Finally a poker brand that is executing winning email. We monitor a lot of email efforts from large B&M casinos as well as online sites, and pretty much all of them receive a low score. FullTiltPoker.com is an exception. With the consolidated online poker market, Full Tilt is one of the major players with their roster of top pros and customer-centric approach.

They have launched an email series that focuses on strategic videos from the pros. Not only is this fantastic content that their subscribers will eat up, but they execute it quite well.

The screen grab below shows the top section of one of their emails.

Some great elements with this top section:

1. They have a clear button to click through and watch the video.

2. The primary topic of the video, description, and button are left-justified so it is easy to see in a preview window, and aesthetically sound.

3. They use text for all copy and not one big image! (you won’t be able to demo this in the screen grab above). This is great for users who have images blocked by default.

4. As mentioned above, they are focusing on the customer both with great usability and by providing solid content.

Areas of improvement

1. Navigation: In a future post we’ll discuss the rest of this email, but on quick glance the email navigation in this example could benefit from some changes. It doesn’t really look like a nav, plus there are alternate/additional options that would likely provide improvement.

2. Testing the Photo: I have not seen any tests run yet on the pro’s photo. I would be interest to see if a video screen grab (with play button) performed better here while still integrating with their branding.

Being a poker player myself, I look forward to seeing more emails from Full Tilt not only for the marketing evaluation, but to actually utilize the content.