This month we’ve taken a closer look at three emails that arrived in our inbox and how they worked across desktop and mobile, all thanks to clever content hierarchy and clear, bold design.

Is the smartphone really killing off the period as a punctuation mark for texters? A recent story in the Washington Post says it is.

Where the full stop once marked the end of a sentence, the simple line break now claims that role in texting.

This year, according to Custora, email drove more Black Friday sales than any other channel – a total of 25.1%. And MailChimp customers alone sent a record 1.2 billion emails on Black Friday – followed by another 1.1 billion on Cyber Monday.

Sideways-scrolling emails have been on the email marketer’s radar for a few years. At Alchemy Worx we first produced them for a client campaign back in 2006, but like many marketers we came up against the number one restriction facing these emails – scrolling left to right on a desktop is not easy! But with 53% of emails now opened on mobile, using easy finger swiping actions or turning the phone to landscape mode, these emails seem much more appealing for both marketers and customers.

For many brands, Christmas is the most commercially critical period of the business year and an effective email program can be the difference between ending on a high or with a hangover.

With huge retail events like Cyber Monday and the Holiday Season, Q4 provides no end of opportunity for email marketers to engage their customers. Here’s our pick of campaigns that put their own stamp on the season.