When searching through your email, it often feels like you get a lot of spam from all those subscriptions you only half realised you were joining! So how do all these companies make themselves stand out from the sea of emails you receive everyday? I rarely open these kind of emails enticing you to spend more money, but I chose New Look’s “your Halloween treat” e-mail to analyse. It actually did stand out for once, making me fall for all those marketing tricks, such as an event triggered response.

Being a student, sale emails are always more enticing than the usual new-autumn-collection emails. They are especially inviting when the sale is ending imminently! This sense of urgency gave me a bit of panic, what amazing deals am I going to miss out on if I don’t have a look now?! They are also using the perfect timing for a Halloween sale ending at spooky midnight no less. This is also likely to make you want to pay that extra for next day delivery too.

So now that they have grabbed my attention with their subject line, how does the content effect my next actions? The first thing on the email is the New Look brand and all the hyperlinks you expect to find directing you around their website, but I instantly scrolled past this to look at their big shiny advert.

They have used a lightening flash animation on their sale picture and tried to relate it to the target market using little ghost emoji’s as we all can’t get enough of those currently! The animation is a nice touch for attention grabbing and unusual to find in more email advertisements, only 2% according to Fiona Ellis-Chadwick and Neil F. Doherty (2012).

They have also carried on the email really well by connecting a Halloween party sale to generic party outfits that you are guaranteed to need this season with Christmas and New Years coming around the corner.

After this there is a simpler advert for menswear. It is clear they know their main audience is female. They’ve kept the male advert clean cut and masculine to emphasize the difference in male and female shopping. Definitely no sparkles to be found here.

At the end there is even more links around their websites, as well as links to all their various social medias. Overall, they included approximately 35 links giving you are large choice of which route will lead you straight to them. This fits the average found in Chadwick and Doherty’s (2012) findings too. New Look has used minimal text and maximised their use of pictures, as that’s what is more likely to grab a shoppers attention fitting their objectives. Their main links take you to ‘New-in’, ‘Party-wear’ and ‘Men’s-tailoring’.

I don’t believe this email was personalised for me specifically, but I definitely fit a broad criteria that this campaign targets. In the end, I did not end up getting any new purchases the night before Halloween for a number of reasons; The sale was on full price items only, so still not really cheap enough to be a student bargain, you had to spend £75 to get free next day delivery or pay the extra fee, and finally I came to that depressing reality that I can’t treat myself tonight because I don’t really need those new party dresses do I?

New Look could definitely use my search from following this email campaign link to personally gain my attention in the future. They know a few more things about me now; I love a sale, I really like skater-shape dresses and even added one to the basket, but I didn’t follow through with the purchase due to delivery costs among other reasons. A great way to target me now would be to offer me free delivery on their next sale. This is a great way to make your me feel like I have a real relationship with New Look without them having to put in too much work. Statistically speaking, just over a third of emails are personalised to an individual (Chadwick and Doherty, 2012), so they would have to take into account time of year, time of day I’m most likely to click through, event triggers and previous searches I’ve made on their site.

If you want to read some more about Web advertising: The role of email marketing, here is the link for the journal I used for some more insight. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296311000063>