Tricks to steal from these examples:

1. The number one trick to steal is the same as every other time of year, LEAD WITH A GIF! Animation – Animation – Animation! Both Ann Taylor and Craigshill (plus one bonus example below).
2. Move your recipients eye to the Call-to-Action. Both Cox&Cos and Ann Taylor put their CTA directly in the header image.
3. Use color to theme your design. Color is an emotional pull, especially during the holiday season. All of these examples utilized either winter, holiday or celebratory colors to immediately connect to their recipients. In addition, don’t feel tied to your brand colors for your buttons, integrating your CTA’s into your holiday theme is another form of personalization.
4. Organize your content in bite-size blocks. Whether your content is long-form like Marks & Spencer or short-form like Wendell August, you can arrange your content in smaller bite-size blocks. This helps your recipient absorb your content more quickly AND makes your email more mobile friendly.
5. State your offer boldly and simply. There are many ways of doing this and each of these examples have taken different paths. Cox&Cox and Wendell August put it simply in a cta directly under their headline logo, then includes it in an extended headline and finally finishes with restating it in another CTA in their header image. Ann Taylor states the draw in their header graphic and states the offer in the CTA. Marks & Spencer put the CTA in the header image and then repeats their CTA’s under every bite-size block.

One trick to steal I always am sure to encourage any time of the year is animation. Email hasn’t always been able to distribute animations but now it’s almost a requirement. Animations don’t have to be complicated or ‘over the top’ as these three examples demonstrate.

Image in conjunction with tripleseat