you've got mail
Our CRM team was responsible for the success, or failure of our email marketing campaigns. We had plenty of data and certainly a sufficient amount of users, about 13 million, to send targeted messages to weekly. However, our open rates and conversion rates were slowly dropping and YOY they were noticeably lower.
Our team uncovered that it was mostly due to frequency and a declining subscriber engagement over time, both from our B2B and B2C audience. It seemed obvious that we needed a makeover and an infusion of excitement and direction. Unfortunately, this wasn't isolated to one country - the EU was having similar issues...so the journey begins.
nobody reads
The first step in the process was to think about this as a global experience. We had been using various stock images alongside a hefty headline for all of our hero sections. We could no longer use that as a standard because of the size of headlines in the EU were much larger and thus created a design problem. An email design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by standards that teams use to create on-brand emails more consistently and efficiently.We used secondary research to uncover user interest in email frequency.
The average time allocated to reading an email after opening it was only 51 seconds. “Reading” is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of emails. The predominant user behavior was scanning. Often, users didn’t even scan the entire newsletter: 35% of the time, participants only skimmed a small part of the newsletter or glanced at the content.
Our strategy answered three very important UX questions:
1. What is this?
2. Why should I care?
3. What do I do next?
design + results
My goal was to cut down on unnecessary design elements and a more prominent call-to-action. The design is clean, orderly and simple providing an immediate utility to the user. The end result is the new email system is very straight-forward and cut’s to the chase. Combined with social media marketing, paid online advertising, content marketing, and managing our overall online reputation was also very critical to the success.
To date, we’ve seen enormous value in the re-design year over year:
Unique Opens: 432KK/32%; 36% vs. Previous Year
Unique Clicks*8.9KK/.66%; 194% vs. Previous Year
Unique Visits:6.3K/1.5%; 129% vs. Previous Year
Apply Starts: 735/12%; 247% vs. Previous Year
Apply Complete: 564/9%; 250% vs. Previous Year
