Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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Last Updated on October 8, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta It has been six years since I passed the Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultant exam. In the past few months, many people reached out to me asking for guidance and a path to becoming a certified Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) Consultant.  That
The post How to Pass Salesforce Pardot Consultant Certification Exam appeared first on Automation Champion.

The main goal of marketing automation is to put the customer first and make their journey through your ecosystem as seamless as possible. Marketing automation is a type of software that allows companies to manage marketing processes and campaigns while effectively targeting customers with automated messages across multiple channels, such as email, websites, and social media platforms. This is commonly done through the implementation of tools such as CRMs, CMSs, and other tools to connected databases. It can help you stay connected with your audience and find new customers, so you can eliminate repetitive tasks and focus on other parts of your business, same as save a lot of time since you won’t have to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create. Before implementing such software, you need to be aware of four key steps which need to be completed: what you need to automate, what software is best suited for the job, create processes so your team can support it, and most importantly evaluate its effectiveness. Aside from those common key steps I also like to audit quarterly. – I’ve been in the direct response marketing industry for 5 years managing an ad budget of $200k/m across a team of 12 brand marketers. Building out marketing automation systems is what I do, how can I help? submitted by /u/Sticky_Bryce [link] [comments]

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Opening a marketing email is such a regular task, consumers often don’t give it a second thought. As email marketers, though, we know the other side of the story. Finding new HTML email inspiration can be a daunting task.
When you’re an email marketer, your to-do list often looks like this: Generate opt-in leads, segment your lists, set up lead nurturing workflows, draft clear and concise email copy, check your emails for deliverability, optimize for plain text and HTML, and so on. “Where’s the fun in this?” you may wonder.

Thankfully, there are plenty of email marketing geeks out there (ourselves included) that do think all of that’s kind of fun. These less glamorous aspects of email marketing — though critical to your campaign’s success — don’t paint the entire picture of what amazing email marketing really is.
While plain text or bare-bones emails can still be extremely effective, sometimes you want to amaze your subscribers with creative, captivating, or delightfully understated email designs. Some brands out there have also figured out how to create emails that are pretty darn beautiful. If you’re looking to dabble in something a little more adventurous for your next email marketing campaign, check out the examples below for inspiration.
Table of Contents:

Email Newsletter Design Examples
Nurturing Email Design Examples
E-commerce Email Design Examples

Email Newsletter Design Examples
1. Collaborative Fund
In design, red and yellow serve as powerful color choices. While red is known to convey power or passion, yellow is often considered both bright and energizing. Although many companies use a big block of color at the top of their newsletters to draw people in, the folks at Collaborative Fund took it a few steps further by combining red and yellow bursts of color throughout the whole email. Pretty powerful, right?
Color aside, they leveraged clean divides to separate these blocks, while incorporating different textures — like that crumpled paper — to create a really compelling experience.
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Pro Tip: When done well, incorporating an array of textures, via high-quality graphics or photography (like the crumbled paper used above), can make the 2D experience of viewing an email more visceral and engaging.
2. Domino
This newsletter from Domino covers a lot of information: design with storage restrictions, giveaways, a profile piece with Chelsea Handler, bathroom and bedroom design tips, and a call-to-action.
To make this more easily scannable, Domino paired these short descriptions with high-quality images. Like the Collaborative Fund example, they also used clear, horizontal divides to separate each topic.
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Pro Tip: Incorporating contrasting colors can help with creating division between sections and draw the eye from each section with ease.
3. InVision LABS
This is a much more concise email from InVision, which includes a clean design and an eye-catching color. The blue background causes both the call-to-action and the white box near the bottom of the email to command attention. The fanned-out product images help the recipient understand what the announcement entails before diving into the explainer copy.
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The colorful experience doesn’t stop with the email. The bright blue color is carried through to the corresponding website, making this a strong example of seamless branding.
Are you inspired by InVision’s clean design and ready to create your own campaign? Use a free email marketing software like HubSpot to create and send your message to the world.
4. GrubHub
This email from GrubHub is a great example of product promotion … because it doesn’t sound or feel like product promotion at all. Instead of saying, “Hey, you like food. You should order it using our service!”, the email tells a story with the help of a really cool piece of interactive content: a quiz to see what you should serve at your party (see what they did there?).
We especially love the saturated GIF they used to promote the piece of content, as it really commands the recipient’s attention.
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Pro Tip: Motion catches the eye. We see this throughout social media and other forms of media. Adding this feature to your emails can appeal to viewers enticed by the motion factor in public-facing content. Learn how to create a GIF using Photoshop.

Nurturing Email Design Examples
5. Handy
We love this simple welcome email from Handy. The color scheme is consistent, relying on gray for the base, and bright blue to draw attention to the logo and calls-to-action.
There’s a nice balance between text and visuals here, and the tile design makes it easy to skim through. Finally, we love that they used non-cheesy stock photos to represent their brand, which makes them more genuine and lovable from a consumer perspective.
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Pro Tip: Nowadays, most viewers have some level of ability to sense whether an image is a stock photo or originally captured content. If you must use stock photography, take your time when looking through image databases, and filtering for images that represent not only the tone of the email and message but the overall aesthetic and feel of your brand.
6. Litmus
You might expect a beautiful email from a company that’s announcing an email design conference — and Litmus doesn’t disappoint. The email starts out with a bold burst of color, which grabs readers’ attention. Below this, you’ll find a clean design that includes concise copy, whimsical illustrations, and a great use of white space.
At the bottom of the email, you’ll see a live Twitter feed showing tweets that use the conference’s official hashtag. That social media factor is a really cool touch that we’re willing to bet increased engagement, while simultaneously informing folks about how to stay connected at the event.
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Pro Tip: Being imaginative and using icons and illustrations can be a rewarding and simple way of getting messaging across. Consistent look and feel makes the difference, showing intention and design-strategy. You can find free icon packs that include the most commonly used icons, at websites like FlatIcon.com.
7. Uber
As marketers, we know that charts and graphs can serve as an effective way to illustrate information. But what about incorporating graphs into emails?
This email design from Uber skillfully demonstrates the power of data visualization through the use of simple graphs. Rather than relying on words to explain their lowered rates, Uber whipped up a few comparative visuals to do the job. Thanks to the bright blue color choice, it’s easy for recipients to understand how the rates have shifted in just a quick glance.
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Pro Tip: Excitement is more difficult to elicit from audiences than one would think. The above serves as an example of how Uber uses their historical data to galvanize excitement for new offerings from the company. The potential of what’s to come is correlated to what has happened. Show what’s been done before showing what’s to come, letting consumers know their excitement is secure.
8. Cuyana
Here’s a product promotion email Cuyana sent to people who signed up for a new product’s “early access” list. The email is centered entirely around showcasing the new product, but in this case, that’s exactly what the folks who opted in to the “early access” list were looking for.
The design of the email is clean and sophisticated, thanks to a brilliant use of negative space and attractive fonts. This approach is very true-to-brand for a women’s apparel and accessories company. We love the use of consistent coloring — especially the signature orange hue they chose for the call-to-action button at the bottom.
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Pro Tip: This is an example of an email made using HubSpot. Click here to check out more email marketing examples from our library.

E-commerce Email Design Examples
9. J.Crew
Sometimes, words can be overrated. Why not let a picture tell the story for you? That’s what J.Crew did in this email, anyway. The email is promoting a sale, but you wouldn’t know it right away: All you see is the copy, “This is worth the scroll,” along with a very long (and very scroll-worthy), high-definition picture of an ice cream cone. We love the subtlety. Yum!
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Pro Tip: If you make it to the bottom, you’ll notice that the tip of the ice cream cone acts like a directional arrow, pointing recipients toward the call-to-action. Photography can serve as more than a static image, it can be an interactive guide, leading the eye throughout the message.
10. Apple
This holiday email from Apple balances white space with product displays to create a really interesting experience.
While the products all share a similar color scheme, what’s really compelling is their positioning. By strategically arranging the products, Apple was able to create visual patterns that alternate throughout the email. This approach is among the best for displaying the confidence of a brand in its products. It allows the products themselves to be the focus of the message, as well as the means through which the messaging is conveyed.
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Pro Tip: Drafting or sketching out the design for an email at the start of the process can make creating eye-catching messaging an easily attainable goal and can save you time.
11. Union Made Goods
Consumers get a lot of emails from e-commerce businesses showcasing holiday gift ideas from their websites, and this is an example of one of these emails done well. They opted for a simple design here, which includes a really nice use of both color and white space, making the copy and images that are there pop a little more.
We really enjoy how the simplicity allows for the mind of the reader to be less focused on distracting elements within the message. Instead, they can fill in the negative space with imaginings of how the products displayed — or others sold by the company — could bring about the desired reaction from the mothers in their lives. It makes one wonder, “What does mom have?”, “What does she need?”, or “What would she like?”
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Pro Tip: Offering something like a discount on a purchase, without overselling, inclines readers to take a look at their own time, with the knowledge that they will receive incentives for engaging further.
12. Casper
This welcome email from Casper does a stellar job of providing an overview of what joining their 1+ million member community will get you. From their community numbers, it is clear they have put a lot of time and work into creating a product and reputation so you can rest assured. (Get it? “Rest,” because it’s a mattress company? Ah, nevermind!)
They list a few of the perks you get from a membership, and then immediately jump into establishing educational value, offering tips for sleeping. This alone isn’t compelling enough to make someone a loyally attentive Casper email-subscriber, but it does further connect the brand and product(s) to consumers’ experiences. We love how they use simple graphics and concise messaging to subtly associate themselves with the solution to sleep challenges.
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Pro Tip: Keep it simple, allowing viewers and consumers to conclude for themselves that they need what you have to offer.
13. Shwood x Stanley
In the e-commerce world, the quality of visuals in your emails can have a huge impact on whether recipients stick around to look through the whole email, or quickly hit the “delete” button. This email from Shwood x Stanley places a big emphasis on those high-quality visuals. We especially adore the textured backgrounds, as well as the ways in which they play with light and shadows.
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Pro Tip: When using multiple images in an html email, consider what colors complement and contrast with each other. This consideration can make the experiences of transitioning from section to section seamless for the viewer, compelling engaged attention throughout the message.
14. Harry’s
For seasonal emails like this one from Harry’s, you might consider using color schemes that go with the season. To promote their winter gift set, the folks at Harry’s cooled down their color scheme with traditional winter colors like green, blue, and brown. They also struck a nice balance between text and visuals, and helped to make their email easier to skim by using a simple tile design.
Another thing we love are those bright red calls-to-action; they look pretty clickable … wouldn’t you agree?
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Pro Tip: Simply put, there is no replacement for good product photography. If you’re diving into the ocean of original product photography, check out this Beginner’s Guide to Product Photography.
What other companies out there have you noticed are creating beautiful email marketing? What stands out about their approach? How can you take this and add your own original spin, making something new for your brand’s messaging?
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2012 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Traditional metrics (like clicks, shares, and scroll times) can tell you a lot about campaign performance, but they can’t measure how customers feel about your brand. That’s where neuromarketing comes in. As a supplement to more standard marketing performance metrics, neuromarketing can help you analyze the emotional response to your campaigns.
Neuromarketing tells us what colors, pictures, music, or messages resonate the most with audiences. Your team can use this data to identify customers’ ad preferences.
Take a deep dive into how neuromarketing works for popular brands.

Let’s turn to P&G for a real-world example of neuromarketing at work.
In partnership with marketing firm Dentsu Data Labs, P&G designed an experiment to find mobile ads that emotionally resonated with their audience. During testing, the company worked with Sticky, a webcam eye-tracking tool by Tobii Pro, to measure engagement of on-the-go users.
What they found was intriguing — the time spent watching video ads on social media was not equal to the time they spent focusing on the ads. Social platforms’ impressions and watch rates did not correlate with real customers’ engagement.
Moreover, Sticky detected which video ad details triggered a desire to interact with the brand. Eye tracking data became actionable insights, highlighting content P&G should change to retain audience attention.
The big takeaway: Knowing what the brain actually resonates with is more important than knowing what people say they like or how much time they spend watching ads.
To grab your customer’s attention, make them feel something and compel them to act. Marketers need to focus more on neuroscience and less on web metrics and in-person interviews.
Neuromarketing Research
Neuromarketing research commonly uses either brain-scanning technology or physiological measurements to assess consumers’ subconscious preferences. This can help inform advertising, product development, or marketing materials.
Neuromarketing is typically done through brain scanning — either with fMRI or EEG technology — or physiological tracking, including eye movement measurements, facial coding, or body temperature and heart rate measurements.
fMRI and EEG technology have different strengths.
“Normally we use EEG to measure dynamic stimuli, like video, TV shows, commercials, online user experience. In such cases, it is interesting to see the brain responding moment-to-moment,” Dr. Roeland Dietvorst, Lead Behavioral Scientist at NN Investment Partners, told the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association. “We use fMRI mainly for static stimuli, like packaging design, campaign slogans, pay-offs, outdoor messaging.”
Measuring physiological tracking is typically much easier to do. Many tools are available in the marketplace, including FaceReader by Noldus, which measures facial expressions, or the eye-tracking software mentioned above.
However, even though leveraging neuroscience to inform your marketing strategy is an exciting opportunity, the tactic still seems more suited for a time when Black Mirror storylines are a reality.
In fact, people often ask, “Is neuromarketing even ethical?”
Below, let’s dive into that question.
Neuromarketing Ethics
While neuromarketing aims to determine how consumers respond to brands or campaigns – a rather innocuous study – not everyone is convinced that it’s ethical.
The book “Towards Ethical Neuromarketing 2.0 Based on Artificial Intelligence” addresses ethical issues such as, “Will algorithms predict future behavior?” and “Is neuromarketing immoral?”
In and of itself, neuromarketing isn’t unethical. However, companies must hold themselves to a high standard of ethics when studying their consumers.
For instance, brands shouldn’t intentionally promote anything harmful, deceptive, or illegal. Additionally, you shouldn’t study minors to figure out how to get them hooked on a product.
Neuromarketing should be used to create effective ads and eliminate ads that just don’t work, and that’s all.
The main ethical questioning has more to do with your product or service and less with how you market it. If you’re ever in doubt, ask yourself if the product or service is good for the customer.
In actuality, neuromarketing has already permeated the content space.
Advertising agency BBDO collaborates with Immersion to use smartwatch biometrics — including heart rate — to predict the success of their ads. One of Immersion’s studies correctly identified which BBDO’s ad would produce the largest sales bumps with an impressive 83% accuracy.
To help you envision a world where neuromarketing is widespread, here are eight practical ways you can refine your marketing efforts with the help of neuroscience
1. Brands can tell more compelling stories.
In 2019, Renault released the newest version of their CLIO hatchbacks. To celebrate, the company released a commercial to highlight the car’s 30 years in development. The ad followed the love story of a lesbian couple that also took place over 30 years.

The world split into two camps. Haters were sure that the couple’s story had nothing to do with Renault as a brand. Other marketers praised the campaign for its boldness, originality, and the strong emotions evoked.
Neuromarketing settled the argument. The video ad reached very high likeability and brand recognition compared to other commercials, according to Alpha.One’s EEG and eye-tracking study.
“From 31 participants in our EEG and Eye-tracking study who viewed the commercial in a large reel of other commercials, 30 correctly identified the commercial as belonging to Renault,“ wrote Dietvorst on LinkedIn.
The audience’s emotional response peaked when the couple expressed happiness and affection. They developed compassion, becoming invested in love story’s ups and downs.
The audience’s emotional response to this ad suggests that telling great stories — chock-full of conflict, surprise, and emotion — triggers the release of oxytocin, the empathy chemical. You emotionally engage your audience and, ultimately, make them care about your brand.
Pro tip: When creating ad copy, develop stories about overcoming adversity and how that journey changes people to trigger an emotional response.
2. Businesses can focus on ads that boost sales.
Bolletje, a food company that makes healthy cereal, created two TV ads promoting the same product to the same audience. Yet, two campaigns brought drastically different results — one generating 250% higher sales.

The company sent questionnaires about both campaigns to figure out why the skinny jeans ad led to more sales. Surprisingly, the result showed almost identical numbers of likeability, brand recognition, and overall grade.
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So what caused a 250% sales difference? A neuromarketing study using fMRI technology explains.
Eye-tracking and MRI technologies detected the specter of emotions the two ads aroused. As it turned out, the ad featuring aqua yoga elicited negative emotions. Viewers felt disgust, danger, and fear, which distracted them from the product.
Meanwhile, the ad featuring skinny jeans activated positive emotions like value, surprise, and expectations.
Pro tip: Before launching your next campaign, make sure it evokes positive emotions like sympathy, trust, value, or compassion. This prevents negative associations with your brand.
3. Companies can host more engaging conferences.
At a major global conference in Houston, Immersion Neuroscience put INBands on attendees and measured their immersion during certain presentations. They discovered that concise, energetic talks generated the most emotional engagement.
On the other hand, longer talks needed to revolve around a strong narrative, or they couldn’t hold an audience’s attention. Additionally, they realized the brain responds well to multimedia-heavy presentations due to the high variety of stimuli.
What we like: Tracking attendees’ emotional engagement during presentations can help companies refine their conferences by cutting out boring talks. Instead, provide attendees with relevant, compelling presentations.
4. Brands can design more effective ads.
The main goal of neuromarketing is to gain insight into what would make an ad more effective. That includes where ads are placed.
For instance, a recent neuroscience study revealed that positioning of display ads influences buying decisions regarding high- and low-calorie foods.
In a nutshell, researchers asked 57 participants to rate food images that appeared on the center, top, bottom, left, or right side of the screen.
Participants evaluated the desire to eat and buy, their liking, and willingness to pay for each image.
The study results uncovered that a banner for high-calorie food is more likely to draw attention and conversion if placed on the bottom right side. In contrast, ads for low-calorie food are most effective when placed on the top left side.
Pro tip: Leverage neuromarketing to find the ads that resonate most and where to place them.
5. Brands can sell more by using FOMO.
The fear of missing out, otherwise known as loss aversion, is a widely used tactic in marketing and sales.
In fact, 62% of consumers in a study from peer-reviewed publication Science were more likely to gamble their money than lose any money.
Here’s the scenario consumers were given.
If you were given $50, would you rather:

Keep $30.
Gamble it, with a 50/50 chance of keeping or losing the whole $50.

When the experimenter posed that question to the subjects, 43% of the subjects chose to gamble.
Then the options were changed to:

Lose $20.
Gamble, with a 50/50 chance of keeping or losing the whole $50.

With that slight change, there was a 44% jump in the number of people who gambled.
When more studies were done like this, 100% of subjects gambled more when the other choice was framed as a loss.
A 2021 study from University College London also revealed that urgent language leads to sales. Phrases such as “The #Sale is ON!” and “Only a few left in stock” on Facebook ads increased overall memory for advertisement information. In contrast, ads with no FOMO triggers performed worse.
The neuromarketing takeaway is that framing will greatly impact people’s behavior. And people are loss averse.
Pro tip: You can implement this method by changing the language of your ads. If you can pose the outcome of not buying your product or service as a loss, then you can sell more.
6. Brands can ensure their packaging is effective.
Brands might consider using neuromarketing to measure viewers’ emotional reactions to different packaging designs and determine which packaging option evokes the highest level of position emotion and engagement.
Let’s see how Alpro, a Belgium company that markets plant-based milk products, applied neuromarketing to build barista-preferred packaging. Working with neuroscience company Alpha.One, Alpro leveraged eye-tracking to measure engagement.
A change in color scheme and adding a cup with latte art led to a 3.6% growth in logo recognition. These slight changes held the audience’s attention more than the previous packaging.
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What we like: Small changes in color and more straightforward communication through images can evoke a better reaction from the target audience and result in a sales boost.
7. Businesses can determine the right price for a product or service.
Pricing is all about psychology.
For instance, University of Florida marketing professors Chris Janiszewski and Dan Uy wanted to evaluate whether consumers will truly evaluate a product as more fairly priced if it’s $19.95 rather than an even $20. They conducted a range of experiments and found people “create mental measuring sticks that run in increments away from any opening bid, and the size of the increments depends on the opening bid.”
Or, put another way: If you see a product priced at $19.95, you might wish it was $19.75 or $19.50, but you’ll be thinking in terms of nickels and dimes. However, if you see a product priced to the nearest full dollar — such as an even $20 — you instead might wish it was priced at $19 or $18, moving the range further away from the actual price.
Pro tip: Rely on neuromarketing to evaluate consumers’ subconscious reactions and determine the right pricing. Just asking a focus group if your product is priced fairly, can lead to groupthink and obscure the truth. (Check out the Lays pricing study below for more.)
8. Brands can evaluate website performance.
That’s exactly what Taskworld did to boost its site conversion rate by 40%.
To figure out if the site was effective, Shiv Sharma, Marketing Consultant at Taskworld, used heatmaps to see where new visitors clicked when signing up. What fields are they struggling to fill out? What question in the sign-up form causes leads to drop off?

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Thanks to heatmaps, Sharma discovered crucial glitches in the sign-up form that took only five minutes to fix. Those minor changes increased their website conversion by 40%.
Companies that Use Neuromarketing
Some world-known brands tested out neuromarketing years ago, ranging as far back as 2009. However, we’ve compiled a list of new neuromarketing case studies so you can gain insights and learn from each of these examples.
1. Frito-Lay
Frito-Lay worked with Neurensics, a neuro market research company, to understand the impact of a price increase of 0.25 Turkish Lira on Lays chips in Turkey. The prime question: Would a price change lead to a decrease in revenue?
To find out, Neurensics used both an EEG to study brain responses to the updated price and a standard questionnaire. The results showcased that what people say can strikingly differ from what people actually think, proving that buying decisions are often made unconsciously.
First, participants answered questions about the likelihood that they would buy a bag of chips after the price increase. Second, the same group answered the “expensive” or “cheap” questions about the same Lays products while an EEG device measured brain activity.
The difference in results of the two methods was staggering. According to the traditional questionnaire, Lays should have lost 33% in revenue. The EEG results showed only a 9% drop in sales.
Once applied, parent company PepsiCo experienced only a 7% loss in revenue from the price change.
Pro tip: Asking people for their opinion on prices, packaging, or ads can lead to incorrect predictions. Instead, you can rely on neuroscience and unconscious behavior to measure changes.
2. Philips
Philips wanted to select packaging for an ultra-light iron that appealed most to buyers and increased purchases. They designed two visuals with left and right hands holding the iron.
With Neurensics, Philips tested out both visuals to determine which one caused a positive emotional response.
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The fMRI study showed that participants found the left-handed packaging disgusting and dangerous. The familiar, right-handed image activated attention, trust, and the same level of expectations. But why?
The Neurensics team explains this phenomenon as a mental simulation: “An unconscious process where the brain simulates using the product or experiencing a situation.”
An iron held with the left hand is a more difficult mental simulation to conjure when 90% of the population is right-handed. This leads to feelings of disgust.
With this new information, Philips pivoted to the packaging with the right hand holding the iron.
3. Steereo and Spotify
Can you use neuroscience to predict the next record-breaking song? Steereo, a platform that plays new music exclusively for rideshare drivers, posed this question to Immersion.
Immersion tracked subtle changes in listeners’ heartbeats to gauge emotional responses to music. The study accurately predicted hit songs with 92% accuracy.
They also estimated the numbers of super fans and followers for those songs on Spotify with 67% accuracy.
Compare this to traditional survey analysis of songs’ likeability, which resulted in no correlation to real hits.
Use Neuromarketing in Your Business
We live in an age of data overload where you can measure almost anything. But Google Analytics will never be able to accurately gauge the most important element of your marketing campaign — its ability to make your audience feel something.
Fortunately, the neuromarketing space is rapidly evolving, and this technology is becoming more affordable and practical for marketers today, leading to its mainstream use tomorrow.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.