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It’s January, and that means email marketers everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief as the holiday campaigns have ended. Phew. Of course, there’s no rest for the weary – January is a time to reflect and tally successes and failures from the year gone by. Then, the focus shifts quickly to new strategies and goals for the year ahead. As we get ready to look toward another year of email, we’ll take one more glance back at a few stand-out campaigns from the end of last year. Here are some of our favorite inbox appearances from December 2018:

Personalized Thank You (Copper Mountain)

Colorado ski resort Copper Mountain has set up a neat automated email that hits visitors after they’ve visited the mountain. The email is personalized based on the visit (in this case, the first of the season) and keeps copy short and sweet. They also keep the CTA simple: Visit our website to stay up to date on snow forecasts and Copper news.

Simple & Sweet Holiday Greeting (Taboola)

Taboola did a nice job keeping their holiday greetings short and sweet. The email features a clean design that fits within Taboola’s brand, and a simple GIF that adds a little something extra to the email. Plus, with the way Taboola designs the GIF, the fallback image isn’t drastically different from the animated version. Like so many other great holiday emails, this one also didn’t have a CTA to sell a product. Simply wishing the subscriber ‘Happy Holidays’ can help build brand loyalty.    

A Gracious End-of-Year Email (Asana)

Asana’s year-end/holiday email is a vehicle for selling its project management platform, but Asana does so in a gracious way. The team thanks customers up front for “an incredible 2018” and then links to a blog post where they highlight how customers have found success using Asana. We also appreciated the simplicity of this email. When the holiday email barrage is in full swing, it’s nice to be able to digest a message in just a few seconds.

Beep Beep! Great Year in Review Email Coming Through (Lyft)

We received a lot of year in review emails, but Lyft’s rose to the top of the list. The colorful design and subtle animations are engaging, on-brand and they break up the email content, so the information is easy to digest. It was also interesting how Lyft peppered in facts about the company with information about the subscriber’s usage – it was a nice way to market the brand while keeping the user engaged.  

Bonus: Cheers to a Great Subject Line (Omaha Steaks)

Before we wrap up this month’s roundup, we had to give a quick shout-out to Omaha Steaks for this excellent subject line (sent on December 31):

Show Us Your Favorites

We’d love to hear about your favorite emails, too – holiday or otherwise. Leave a comment below or hit us up on Facebook and Twitter.