Welcome back, fellow lovers of style. With summer winding to a close, we’re reflecting on some of our favorite stationery creations of the season. Each of these completely custom Concierge Designs achieves a perfect balance of client concept and designer imagination. Let’s get started, shall we?
Company: Riverbank Arts Centre
Designer: Elizabeth Williams
Located in Ireland, the Riverbank Arts Centre is a venue dedicated to film, theater, music and workshops for children. Riverbank came to Emma with a unique illustration-themed website in place that changes regularly depending on the season. Their goal, however, was to create a stationery that drew in elements of each illustration without creating a season-specific design. Elizabeth pulled several elements from the website, including a watermark-style image of animated characters to echo the audience in the footer. The result is a seamless connection to the Riverbank brand that they can use confidently all year long.
Company: Sagra
Designer: Jennifer Kasdorf
Sagra is one of Austin’s premiere Italian restaurants. Their atmosphere is as important to them as the quality of the food – and that’s saying a lot! The menu is fashioned after the bistro-style meals served in Italian railway stations, and they wanted their email campaigns to match their existing branding. Jennifer based the design on their logo and added a darker texture to give an antique sensibility to the header. Its simple, logo-focused design is flexible enough for a quick message (such as their welcome trigger mailing) or a longer newsletter featuring images of their tasty offerings.
Company: Crystal Jones
Designer: Kelly McClain
Crystal Jones is a talented photographer from Sacramento, California, who described her website as simple, clean and modern with a hint of whimsy. She loves her logo, but she wanted something a little bit playful added to the stationery. Though she couldn’t pinpoint the exact element she wanted, she provided Kelly with links to other websites that accomplish that special something. Kelly chose to add concentric circles for a Méliès-style wave effect, plus some subtle texturing in the header background to add depth.
Company: Agent06
Designer: Jessica Peoples
Angela Barnshaw is the owner and lead listing specialist of Agent 06 in south New Jersey. Having worked with Jessica on stationery in the past, Angela was confident that Jessica was up the task of combining some existing stationery elements with the colors and logo of Keller Williams. The real estate industry is a field that requires a combination of business savvy and hospitality, and that can be challenging to convey. Jessica chose flowers and a scripted font for Angela’s signature. Both elements add warmth, while the Keller Williams and Agent06 names convey the seasoned business experience that’s so important.
It’s been a busy season for our Emma designers, and we look forward to our next opportunity to help you with some stylish stationery.
Until next time … cheers from your entire Emma Design Team.
Another way effective email design can make your campaigns more effective: Get all your buttons to look just right.
I know the feeling. You’ve crafted what feels like the perfect email. The photo totally complements the concise and appealing description of your new service. The label for your call to action is clear. You just know people are going to click it and take that next step. Everything’s ready. You take a deep breath, and send your baby out into the world. You’ve worked hard, and you’re proud of that baby of yours. You wait for good things. And you wait. And you wait some more. But nothing happens.
What went wrong? Why aren’t people clicking your call to action? Well, it’s time to get honest with yourself. Your baby’s button may be ugly. The label is fine. But that button design isn’t going to win her any ribbons at the county fair. You see, that button doesn’t have enough perceived affordances. Don Norman is credited with introducing this term to the design world, and it refers to “those action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor.” In other words, there are certain qualities of an object, in your case a button, that help people understand what they can do with it.
Let’s take a closer look at a button. Maybe you’re creating a campaign to announce your new lunch menu (because your new paninis are quite tasty). Besides showcasing a great photo of said panini, you really want your customers to click that button so they can check out the new menu on your website.
The first question to ask yourself is whether it looks like a button. Not really. It looks more like a rectangle with a border. Second question, does it look clickable? Maybe. It’s pretty flat, but it is different than the photo and the text. Of course, no one wants to settle for maybe – fortunately, it’s easy to add perceived affordances and make that button more effective.
This revised button looks more clickable than the old one. (The fancier way of saying this is that it demonstrates a higher level of affordance.) I know it’s tempting to be totally unique from a design perspective — and you can be if you keep affordance in mind — but it’s often more effective to use a design convention that’s already out there instead of dreaming up something new.
Sure, your button might look similar to another one, but who cares? Your audience members know that it’s a button, and they know what usually happens when they click one. They don’t have to figure that out. It’s one less thing for them to think about. Using a button with more affordance eliminates a barrier. And let’s face it, you’re competing with a lot of other noise out there (digital and physical). Why not help your subscribers get to your content – and to those delicious paninis – more easily?
Survey know-how series, part three of four:
Using Emma surveys can help you plan and streamline events.
Now that we’ve explored some of the best reasons to survey your customers and some things to keep in mind while you’re designing a market research survey, let’s take a look at another useful application of this free, integrated tool. Planning an event to support your business can be complicated and time-consuming to manage. But using email and surveys together can really streamline the communication and let you focus on, you know, the event planning.
Many of our savvy customers are using the survey submit button to collect event RSVP information. This pairs easily with an invitation email, which can provide event details and a link to the RSVP survey.
For example, consider this. You have an event coming up, and your goal is to invite your customers, while hopefully spreading the word to some prospective customers as well. But you need to know how many beanbag chairs to set up, so you’ll be asking people to RSVP. Well, you can use an email campaign as the actual invitation, and then use a survey to collect RSVP responses.
Here’s how:
This format lets you ask exactly what you need to know: Can you attend? Will you be bringing a guest? Will you be bringing s’mores as your potluck dish? (In that case, you can bet that a few Emma staffers will be there too.)
Once you’ve heard back from your audience, you can easily organize the responses so that you can report back to your caterer (yep, better order some more marshmallows) and get in touch with those who responded. For example, a timely “Directions and Parking” follow-up email to those who said yes can minimize both frantic inbox-searching for your clients and day-of phone calls for you. Or, after the event is completed, sending a follow-up survey soliciting feedback and suggestions can help you continue to improve.
Also, that whole link-to-the-RSVP-form-straight-from-the-email thing makes *actually* responding a lot easier for your recipients. That way, hopefully you and your staff will only have to say ‘s’il vous plaît’ a few extra times.
It’s been a minute since my school days, but this time of year still makes me want new books and shoes. There’s just something magical – something like New Year’s Eve – about the feeling in the air, like promise and potential are everywhere.
And after all, let’s face it: It’s been a long, hot summer, and maybe a little back-to-school spirit is all we need to get us through the tail end of this heat wave. Who else is ready for some stylish fall boots, back-to-school sales and university stationery? This month’s design showcase will at least help on the university stationery front.
Client: University of Notre Dame Undergraduate Admissions
Designer: Elizabeth Williams
Colleges are great candidates for Design Suite, our custom design package that includes three stationery designs based on one concept. Since university messages must appeal to a wide variety of audiences (prospective and current students, donors and alumni, faculty and staff, high school guidance counselors, parents and so on), the Suite is the perfect way to have something special for each distinctive group – while, of course, retaining brand consistency.
This design is the first of what will become a Design Suite for the University of Notre Dame. The original request included the school’s brand guidelines, which immediately determined the colors and fonts for the stationery. The shape, however, came from website-prowling on Elizabeth’s part. The curved frame appears frequently on the Notre Dame homepage, so Elizabeth mimicked the shape and added shadows and highlights to enhance it, creating a truly three-dimensional feel.
Client: Metropolitan Community College
Designer: Jimmy Thorn
Our friends at the Metropolitan Community College wanted a fresh look for their stationery, so Jimmy was free to play with design concepts that strayed from the look of the website. Still, he knew it was important to communicate the school’s particular personality and style.
They provided their logo as an EPS file, meaning that Jimmy could blow it up as big as he wanted without losing image quality. And that’s exactly what he did: If you look closely, you can see that the background texture behind the logo is actually an extremely enlarged copy of the logo itself. He added color and shadow to give it a metallic sheen and then reversed out the actual logo to white, making the contrast much more dramatic. Their tagline gets its own focus here, but the red slanted bar continually draws the eye right back to the logo.
Client: Stanford University Press
Designer: Kelly McClain
This was the second stationery design for the Stanford University Press. They needed a new, less traditional design for certain kinds of mailings — they weren’t exactly sure what they wanted for their new design, but they did know they wanted their brand shade of red. With that in mind, Kelly perused the SUP website and found that they typically use a lot of white space to give the red accents more power. She also discovered that they have a terrific online presence, and not just with their own website and Emma campaigns. They’re active users of Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, podcasts and a blog, all of which work together to engage a diverse community of fans and followers.
How brilliant, then, for an established American institution of print publishing to be so active on the web. And how brilliant of Kelly to put a similar ironic twist on their “less traditional” email stationery by making it look like a traditional printed letterhead, complete with typewriter font! She further aged the look by bending the page corners just a bit, scratching up the header type and fading the red bar under the title. The “paper” comes to a clean mid-section, though, so that the header and footer images could easily give way to clean, HTML-based design in the middle. That way, the stationery can stretch vertically to accommodate content of any length.
Client: Michigan State University – International Studies and Programs
Designer: Jimmy Thorn
Stephanie from Michigan State University wanted a fairly simple design but requested a variety of colors to represent her international audience. She provided a photo of flags from the around the world, with a busy street market blurred in the background. Jimmy cropped the image so the focus would be entirely on the flags in all their colorful glory, and he took the accent shade of green from the department’s own website. He also borrowed the idea of rounded corners from their existing branding and used that shape to frame the individual design elements as well as the stationery itself.
Stephanie can use the editable text box just below the header for the date, issue number or any other text that she’d like to change out from time to time. It’s completely separate from the text box(es) that form the layout template, so she can still use any of the existing layouts without losing that upper text box.
Until next time … hugs and autumn leaves from the entire Emma Design Team!
Survey know-how series, part two of four:
Explore the value of knowing what’s on the minds of your customers.
We’ve all heard banal business expressions from motivational speakers and management books about customer satisfaction, right? Maybe something like …
OK, so that last one was from my mom and not a *traditional* motivational speaker. But if you boil it down, these types of phrases are just reminders to make sure that you’re taking care of your most important market: your existing customers.
So, how do we do that?
By asking our customers to tell us about themselves and their experience with us and then – and here’s the kicker – listening to them. You have several options when you think about using a survey tool like Emma’s to connect with your customers.
1. Getting to know your audience helps you market and serve them better than you can by simply guessing. Additionally, just the experience of being invited to share an opinion can be therapeutic for a frustrated customer, or inspiring for one who likes you already. A positive experience like that is just one more touch-point that you now have with that customer.
2. Negative feedback is no fun, but it can be extremely valuable for you if it helps you spot and fix problems before a greater percentage of your audience catches on. Customers who are willing to go out of their way to share a frustration with you (instead of simply taking their money and their word of mouth elsewhere) are invaluable. Reward these folks and encourage your team to be truly thankful for them.
3. Surveying people who either have stopped being a customer, or decided never to be a customer during the sales process, can help you fill holes in your service and boost both sales and retention in the future.
4. Lastly, you may receive positive feedback, which is motivating and encouraging. At Emma, we regularly share positive messages about our team and our service along with customer suggestions, and they each fuel our staffers in different ways.
What now, you ask?
A good place to start is to think about your business strategy and form a survey to help you with that purpose.
If…
If you’re finding engagement is decreasing
Try this:
Ask your customers what type of content and offers they are interested in
And don’t forget…
List a few options – don’t make your subscribers come up with them
If…
If you’re wanting to boost sales and retention
Try this:
Ask your lost sales what you could have offered to snag their business
And don’t forget…
Of course, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily should offer it. But it’ll give you a good idea of what types of customers your competitors are getting
If…
If you’re interested in serving your clients better
Try this:
Ask them about themselves and what they’ve liked in the past so that you can continue to improve
And don’t forget…
This also may help you create a picture of your customers, which may surprise you
Happy surveying! One thing to keep in mind in all this, however, is that unless you take great pains to get a representative sample of your clients, take care before you act on results. These types of things have a self-selecting characteristic, in that usually you will hear from the very happy and the unhappy. The reasonably satisfied aren’t always motivated to reach out, so take your results with a few grains of salt, or any condiment of your choosing.
Missed part one? Read about the “how” of designing effective surveys.
Next time, we’ll explore the “when” of surveys, with a post about using this tool for event registration and follow-up.
If you’re an Emma customer, you’ve probably heard about this little thing called Studio Design, which is an entirely different (dare we say, groundbreaking) approach to custom design. But as thrilled as we were to launch it, our customers’ enthusiasm quite simply made us feel like dancing.
And so, with the helpful feedback of our community and fellow staffers (except this guy, who really just did the dancing), we’ve put together a handy-dandy user’s guide to our own little design revolution. Which, of course, is not to be confused with Dance Dance Revolution, even though they do, on occasion, look quite similar.
Studio Design is a new way to get custom stationery that relies more pointedly on *your* art direction. One particularly astute customer noted that requesting Studio Design vs. Concierge Design is a lot like answering a multiple choice quiz vs. a short essay question. With Studio Design, we provide a hefty assortment of styles and motifs, and from there, you choose your own design adventure. Side note: Never fear! At Emma, said adventures never end in shipwreck or scurvy.

Lauren Johnston, one of the Emma designers who created the look of the Studio Design request form. Other reasons she is amazing: She has great taste in jewelry, she is a fantastic DJ for the design team and she is from Texas.
So how does it end, you ask? With beautiful stationery created by one of our fabulous designers, of course! And because of the systematized process, we get a streamlined work flow, and you reap all the benefits: shorter turnaround time, minimized design cost and more direct control over the look of your stationery.
If one or more of the following sounds familiar, then you could be a great candidate for Studio Design:
If you’re an existing customer, just head on over to the online form.
If you’re interested in joining the Emma community, we’d love to chat and get you started! Just give us a ring at 800-595-4401, email us at hi@myemma.com or fill out a quick form.
The first step is to give us your basic brand information: your logo or company name, your slogan and your color preferences. Then choose one of our many style themes, each of which has a thumbnail and description to demonstrate what it is.
The menu of textures and elements that you see is based on your choice of theme. This time, though, the thumbnails are in black and white so that you can imagine them in *your* colors. Just keep in mind that the texture is a sort of backdrop, whereas the elements are smaller decorative motifs that work with and enhance your logo.
Finally, you just need to choose the shape of your header and whether you want a drop shadow. Your designer then takes all the information you provided and creates something new, custom, brand-consistent and quite possibly dance-worthy.
The turnaround time for a Studio Design stationery is two business days from the date we get your request. Keep in mind, of course, that the form does not generate a preview of your stationery. That’s because each header is handcrafted by a real designer, who uses his or her graphic design skill after you submit the request to make judgment calls on things like scale, composition, opacity and angle.
So what if you chose the most perfect shade of green, only to realize that it wasn’t so great after all? Rest assured that you can ask your designer for a revision if you change your mind about any single aspect of your stationery.
Of course, we’re still offering Concierge Design too, so you still have plenty of options. To see some real-life examples of Studio Design, check out our June design showcase. Ready to request one now? Click here for the form, and vive la révolution!
Survey know-how series, part one of four:
Shape your survey questions to get the most valuable information.
In a world full of emails, advertisements and direct mail, adding surveys to your communication mix can be an effective way to let your subscribers know that you’re listening as well as talking. The simple act of asking people what they think, want and know can open up a dialogue that will allow you to glean valuable information and also let your subscribers feel heard and valued.
Like email, however, a successful survey needs some careful planning and execution. In this first post of our new survey know-how series, we’re covering the “how.” That is …
“How the heck can I write solid questions and answers that will result in a positive survey experience for my audience and valuable insight for me?”
Taking the time to order your questions thoughtfully and frame your questions effectively creates a survey that can give you just the kind of information you’re hoping to learn about your audience. And this knowledge can be a valuable tool in your organization’s decision-making.
Once you couple that survey with a “Thanks for taking our survey” automatically triggered email, you’re well on your way to having customers who feel pleased and appreciated.
Next in the survey know-how series, we’ll explore the “why” of customer experience follow-up surveys.
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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