Navigating business needs and exploring new opportunities for email templates
When Onlineshoes.com launched a complete site refresh and rebrand, the need to update outdated email templates became an important next step. In strategizing the best approach to solve this design problem, I decided to hold a workshop to better understand business needs as well as to help facilitate internal alignment.
Workshop goals
1) Capture business needs
2) Capture customer needs
3) Facilitate team alignment
Stakeholder interviews
In prepping for the workshop, I ran several 1:1 stakeholder interviews which resulted in the following notes.
Takeaways
Email is 23% of business revenue; promotional based business philosophy
Promotional emails = % off or $$ off
Bigger brands do not want to be a part of promotional deals
Smaller brands don’t want to be associated with discounts
Customers get 3-4 emails a week (during the holiday it is everyday)
Keep in mind current brand restrictions
Need several HTML email templates to fit business needs
Leverage featured brands for co-opt
Unsubscribe has a usability issue; customers have to login first
Responsis is current email vendor
Email template ideas
Stories/products/promotions combined for unique branding opportunities
Offer template vs no offer template
Showcase more product when possible
Offer additional marketing message spots
Consider editorial newsletter opportunities
Workshop Agenda
I then planned and lead the following agenda.
(10 minutes)
Identify business needs
Identify customer needs
Review current metrics (qualitative/quantitative)
(15 minutes)
Review current email templates
Define what is working vs what isn’t working
Team exercise: label with sticky notes
(15 minutes)
Review sample emails from competitors
What is working vs what isn’t working
Team exercise: label with sticky notes
(10 minutes)
Group categorize “What is Working”
Team exercise: label with sticky notes in high to low priority order
(5 minutes)
Anticipate future needs
Open discussion
(5 minutes)
Discuss next steps
Open discussion
Workshop in progress
Workshop participants included our Email Manager, Director of Marketing, and Director of Product. Below is the core group working against the compressed agenda timeline.
Post workshop presentation
I assembled the following takeaways, created a presentation, then lead an open discussion with a larger group.
Business & customer needs
Competitive email analysis & sticky notes
Onlineshoes email analysis & sticky notes
Key takeaways (high to low priority)
Template wireframes
Following the presentation and discussion, I produced 5 unique email templates. Shown below are a couple from the suite.
This template focused on one large category hero (with a promotional specific widget), followed by a “whats new” widget, and then a recommendation widget. This hits on the following key takeaways from the workshop: Visually interesting, focused, clean and simple, product education, and promotional content.
This template focused on a split category hero (without a promotional specific widget), followed by product “whats new” widget, blog editorial, and a wide/narrow sizing widget. This hits on the following key takeaways from the workshop: Visually interesting, focused, clean and simple, and inclusion of editorial content
Design Portfolio 