Big Marlin Group

Opportunity card: three email directions

Same four blocks and the same words as the live card, rebuilt so they survive an inbox. Every one of these is tables and inline styles at 600px, because the hosted card's flexbox, SVG logos and rounded pills are three things Outlook does not have.

What differs between them is how much container the card has: none, one, or one per block.

A · The Note

Written, not designed

No masthead, no panels, no labels. Three short paragraphs, one button, one link, and the two logos down in the signature where they'd sit in a real email. Nothing announces itself as a campaign before the first sentence is read.

Risk: nothing signals that work was done. A prospect who wanted to feel researched may not feel it.

SEO Paid

B · The Brief

One document, hairline sections

Both marks at the top, a slug line, then labelled sections divided by rules. Closest to what's live now. The labels do real work in an inbox: a skimmer can find the money without reading the sentence that earns it.

Risk: labels are furniture, and four of them on a short card can read as a template.

SEO Paid

C · The Bands

Colour carries the structure

Four full-bleed bands, one per block, no border and no gaps. Holds together at a glance in a scrolling list, and each block is unmistakably its own thing. Reversed white marks on the navy masthead.

Risk: the loudest of the three, and loud is the register we spent the last six revisions removing.

SEO Paid

The one to send

The Brief, with the scarcity in the finding and claim on the button. The counter counts their slots, not our calendar: 0 of 3 open on organic, 0 local advertisers on paid. Every number is a restatement of data the analysis already produced.

Open the SEO card

Open the paid card

Naming the competitors

The lead names the three businesses holding the map spots when the names fit in a sentence, and falls back to "three competitors" when they don't. Gloucester falls back, because one of the three has commas in its Google Business name and a comma-separated list of it stops parsing. Left is what ships today; right is the same card with hand-written short forms.

Fallback wording — **Ships today.** "The map results have three spots, and competitors have claimed all three", then the names in a list below.

Named wording — **Needs approved short names.** Names in the sentence, list gone, 120px shorter. Open it →

Scarcity

Three sources of scarcity and the word claim, all built on The Brief so only the pressure changes. Open the scarcity comparison →

With images blocked

Outlook turns images off by default, so this is the first thing a good share of the list actually sees. All three hold, because nothing load-bearing is inside an image.

The Brief with images blocked — B · The Brief

The Bands with images blocked — C · The Bands

What email costs us

Gibson is gone. Webfonts don't reach Outlook, so all three fall back to the reader's system sans. The brand's typeface is not available in this medium and pretending otherwise just produces a card that looks different everywhere.
SVG is gone, and so are data URIs. Outlook strips SVG and Gmail refuses to render base64 images, so both logos are PNGs. In a real send they have to sit at absolute hosted URLs, not next to the file.
Rounded corners are advisory. Outlook desktop squares off the buttons and the card edges. Everything still reads; it just reads squarer.
The page canvas moved off mist. Mist bands on a mist background made the card look like it had a hole in it, so the canvas is one step darker and mist stays a card surface.
Neither link goes anywhere yet. The strategy session and the video playbook are both placeholders. A card whose buttons 404 should not be sent.

None of this is wired into the skill. cards.py still renders the hosted browser card, which is the right thing for a link. If the card is going to be the body of the email rather than a link inside it, that's a second renderer, and one of these three is what it should render.