We couldn’t help but be impressed with England’s performance at the weekend. We were lucky enough to witness a decent England performance on the pitch (albeit against a second rate Slovakia team who barely bothered to turn up), but was also pleasantly surprised to see the FA.com had put some thought into their email communications.

For those that missed it, the Slovakia game was turned into a bit of a PR stunt to unveil the new England football kit. The team paraded out of the tunnel in what we’re told we have to call their official “anthem jackets”, to unveil a new retro look football kit.

Exactly 18 minutes after the unveiling, we received an email from the FA.com promoting the kit and allowing us to buy on pre-order. “So what?” we can hear many of you cry, well the simplicity of this campaign is email marketing at its best.

They didn’t wait until Monday morning when they had returned to work after the weekend to whip the email out like we’ve witnessed a number of retailers do this morning. 18 minutes after we’d seen the shirt on screen, we’d been given the opportunity to buy it and if we hadn’t been working so closely with a sports retailer who we’re hoping to get a freebie from, we probably would have been reaching for the credit card.

Good marketing is quite often about using common sense, this was simplicity at its best.