WWF Futuremakers

July 04, 2006

The great emails for great causes just keep on coming! Today we're featuring a monthly newsletter sent by WWF Australia called Futuremakers.

The visual separation of each main section with a different background color makes the email very easy to scan. Subtle decorative elements such as the curved corners and worn section edges finish everything off. It's also nice to see the all-important reminder about why the recipient is receiving the email in the footer.

Finally and most importantly, the content is interesting and very relevant to their subscribers.

Posted in: Two column, Newsletter

3 Comments

Grant
January 18, 2007 4:52pm

Thanks for the kind words David.

I have to say that we were following the gallery well before we were a Campaign Monitor customer, and learnt an enormous amount about how to develop a compelling newsletter from the examples in the gallery. The Campaign Monitor blog articles on CSS and best practices have also been invaluable.

On that note, the HTML is unfortunately a bit of a mess because we wanted the design to look good in a wide variety of email clients (including Gmail and Hotmail) which meant a lot of less-than-satisfactory hacks to get the desired end result. I’m a semantic mark-up/CSS nut, so it was very disappointing to have to bend the markup so significantly to work with those email clients.

Thanks again :)
Bill Burns
January 18, 2007 4:53pm

We often still use basic HTML formatting (coupled with some inline CSS) for most of our client emails, for the reasons Grant expresses here. It’s definitely frustrating, especially when you are obsessed with solid markup and code validity, but a necessity to make sure the message arrives intact to the broadest section of users.

I’ve also followed the gallery for some time and have used it as inspiration (as well as a great tool to get new art directors familiar with the possibilities of HTML email design). Between the gallery and the blog postings on this site, there are few better resources out there to learn and grow in this realm.

Do you consider these criteria when selecting your gallery “winners”? It seems like a good number of the designs featured here use CSS markup that does not “play nice” with email clients such as Gmail and Hotmail.
Dave Greiner
January 18, 2007 4:53pm

Bill, thanks for the kind words about the blog, great to hear you’re finding it useful. We don’t have any set criteria for what we do and don’t feature. In most cases it’s a combination of great design and adoption of email marketing best practice. Lucky for us there’s no shortage of that from our customers.

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