The style guide email for anything bought on how it looks

They can't picture it in their own house

Your product shot on white tells them what it is. Nothing about whether it'll work. The hesitation is about context: what it sits next to, what it goes with, whether it'll look out of place beside the things they already own.

One photograph of it being worn or used in an ordinary room settles more doubt than a page of specification. That's the whole observation, and this campaign is built out of it.

Show three ways, and include one that isn't yours

Three settings for one product beats one setting for three products. Your reader is trying to place a single item. Seeing it work in a formal room, a cluttered one and a small one does exactly that job.

• A version using only things the customer probably owns already, which proves it doesn't need a whole new scheme
• A version with one other product from your range, which is the honest cross sell
• A version deliberately unlike the first two, so the range of use is obvious
• At least one photograph with something in it you don't sell, because a styled shot of only your own products reads as a catalogue

That last one is the point brands fight hardest. A room with an obviously unrelated chair in it is more believable than one furnished entirely from a single collection, and the believability is the bit that sells.

Customers, staff or a stylist, in that order of credibility

Most brands start at the bottom row and never move. Start at the top and it costs you less and performs better, and the campaign turns into something you can run monthly instead of once a year.

Link every element, even the ones you don't sell

Every styled image should let the reader buy any part of it you stock, and should say plainly where the rest came from if you know. Pretending an unrelated item isn't in the shot is the detail that makes a styled email feel like an advert.

After a first order, and before a season

The strongest slot is a few weeks after somebody bought one item, when they're working out whether it landed and what to add next. Style the thing they already bought instead of presenting something new. That's the version that produces second orders.

It belongs in front of anybody who's looked at a product several times without buying, too. Repeat views nearly always mean the reader is trying to picture it somewhere and can't quite get there.

The second slot is a change of season, where the same product turns up in a different context. That's a genuinely new email and not a repeat, and it's what the cross sell sequence should be carrying instead of a list of related items.

Look at how many of your images have context in them

Open your last ten campaigns and count the photographs that show the product on its own against a plain background. In most accounts it's nearly all of them. So the question customers actually have has never once been answered in an email.

Ask three customers for a photograph of the item where they keep it. You'll have a styling campaign inside a week, and a library that keeps the whole programme supplied for a year after that.