Hi friend,
We’re in our short series of sharing the team’s personal favourite newsletters. You can find the previous weeks’ shares (along with the archive of Email Edge) here.
For this series there was only one rule for the team: the newsletter must be one that you engage with regularly / consistently. (Aside from our own newsletter of course)
Two of Thys’s favourite reads are Good Old Games (GOG) and the Formula 1 newsletters. GOG’s mission is to preserve old games so they are forever available to play. It’s great to revisit games from your childhood.
Anything related to gaming by its very nature is bound to be a visual festival. In email this translates to slick graphics, animation, and interactive elements such as countdown timers. We see plenty of bells and whistles in mails sent by gaming companies.
There are many practical uses for countdown timers for all types of industries – ecommerce, services, and event campaigns alike:
• Event countdowns, e.g. “48 hours, 5 minutes, and 27 seconds to go”
• Launch countdowns, e.g. “3 days and 4 hours until podcast is live”
• Subscription renewal countdowns, e.g. “3 days until your subscription renews”
• Birthday, wedding, or anniversary countdowns, e.g. “7 days until your big day”
• Expiration countdowns, e.g. “5 days left until your trial expires” or “5 hours left to shop”
How to do a countdown timer:
• Check if your ESP (email sending platform) offers this as a native option.
• If not, there are tools such as Litmus Personalize and Mailtimers.
• Remember to test your email thoroughly to make sure that the countdown timer works.
Are email countdown timers compatible with all email inboxes?
Countdown timer support varies, which is why it’s important to always include a fallback option and test ahead of any email campaign. A fall‑back option could be that you hide the timer completely for certain mailboxes. Gmail, Apple Mail (if MPP is turned on the timer might not show the correct time) Yahoo, Outlook Web, iOS, Outlook Desktop (post‑2016 it has some supported but pre 2016 use a fall back that will display instead).
You can also swop out the timer to show something else when it gets to 0.
Animation is a great way to make your email more engaging and effective. There are some tricks to it though as it’s not the same as creating animations for websites, get our 7 golden rules for creating animations for your emailers to help you nail your animations.
Hope this has given you an idea or two.
Are you tasked with producing your company or personal brand newsletter, friend?
If you’re responsible for your company or brand’s newsletter. I’d love to chat about your process for content planning, promotion, and producing your newsletter. We’re creating a playbook to help with newsletter creation, and your insights would be invaluable. Interested? Sign up here – just 30 minutes, and I promise it’ll be insightful for both of us!
Stay curious,
