Emailium, an inspiration database for designers who create email marketing campaigns, opened their public beta today. The site is free to join for now, although it makes no mention of what the prices might be once the public beta is over.The company describes itself as “A filterable, sortable, categorizable, global database of email campaigns for competitive research, design inspiration and industry analysis.” In other words, Emailium is to email marketing what cssmania.com is to web design.
To show you just how helpful a site like Emailium can be when you’re sitting down to design an email template, it’s helpful to take a look at a real world problem. I used the site to research ideas for an email newsletter and found the results to be very helpful.
Here’s how it site works. Visit www.emailium.com to search for email design ideas by subject, company, industry, tag, color and date. You can even filter by Alexa Ranking.
During my search, it’s apparent that Emailium is still a new database. The email designs in the showcase are not extensively tagged yet, though since users can add their own tags, I expect the search-by-tag feature will improve with time. It also looks like the site is either having problems with their internal search engine or letting companies self-categorize. That’s the only explanation I can find for CambriaBikes.com to be listed under “real estate.”
If you read their twitter stream, it sounds like Emailium has about 100,000 email campaigns and template designs stored in their database. If so, then a few companies seem disproportionately represented. This is probably because some newsletters are published daily, others weekly, and some only randomly. It would be nice if the search results were able to weed out campaigns that are essentially the same thing every day.
The other thing I’d like to see are a way to rate or favorite campaigns or store designs in a lightbox to come back to later. For now, Emailium allows users to save a set of search filters that can be used again. This is a good start, but it would be fun to bookmark campaigns or sort by “most popular” as well. It’s easy to submit a “feature request” on the site.
Overall, as a fledging site still in beta, Emailium is definitely a tool you’ll want to bookmark. I haven’t seen another resource like it and I look forward to seeing more companies join and submit content. If there is a company that you’d like to see listed on Emailium, you can “Request a Company” once you are logged in.
What to be inspired, too? Check out Emailium and browse through their gallery of email designs and marketing campaigns.
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