Redesigning email campaigns - A UX casestudy

Key information

Company - Freshworks
Product - Freshmarketer
Time - 3 months (Jun - Aug 2022)
Team - 1 Product Designer, 1 Product Manager, 2 developers, 1 QA
My Role - I worked on this project from end to end which includes competitive research, flows, designs, presentations and buy-ins and visual QA
Platform - Desktop
Status - Live

In a digital world filled with countless marketing channels, it’s easy to overlook the enduring power of email campaigns. While some may dismiss them as unread messages in overflowing inboxes, businesses have discovered the art of crafting captivating subject lines, engaging visuals, segmenting target audiences and personalized content to enhance visibility and drive engagement. According to industry research, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is a staggering $42 for every $1 spent (source). It highlights the cost efficiency and effectiveness of email campaigns in reaching a large audience on a personal level.

The essentials

What is an email campaign?

An email campaign is a powerful marketing strategy where companies send targeted messages to a group of people through email. It helps businesses connect with customers, share important updates, and offer enticing promotions, all in a convenient and personalized way.

Types of email campaigns

• Promotional emails: These emails include exclusive deals, discounts, and exciting offers from businesses [the ones that go in the Promotion tab and you can unsubscribe from]

• Transactional emails: They provide essential information such as order confirmations, shipping updates, and account notifications [Usually land in the primary tab and cannot be unsubscribed from]

• Automated email journeys: Emails tailored based on user’s preferences and behaviours. Example — a reminder about items in your cart or personalized recommendations

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM products enable businesses to store and organize customer data, track customer interactions, and manage communication with them across various channels. It helps businesses gain insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and history, allowing them to provide personalized and targeted experiences.

About Freshmarketer

Freshmarketer is a part of the CRM offering at Freshworks. It is a comprehensive marketing automation product for small to mid-size businesses, with prime focus on small D2C businesses. Two of the most used features are email campaigns and marketing journeys, which help automate tasks at scale. Other campaign channels include WhatsApp, social media, SMS, and live chat.

Email campaigns in Freshmarketer

Freshmarketer enables you to launch marketing campaigns across various channels including WhatsApp, SMS, social media, and email. Among these options, email stands out as the most commonly used channel with the least friction for the initial setup.

Uncovering the challenges and opportunities —

Initial whys

Email campaign redesign was a design-led initiative. We had the high-level idea of solving the following problems with this project —

1. As we began, our main theme was that the current flow did not match the typical user’s mental model.

2. The existing designs look outdated. They lack a modern look when compared to other email marketing competitors.

3. Existing designs did not scale well for planned features, such as Add CC/BCC and Don’t Send to.

Competitive research

We gathered many feature-specific ideas and visual design inspiration. We included some of these ideas while keeping others in mind for future updates due to the required effort. Here are some of the insights we discovered —

1. Most modern platforms prioritise content creation and design first, followed by configurations. Some give users the perception of an easy switch between steps, rather than a linear and step-by-step flow.

2. Mailchimp offered subject suggestions based on best practices (pre-ChatGPT era).

3. Drip had an FAQ section beside the mobile view editor.

4. Ability to create a new segment from the email campaigns page.

5. Ability to dynamically display the number of contacts the email will be sent to.

Page-wise deep dive

Campaign name

Configure

Style

Design

Review

Final design

New user flow

Templates

Email editor

Configure and review

What happened in between?

• Feedback from other designers

• Discussions on feasibility of Bee editor (integrated email editor) changes with developers

• Scoping of project in two phases with tech and product team

• Working on missed use-cases on highlighted by the QA team

• Buy-in presentation with stakeholders including executives

• Discussions with the design system team to have a consistent and central design components

• How to migrate the existing users without disrupting their “Sent” and “Draft” state emails

• Identifying issues during visual QA before release and collaborating with developers and the product team to prioritize and implement high-priority ones

Impact and user feedback

• 20% increase in email campaign creation

• Positive user feedback — One of the customers explicitly mentioned that the redesigned experience looks very intuitive and simple than the previous 4 steps. Another mentioned that the overall design looks clean and compact.

• Suggested improvements —

  • The primary CTA label on Email editor “Go to campaign settings” is not an obvious next step in the design, which caused confusion about where to add recipient details, especially for first-time users.

  • Moving “Send Test” and preview to the last step caused inconvenience. Users prefer to preview the email while designing the content to facilitate quick changes. Also, they use “Send Test” more than Preview due to font and font size discrepancies in the preview compared to the actual email. So, this change affected their workflow.
    Both of these changes were quickly resolved in the next sprint.

Future

In the future, we have plans to implement phase 2 changes. These forthcoming enhancements will build upon our current efforts, aiming to further improve and refine our system.