Subject lines… the easiest thing to write, the hardest thing to get right. There is just no single best practice, rule or tactic that works every time.

Symbols might produce killer open rates one week but that doesn’t mean every subsequent send should be jam-packed with ☀☀☀ and ☺☺☺. You have to keep your subscribers on their toes.

The key is originality in moderation. But how much originality and how much moderation?

We’ve rounded up a selection of Valentine’s Day emails that set pulses racing. From high frequency programs to clever copy, these brands pulled out all the stops to win their customers’ affections.

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.