Spowart.net - Responsive Portfolio by Nicholas Spowart

Email: Dixons Retail: Currys & PC World

Supplier Funded
Targeted
Templates

Sites:
www.currys.co.uk | www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk | www.pcworld.co.uk | www.dixonstravel.com | www.knowhow.com

Job title: Email Specialist

Duration: April 29th 2013 – present

Overview:
Using the progressive coding of HTML5 and CSS3 I have helped pioneer a responsive email template for the Email Department of Dixons Retail.
Most of my campaigns are supplier-funded, targeted or post-purchase attachments.

Web Specialties:
Hand coded HTML table layouts, CSS2, CSS3 & progressively enhanced by media queries for device layouts
Using Sublime 3 for progressive coding & Dreamweaver for weekly workflows
Responsive 'liquid' layout (Mobile 1st) approach to tables <table> <tr> <td>
Cross email application-checked, device-checked & browser compatibility
HTML responsive email creation templates
Image optimisation
Animated GIFs for leading products & banners

Graphic Specialties:
Adobe CS5/6 suites: Photoshop, Illustrator

Platforms:
Desktop
Laptop
Tablet
Mobile

Email: Video

TOP ^

Strategy:
For the Curry's new brand campaign I was required to integrate a video into the weekly promotional email to support our social media channels and online.

This video runs in devices which support the HTML5 <video> tag (mp4 ogg & webm), falling back to a poster frame then an animated GIF.

Testing: Extensive testing was done across Litmus Builder previews and devices for both Android and iOS (Apple devices). iOS7 supported video tag, however iOS8 does not, therefore a static poster image had to be implemented along with a GIF video clip where the video tag was not supported.

Please see the live example adjacent.
Litmus test:

Email: Supplier Funded

TOP ^

Strategy:
Supplier-funded email campaigns generally follow their own creative style which normally does not comply with the master template. (See Template Section below.)
As the master template evolves each week, due to the nature of the ever-changing code requirements to fix glitches
and issues, the master template is used very loosely, more as a guideline to achieve the optimal build, when following the supplier-funded visual layout.

Click images below for the screen-shots of each campaign.

Email: Targeted

TOP ^

Strategy:
Targeted email campaigns are created to focus on a specific type of customer.

They may have:
just bought a DSLR camera and we can email them informative material
abandoned their basket. In which case, we can then follow up with the items they were looking at
logged on when the site was down so they may receive a redeemable coupon for their troubles

Click images below for the screen-shots of each campaign.

Email: Templates

TOP ^

While I pioneered the responsive aspect of email templates, I drew from my previous knowledge of the Currys and PC World responsive home pages.

Strategy:
to implement the correct size of buttons (CTAs) for Tablet and Mobiles
to allow graphics and text to scale as appropriate without becoming blurred
To modify the desktop version, in order that the responsive 'mobile first' approach happens all within the CSS3 media queries

Click images below for the screen-shots of each campaign.