Email design inspiration — Ugly duckling to a handsome swan
Despite all the modern (and somewhat more intimate) methods of communication we can have with our customers nowadays (SMS messaging, push notifications or even sliding into their DMs), email is one of the most popular and convenient ways to communicate with our customers. Whether it’s letting them know a consumer has sent a lead or updating them about changes to their packages and services, email is important, so it’s important we get it right.
As part of our ongoing migration of Motor Trade Delivery (a company we acquired in 2018 to help connect retailers with logistics companies) to bring the application into Portal (the system our customers use to manage their stock, forecourt, advertising and more), we had an opportunity to review and update the email templates sent out by the platform into something more useful and representative of our current brand.
Understanding what we have
First of all, it seemed like finding out what the current situation was would be a good place to start. I headed into Mandrill (the email platform that MTD used to generate emails to customers) to see what I had to work with. What I found was a bunch (and I do mean a bunch) of templates with no real data to back them up and no real indication of how these templates were being used and how useful they were to our customers.
Although it didn’t seem like much to go off, what this did provide me with was a great starting point to understand how we could communicate certain messages to customers that we would want to migrate over.
I sifted through all the emails available to me to understand how many different templates there were and what content they contained. Again, this wasn’t great as I wasn’t able to review all templates due to the configuration of the account. For those I could, I was only able to see what had been sent out in the last 90 days (which due to Covid-19 and the limited number of moves happening at the time, wasn’t much to go off).
For the emails I could see the content for (30 templates out of 54), I copied the content over into to Figma to start to have a bird’s eye view of everything I could find.
This allowed me to start to analyse any themes and the different types of emails we had. Some were notifications to do with the status and changes in detail of a move, others would inform the user of account related matters such as expiring insurance documents or account deactivation, and some were bespoke reports with no real indication to the value they provided.
Defining principles for good emails
Naturally, we wanted focus our emails on the most important messages and minimise overload for our users. We did this by setting out some simple principles that helped us to question each template and allow us to decide whether or not it made the cut.
- Only send an email notification when the trigger can take place even when the user is not logged into the platform
- Use in-platform notifications where possible
- Avoid duplicating emails that could be sent from our billing/CRM system
By having a good understanding of what was already in place and applying these principles, it was much easier for us to decide what should stay, and what should be sent to the fiery depths of hell, never to be seen again.
It was at this stage that we also looked at the user journeys we had created for the new platform and tried to identify what seemed to be natural triggers in the journey to communicate to the retailer, the logistics company or both as part of a move life cycle.
By cross-referencing the triggers with our principles, we made defining what our new email cohort was going to be fairly simple.
Re-designing and implementing a new email set
Now we had whittled our emails down to from a hefty 54 to a much more manageable 8, it was time to look at the design of the email and what we were actually communicating. We of course, had to consider GDPR and the content we were sending out along with taking the opportunity to make our new emails cleaner with much clearer actions to take.
It’s probably worth noting here that we are currently going through the process of updating our brand language across Auto Trader and a lot of our current Portal emails utilise what we would consider to be outdated consumer branding (Which is not aligned with the style our customers see within our application).
This put us in a unique position in which we either:
- Make a conscious decision to build our emails using a style that was technically outdated
- Make something more aligned to our current web application
We made the decision to design the emails more aligned to Portal knowing that when the brand language update reaches us, we can update it then.
After collaborating with other designers who were working on new products that were facing similar situations (the need for new flavour of email that more representative of our current brand language), we ended up with a simple and much more representative email pattern that can be built upon. A template for this email was built, managed in Figma, which can be updated when the brand language is updated across Portal.
In the end, we found ourselves with 8 emails (4 aimed at logistics companies and 4 aimed at retailers) and an email pattern that we can build on and add to as we need. It just goes to show that with some analysis, core principles, collaboration and a bit of legwork, your ugly duckling emails can become handsome swan… emails
