast, but not accessible or ideal.

We were looking for an email which showed creativity in layout and design, but that still worked well within the constraints of email clients. The Six Degrees Creative design is a great effort at an email which, while still quite image heavy, uses actual text for the core message.

The content itself also appealed - a very different Santa than we are used to seeing, and a fun Christmas competition that really encourages interaction from the recipients. We'd be keen to hear how the competition played out! We'll be in touch with Six Degrees Creative shortly to organise their prizes: A Flip Mino HD, 50,000 Campaign Monitor Credits and $100 of Threadless vouchers.

Well done!

Our runners up

There were a few other entries that stood out, and we'd like to mention a couple of our favorites.

From Cattails Multimedia, this well executed text based Christmas tree, linked to a more interactive landing page. 10,000 email credits are coming your way! And finally...

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This attractive and text based gift tag idea from Toddle also wins 10,000 free credits.

Previous winners

If you are looking for some more holiday email inspiration, take a look at winners from past years.

Thanks to everyone who used Campaign Monitor for their own or their clients holiday campaigns, we appreciate it. We'll do this again for Christmas 2009, so start planning now!

12 Comments

Posted in:

  1. Alan O'Rourke
    February 19, 2009 9:17pm

    Wow! Brilliant thanks guys. A very nice surprise to start the day at Toddle HQ :)
    Congrats to Six Degrees and Cattails, lovely work.

  2. Martin
    February 25, 2009 7:49am

    I agree with previous speaker. Congratulations, very nice work.

  3. Chris Hawking
    March 5, 2009 1:55pm

    Thanks guys!
    It was a super fun project to work on. All the guys here at Six Degrees Digital have been buzzing and frantically working on getting the result out…
    ...and here it is:
    http://www.sixdegreesdigital.com.au/winner/
    Enjoy :)

  4. Mathew Patterson
    March 5, 2009 2:22pm

    Campaign Monitor team member

    Thanks Chris,

    We’ve tweeted about it for you too!

  5. Chris Hawking
    March 6, 2009 11:47am

    Cheers Mathew!

  6. Andrew Breese
    March 6, 2009 12:00pm

    Nice job on the video, and kudos to that poor bastard wearing a mullet on a 46 degree day.

  7. Fred Campbell
    March 6, 2009 9:01pm

    Some really nice work - and not a Robin or Snowman in sight!

    Here’s my attempt: http://northstar.createsend.com/t/ViewEmail/r/809DC4339754284B/C67FD2F38AC4859C/

    It only works if you know the company name, and logo - Northstar.

  8. j
    March 7, 2009 3:55am

    sixdegrees: nice work.... but just a heads up.. i wouldnt rely on inline style for fonts.. the web version of outlook for instance doesn’t show them so your text comes out black times new roman. also most html clients won’t read your body bgcolor so for example in mail.com the email comes out as white text on a white background.

    so…

    i would do as

    <font face="Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font” size="2" color="#FFFFFF">

    (personally i don’t use either as i find it has varied results.. I find

    generally works more consistently than ...)
    and for backgrounds i always do a 100% width table with my main body background colour as it’s bgcolor

    finally i’d specify widths and heights on <td>s that just contain an image so that the table doesn’t collapse when images are switched off, and also use style="display:block" to avoid whitespace issues breaking your design (there’s a gap between your top image and the content below in hotmail firefox)

    hope you (and everybody else) find this of some help

    regards
    j

  9. j
    March 7, 2009 3:57am

    my html didnt come out! the P tags are not showing in that post above.. it should “personally i don’t use P tags either"… ironic ;)

  10. Kirk
    March 10, 2009 12:04pm

    Hi j,

    Thanks for the feedback. I must admit it was a bit of a rush job to get it out on time, so we probably didn’t test it nearly enough. Working with tables, tds, fonts, etc seems so foreign to me after working exclusively with CSS based layouts for so long now, but we’ll keep your tips in mind for future campaigns. Thanks. :)

  11. Jack Werner
    March 11, 2009 7:33am

    Thanks for the honourable mention and the free credits. It was a surprise because this really is our christmas tree that Ewa Henry leveraged into a neat little animation.

    See the proof (as it’s in the Christmas Pudding) http://www.cattails.ca/christmas08/HonourableMention.jpg

  12. DRoss
    March 15, 2009 9:41am

    Interesting that Uncle Sam is iconic even in Australia. I thought it was an American thing.

    Nice job on the email guys!

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