As Internet marketers, we live either in the now or slightly in the future (ever ask your neighbour about feeds, podcasts or YouTube?). With that in mind, I thought it might be nice to look at the progress on online retailer — “Harry Rosen” has made in e-mailing their customer list.

Here we see an e-mail sent from my wonderfully named salesperson Barby Ginsberg back in September 2002:

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Besides being text only and using non-trackable links, the message has a lot of quirks that caused me to use it as an example of what not to do when teaching e-marketing courses.

But Harry (and Barby I guess) have been learning more about the Net in the last four years and I was quite impressed with this recent e-mail promoting an in-store event:

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Maybe it’s the fact that the e-mail is almost a clone of One Degree’s stark black and white look, but I found this very compelling. The message is now made up of a bunch of images (and pretty much nothing else) which isn’t the best but I found the visual design appealing, very on-brand, and effective. Any thoughts on either this particular campaign on the progress Harry’s has made in the last few years?

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on June 4, 2006.