The staff picks email, when the shop floor knows the range best

The picks have to be allowed to be inconvenient

Let's face it: if every staff pick happens to be a new season line with good stock cover, your readers work it out inside two sends. The format lives or dies on the possibility that somebody names a product the business isn't pushing.

That's a decision made before anybody briefs the campaign. Either the picks are genuinely theirs, and this works, or they're a merchandising plan with names attached. In which case send an ordinary product email and don't dress it up.

The further from marketing, the better it reads

• Whoever handles returns, because they know what comes back and what never does
• Whoever packs, because they see what the regulars reorder
• Whoever answers the phone, because they hear the hesitations first hand
• A long standing customer, now and then, which is a different campaign wearing the same clothes

Whoever picks, tell the reader what their job is. A recommendation from the person who processes returns carries different information from one made by a buyer, and readers weigh them differently once they know which is which.

Two or three pickers per send, one product each. That's the right size. One person's edit of six items reads as a catalogue page and loses the variety of voice that makes the whole thing work.

The reason is the campaign, not the product

Ask for the reason, not a description. Why this one and not the obvious alternative. What they use it for. Who they wouldn't recommend it to. Three sentences of that beats a paragraph of product copy every single time.

Keep their phrasing. A picker who says it's a bit of a faff but worth it has written a better line than any copywriter would have been allowed to.

Three versions worth alternating

The middle version needs the purchase to be real and unprompted. Staff being handed products to endorse is a different thing entirely, and it has to be disclosed.

Monthly is sustainable, quarterly is safer

Because the format needs three genuine opinions every time, it runs dry faster than it looks. Monthly works in a business with a big team and a deep range. In a small one it becomes the same four people recommending the same shelf, and readers notice. Every time.

Rotate the pickers, not the products. The same colleague recommending something new every month reads as a column, which is a harder thing to sustain and a weaker one to read than several people each speaking once.

Where it does run monthly, it pairs naturally with a recommendation sequence, because the picks tell you which products your own staff think go together. That's material the cross sell flow can use for the rest of the year.

Ask three colleagues before you plan anything

Ask three people who don't work in marketing which product they'd recommend to a friend, and listen for whether the answers match the current promotion. If they don't, the campaign is worth running and the gap itself is worth understanding.

If nobody can answer, that's a more serious finding than a missing campaign. A team that can't recommend anything has never used the range, and it shows up in every customer conversation long before it shows up in an email.