I know we talk a lot about following best practice, about not having emails that are too long, and not sending image heavy emails, but sometimes it’s good to innovative to go against the rules and do something unique and truly creative. So we provide to you, the following two examples, as examples of how to break the rules in the right way.

This promo email for a new 14 story high water slide at Brazilian water park Beach Park is a prime example of this, and boy does it breaks all the rules. (Click on the image to see the full version of this email)

It weighs in at a hefty megabyte, and it’s 12,000 pixels high, so i’t s lonnnnnnnng and requires people to scroll a long way, and it’s 100% image based, but for this campaign it works. Because it is a unique campaign, a one off promo, for something really crazy and fun. Also it might have something to do with the fact that as you scroll down you get to experience going down a 14story high slide yourself first hand – a bit dizzying I must say. But I scrolled back up and went down the slide 2 more times, so it obviously did the trick!

For our second example it is a great email campaign that Chad White over at Retail Email Blog recently posted about. This campaign also breaks all the rules, but it does it in style, and as a result it really stands out from the crowd. (Click on the image below to see the full version of this email)

This Brooks Brothers email campaign features a huge stack of polo shirts, about 40 of them in fact, in every imaginable color, and presents this stack of shirts as a box set. It goes against the usual ‘best practice’ rules, but in breaking the rules it makes it point. It shows the variety of it’s products, it appeals with humor, and it compels people scroll right to the bottom of the ‘everlasting stack of Polo shirts’ which I found pretty entertaining.

There’s also a lesson here about the way we think everything needs to be above the fold. I have seen a few campaigns doing recently. Instead of packing the top area with call to actions, links, and big shiny buttons, it actually draws you in and compels you to scroll right to the bottom….where you find the call to action. Surprise!

So if you have a concept you want to get across, or just want to create an email that’s out of the box, look to the water slide email, and the polo shirt email, as outstanding examples of how to do it right.