Plus: Peak planning, email design best practices, an email migration survival guide, and more... ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

I've always been befuddled by the term "award season." I get other seasons, like spring or football season, but naming an entire season after one or two award ceremonies you might care about seems a little absurd. Yet here we are, gearing up for it as the end of the year approaches.

Perhaps it isn't the ceremony at all. Perhaps it's the trophy shaped like a malformed human doing the thing you spend your time doing. That little thing collects dust on a shelf somewhere in your Zoom background, telling everyone that somebody thinks you're worth recognizing. (They like me. They really like me.) And maybe that's the real reason we care about awards and the season leading up to it.

But the best award announcements give the audience something to believe in, too. Maybe it's a story worth telling, a behind-the-scenes look, or some well-earned social proof. Awards remind people that there's a real team behind what they're buying, and that someone else thought the work was good enough to put their stamp of approval on it.

With the Q4 buying frenzy approaching, there's no better time to put that recognition to work. Here are some award-winning examples of emails about awards. (Which is not an actual award category. Yet.)

(P.S. Stay tuned for more info about RGE's Annual Awards)

A quick ad break before the good stuff...

Marketers are preparing for five days of holiday shopping. Shoppers apparently didn't get the memo. Acoustic's research finds that 73% of Cyber Five shoppers did most of their holiday buying outside those five days, while only 22% of shoppers receiving holiday messages considered most of them relevant. Plenty to reconsider before Black Friday.

A beautiful email that doesn't get clicks is just a very expensive screensaver. Insider One digs into dark mode rendering, mobile-first layouts, accessibility, and how to measure design improvements against conversions instead of unreliable open rates.

There's a fine line between helping new users get started and becoming their most persistent pen pal. Mailazy shares seven rules for trial onboarding, including front-loading the first 72 hours, limiting lifecycle sends, and replacing scheduled nudges when users have already taken action.

Migrating email platforms is already complicated enough without discovering that your templates have developed a second personality. RGE breaks down why layouts and personalization break during Salesforce migrations, how duplicate versions get out of sync, and what teams can do to keep their templates portable.

A. Legal 26%
B. Design 2%
C. Leadership 43%
D. Copywriting 16%
E. Me 13%

What this probably means about email makers: Leadership and Legal are the known enemies. We paint them as ruthless individuals who wouldn't recognize a creative idea if it walked up and introduced itself, probably because they've never truly loved before.

But what surprised us is that the Design team is practically never at fault. We can blame copywriters for their anal attention to punctuation, and we can even blame ourselves for rejecting a perfectly good idea while complaining about how nobody listens to our ideas.

Meanwhile, Design comes across as a congregation of angels. Either they never tell us no, or they've made their rules so painfully obvious that nobody bothers asking anymore. Which, now that we think about it, might be the most effective form of organizational control we've ever seen.