Domino’s is an iconic brand, synonymous with my favorite food ever: Pizza. Some traditional brick and mortar businesses get a bad rep when it comes to email marketing, especially franchise-based models. The good old red blue and white, on the other hand, is doing an amazing job of staying relevant and true to the brand. Let’s dig into this iconic brand and see how they’re executing on email.

Bite sized takeaways

• An iconic brand like Domino’s can combine 3 simple colors with spacing, large font sizes, and alignment tricks to create a really engaging email
• If you have a loyalty or points program, elevate that to the top of your email and give your customer ways to action on it
• Use a dynamic repeating background image to add some punch to your designs
• More is sometimes better, when it comes to call to actions, but use color to set information hierarchy

Email mouthfeel

What’s the mouthfeel of an email? It’s me stretching an analogy to match the theme of Domino’s email. To be clear, Domino’s has a great overall structure and theme to their emails, and they do two things very well. First, Domino’s hard commits to their iconic brand colors: red, white, and blue. Blue is predominately used as a background color for their single column layout, whereas their unique red and white are used as highlights for text and calls to action.

Second, Domino's has opted for an awesome party-themed repeating background image. In this case, it was Hockey Night in Canada, which would explain the background of hockey sticks and pucks. I’m looking forward to receiving this email in the spring, when I hope the background will swap for something to match the season. Background images like these are largely “set it and forget it” but I think they’re a small touch of personalization that can really delight a customer.

Rewards, rewards …

This subtle puzzle piece slips in just under the logo, though it is one of my favorite parts of this email. Many brands track loyalty points and rewards status, but so few highlight it in customer communications. I love that Domino’s puts this at the top of their email.

This really could have been enhanced by highlighting some available rewards or by adding a way to leverage those points today. Can I get a free 2L soda with my order if I use points? Maybe I can add a second large pizza to my order using points only? That’s what I really want to know! Herein lies the challenge for many marketers: sending data-driven emails is hard and often requires an email developer. Kudos to Domino’s for adding the points total. Fingers crossed they double down on the investment!

Nuts and bolts, this iconic brand goes modular

I really have to hand it to the email marketing team at Domino’s, they’ve adopted a modular design for the emails that really plays to their strengths: Pizza looks amazing. In this email we have the same hero module used 3 times, with different variations of component positions and text size. It’s great to see a brand practicing what we preach (modular design). 

One criticism of Domino’s approach is that each hero is composed of 2 images, including their text and buttons. This is a major bummer because without images enabled, this email really doesn’t hit the mark – the recipient will see a long, blank email. In rebuilding this email in Dyspatch, we made the choice not to create this as one huge image. The benefits are that we can make changes to everything on the fly, no designer required, and we can ensure the email scales down to mobile really easily.

Left aligned pricing?

I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the decision to have pricing left-aligned in the column, while the rest of the text and calls to action are center-aligned. I’d love to know if there was testing or analytics behind this decision and it performed better, or if there was another reason for this. Visually, the red horizontal section is striking and is a great way to break up the email.

Menus? We’ve got those.

After the repeating hero modules, Domino's includes this great little menu. I love the choice of the full column blue bar being a clickable button. Visually it really reminds me of a menu I might find in a mobile app. It’s a great touch.

If I was talking with their email marketing team, I’d suggest including a mini menu in the header as well, maybe just leveraging these icons to also help customers find their way.

Atouch that any marketer will appreciate is how Domino’s speaks to price sensitivity without saying “free” or “20% off” etc. “Find coupons” is a great way to entice a click, but it’s not included in the first ⅓ of the email. Domino’s knows they have a great product so they don’t have to race to the bottom of the pricing barrel right away. I thought this was a great, tasteful way to include this in their email.

Speaking of differentiators…

I bet if you hire an MBA-toting agency expert to analyze the takeaway Pizza market, one of the things they’ll bring up is the emergence of “pre-made” pizza delivery companies. It’s hard to ignore the business efficiency that this creates, but I love Domino’s fighting back with “Handmade over pre-made” . 

Domino's knows it’s important to remind customers why their pizza is so great, and even if you don’t click through to the info page, it’s still a great reminder and visually breaks the email up.

We’re almost done

Before we get to the ever important footer, Domino’s has a quick reminder that “Hey, we’re hiring!”. Personally, I’m a big fan of play on words, so the invitation to deliver your application really tickled my fancy.

From a design standpoint, this block uses a slightly different light grey background, which helps the reader know this component is important, but not as important as what came before it. As a company that is constantly hiring thousands of people, I think it’s smart for the Domino’s team to pack in one more call to action before the footer. Email marketers are often reluctant to give up email real estate to tertiary links, but I’m of the opinion that you never know what will entice a user to click. As long as the call to action aligns with your business goals, what’s the harm in testing it out?

Change is a foot….er

Two things I love about the Domino's footer that really set it apart: First, we’re seeing app (iOS/Android) links show up next to social links more and more often. Normally you see larger “install our app” icons, I like the subtlety here.

Second, and this is small but… the little Domino’s blue highlight of “Legal Stuff:”. That’s 🧑‍🍳

All in all this email is composed of seven (7!) simple modules, but you could argue it’s really six since the logo/rewards section are one.

Peloton is an amazing brand that matches a premium product, a lifestyle aesthetic, and a community all in one. A large differentiator of Peloton is the exhaustive selection of live and recorded classes that are available on the platform. With all this content, keeping users aware of new programs, new instructors, and highlights is a challenge. Hence where this newsletter “Workouts to Watch” comes into play.

After receiving this email, I just knew we HAD to rebuild it in Dyspatch. This email features a unique Hero that leverages contrasting background colors and “netflix” style video cards – this look is both eye-catching and pulls on an interface we’re all very familiar with nowadays. I’m going to document the process, share what we loved about the design, and what we think anyone implementing a similar email might want to improve.

It all starts with a theme

When you’re going from a static email design to a full modular design, the first step is to build out your theme – including your fonts, your brand guidelines colors, padding etc.

In this Peloton email, we make note that they are using a standard 600px wide email, with a dark grey (#131416) full-width background. The main text is a distinctive white (#FFFFFF) text on a black background (#000000). For the logo and hero section, Peloton is using their distinctive brand blue (#007CFF) and their word mark. The fonts are Roboto with a Helvetica fallback. Lovely. And there’s a generous left/right padding of 40px on all the content. 

One thing to note with Peloton is their very specific use of letter spacing and line height to create a highly recognizable visual effect.

Breaking it down / Building Blocks

Once we have our theme built out, our next step is to break down our email into distinct blocks. First up is the header, which includes the logo and wordmark. We’re using Peloton’s wordmark with an extra branded blue background:

After that we have the most visually striking component in this email, the hero.

Static Images vs Dynamic Blocks

Peloton is using a single static image for this entire hero. This is common in the world of email marketing, and if you’re working with a design team that can quickly create these assets, it makes email sends a breeze. There are some major downsides to this design though. First, you’re highly reliant on that design team being available to give you email-ready designs every day. That’s a pretty big limiting factor for many teams.

Second, it limits (but doesn’t make it impossible!) your ability to link out to distinct content or track what is best performing. In this hero, I love the “Netflix” style cards for different workouts, but unfortunately, they all link to the same place. As a marketer, that means you’re not getting rich analytics on which content you’re sending out is the most important to your readers.

Finally, full image blocks suffer when viewed on mobile, which in this day and age, every email is going to be read on.

In rebuilding this module, what we did is make every component dynamic, so they could be updated in place without going through a designer. Want to swap out Yin Yoga for Power Vinyasa? Just update a single image. Going to reuse parts of this email for February’s send? No need to go back to a designer. An added benefit here is that Dyspatch will guarantee this 🤣new module is mobile-friendly from the get go. Winner winner chicken dinner, as the kids say.

Building the Body (of the email)

The body of Peloton’s email is alternating between left and right image and text combinations. These are really quick to setup in Dyspatch and make reusable components that can be used in any email.

One of the issues email marketers face is that when this left/right swap design is viewed on mobile, it often stacks in an unflattering way – image, text, text, image – eroding the designer’s intended layout. By using Dyspatch’s responsive features, these two modules are actually the same, just with the direction swapped. The mobile view then stacks perfectly:

Building out the remainder of this email is quite simple: dropping in our images, heading, text, and links at the bottom.

To wrap up, we have Peloton’s footer. I love the use of a full width, full black block here. It gives the reader a clear visual reminder that “this is the end”. The generous padding with subtle monochrome social icons adds to this effect.

All in all, this is a 10/10 email from Peloton, with some great and subtle design elements that don’t distract from the ultimately great content.