Reinventing email as a user experience
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Presented by Rob Pellow, Head of Digital Design, Adestra, at Marketing Week Live on 27th April 2016. Download to see the notes that explain each slide.
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Reinventing email as a user experience
- 1. Reinventing email as a user experience Rob Pellow
- 2. Rob Pellow Head of Digital Design - Adestra
- 4. Obsessive, award winning customer service with 98.7% client retention rate. 11 Years as a leader in the email marketing space with thousands of users. Account structure for complex organizations and agencies. Enterprise tools that you will actually use In app chat, quick response phone or email to provide the quickest service in the industry.
- 5. What are those marketers up to…?
- 6. Mobile optimisation is a key practice for 64%of marketers
- 7. • Responsive design is not supported in all email clients • Mobile refers to more than just smartphones
- 10. The Journey
- 12. We’d like to tell you about a promotion Thanks for registering Thanks for your purchase
- 18. Creation
- 21. • Background or button colours • Deleting a section from the template • Adding a section to the template • Layout changes • Resizing images • Copy/pasting new copy • Special announcements Marketers template frustrations:
- 23. Does using a template mean crushing your designer’s soul?
- 24. Not if you do it right.
- 25. • Create brand consistency • Speed up production • Allow you to test and use only effective layouts • Get device support working every time Good things about templates:
- 26. • Same layout every time • Boring • No room for creativity or testing • Restrictive Designers worries about templates:
- 32. What do I want people to do?Message-led Design
- 34. What do I want people to do?
- 35. Any Questions?
Editor's Notes
- I’m Rob and I’m the head of digital design at Adestra. I work with hundreds of brands – helping them understand why email isn’t the poor relation of the website and why they should pay more attention to it. I run a team of designers and developers all centered around email and the surrounding journey’s – landing pages, web forms and the like. As well as designing and building emails, we love talking to people about everything from how to design their emails to maximise engagement through to how to code their emails to work perfectly. Before joining Adestra nearly 2 years ago, I worked for Dyson for over 11 years. In that time I worked as a designer, a web developer, a consultant and a marketer - ending my career by managing the content production for the US digital team in Chicago across web and email. This gave me a unique view of marketing on the front line in the biggest market in the Dyson world. It showed me where marketers spent their time and, more tellingly, where they really wanted to spend it. What I particularly love about working with email is that there are few other disciplines within the marketing world where you know so much about the people you are talking to. In a best case scenario you everything – what products they’ve bought, when they are likely to buy again, when their birthday is etc. But even without that, you can send a single email to a large audience and glean some really important things; you know you have a group of people that reacted in one way or another – they either opened or didn’t, if they opened then they either clicked through or they didn’t and so on. Just from this you could start to group these people into new audience lists and start to change the way you interact with them.
- A little about Adestra.
- We provide best-in-class email marketing technology Here’s a few of our USPs We provide enterprise tools that you actually use – from automation to multi-variant testing. More recently we’ve turned our attention to solving some of the frustrations that go with actually creating the email campaigns – both from a marketer and a designers point of view and we’re very excited about our new email editor. I’m not going to go on about how great it is (though it is great) today, but I’d be happy to talk to you later on if any of you would like to have a chat! Before I talk about what you can do with email, I want to step back in to those marketers shoes for a moment. This is important because, while we designers can push out boats, think outside boxes and push boundaries, the marketers are the ones that need to plan, test and think about the bigger picture. We need to bring them with us in our quest for email gold or we will have some very lovely looking emails that no-one will see.
- Lets start with some stats – something you were probably hoping would feature heavily in a session about design.
- MOBILE OPTIMISATION, MOBILE 1ST!, RESPONSIVE DESIGN! These are all things that every one of you will have heard shouted at you by everyone that talks regularly about the future of web, the current state of web or any web based article telling you where you should be focusing your attention. In the 10 year anniversary edition of the eConsultancy Email Marketing Census 64% of marketers are already focussing on this with another 23% planning to. This is good news on the face of it but actually, should the marketer be the one worrying about this?
- Those terms are NOT the whole story though. Due to email being a fickle coding mistress – worse even than the dark days of having to support IE6 as web developer – just making emails responsive is not a silver bullet. And most reporting that tells you x percentage of your audience is looking at emails on mobile also includes tablets which normally display the desktop version of the email anyway and wearables which is a huge area of growth can only be relied upon to show the text version.
- My last point about mobile for now is that, while the open rates of mobile continue to rise, and those on desktop decline,
- the actual conversion figures show that people are still more likely to purchase on their desktop/laptop than on a mobile. There could be any number of reasons for this but I would be willing to bet that most people just feel more in control on desktop. Forms are nicer to fill in, passwords are easier to type, it’s easier to have more tabs open to double check things or do more research.
- UX design is about presenting a challenge to the user – one they can either choose to accept or reject. Our job as designers is to make it as easy to possible to accept it.
- So if it is difficult to get people to buy into a journey, how do you do it? One brand that does a very good job thinking about this problem holistically is Amazon. Here’s an email I received from them based on highly personalised recommendations. Try not to think too hard about why I need heavy duty velcro strips – what I do in the privacy of my home is no-one’s business. Now, assuming I haven’t already made velcro based arrangements, I know from experience that buying this on my mobile is going to be very easy and quick. I can click on the learn more button, open that item in the app I have installed and then with one more click I can order it and have it arrive at my house within 24 hours. Obviously Amazon have ALL the money and not everyone has either the resources or brand recognition that they have. So how do us mere mortals aim for these lofty heights?
- As we’ve seen, user experience isn’t restricted to just the email/website/tv ad in front of them, it is all about the journey. Likewise, that journey is not continuous, people start that journey with their first interaction with your brand and everything you do or say to them after that is another step. Even zooming in to a single step, your email is unlikely to be the only point in a journey – it could be the start: We’d like to tell you about a promotion The middle: Thanks for registering Or the end: Thanks for your purchase Regardless of where our journeys start, the brand consistency and onward journey needs to be considered.
- Creating consistency is not about recreating your website in your email. It is about making people feel ‘at home’ in your brand. Instead of trying to fit your homepage into 600px, you could pick some key elements from it – colours, buttons, parts of the navigation – and use these to help your users understand what is expected of them.
- Creating consistency is not about recreating your website in your email. It is about making people feel ‘at home’ in your brand. Instead of trying to fit your homepage into 600px, you could pick some key elements from it – colours, buttons, parts of the navigation – and use these to help your users understand what is expected of them.
- Here’s an example: This is the website of a company called Air Charter Service. They regularly send a emails for various subjects and individual customers may (and probably will) receive more than one of these. So although the journey is not a linear one, they will understand in each engagement how to interact. We’ve used different pieces for different emails but kept the consistency going throughout. So the 1st email they receive looks most like the website and the lead image will change depending on which area of the business they interacted with, subsequent newsletters retain some of the key pieces of 'Why Us' messaging as well as other elements such as the call to action buttons and brand colours.
- Perhaps the most complicated of these was the cargo availabilities email that goes out once a month in 9 different languages to 12 different territories. The main piece of information is the list of availabilities and we wanted to create a specific journey around these for anyone that was interested. This starts with the desktop version where we combine the brand colours with the idea of an airport departures board. Then, as we move to mobile the challenge is about how to effectively get this information on to a mobile screen and still have it legible, which led us to using some touch interraction.
- Then we considered the onward journey, we know this will be received in many different languages and we know it’s going to a form so we wanted to make it as easy as possible to fill out – which meant pre-filling as much information as possible, as well as having the form automatically display in the correct language. Once this is submitted, we want to keep people engaged online so we re-direct them to the appropriate countries website – also in the right language. So you can see how thinking about the wider picture of each interaction can create an entirely consistent journey. One more point about forms; while there is one on the screen; a quick tip for helping people along on mobile is to ensure that your form fields all have the correct type on them. There is nothing more infuriating than trying to fill out a form on your mobile and having to repeatedly switch between keyboards to find your numbers or @ symbol. Your users learn what you do well and what you don’t and will base engagement decisions on this learned behaviour.
- So how can you start to get to the point where you can deliver these types of experiences? At the minute, it’s taking too long.
- According to Litmus’s State of Email Production report, the majority of marketers are taking between 1-2 weeks to create a campaign – from conception to send. It’s not efficient and doesn’t allow marketers to do the stuff they want to spend more time doing.
- The most common way of dealing with campaign creation is by using some form of template, with most people just updating the images and text in each campaign.
- That comes with it’s own challenges though. These are just some of the things people struggle with.
- Designers have their own concerns about templates though.
- So here’s a question. It's not just marketers that have frustrations with the template approach. I've certainly been guilty in past lives of giving a little sigh of annoyance when presented with the fact that I would no longer be hand crafting emails for the brand I worked for - no longer being given the freedom to design every campaign to within an inch of it's life - after all, every single message needs a completely re-designed and re-thought out layout, right?
- Here’s some things that maybe we can all agree with when it comes to templates. On the flip side…
- Past life Rob definitely thought these things
- In actual fact, templates are freeing. An established brand does not want to start from scratch every week and decide on a whim what their online presence should look like that day. You don’t do it with you websites and you shouldn’t do it with your emails. That is not to say that every message you send should share the exact same layout. Templates are about making some tools and allowing the marketers to choose the right tool for the job. In this example, I have an email that Crabtree & Evelyn sent earlier this year. It’s very pretty. It has some lovely design elements, it’s aspirational and gives you a nice, clear call to action. It’s also made up purely of images. This means that, when viewed in Outlook, all you see is this.
- On mobile it’s not much better – we can see the images by default but everything is zoomed out and is difficult to read without zooming in. As customers, we don't like that - we like to be able to look at stuff on our phones while doing other things. A good rule of thumb when thinking about mobile UX is that you need to be able to effectively read and interact with the content with 1 eye and 1 finger - which is to say, while you are also doing something else.
- Here is the same campaign but built using re-usable modular elements from a template. The same email in Outlook with images turned off – while not perfect; we are left at least with our main messages and calls to action with no difficulty understanding the message. Further more, in mobile…
- We are given an experience that has been designed with the message front of mind and tailored to work across any device – iPhone, Android, tablet – anywhere. I mentioned that this was built with some re-usable modules from a single template. I also mentioned the worry that designers have regarding templates meaning the layout is always the same. Let's take a look at the template that this layout came from.
- This is representative of all the different types of content that Crabtree & Evelyn might want to send. They can mix and match, update background colours to match the images and create a mix of promotional, newsletter and product based emails which their designers can be as creative as possible with - within some guidelines.
- With all of these designs, examples and anecdotes, the point that is consistent across all of them is that we should be thinking about this – message-led design. The problem with responsive design as in practical terms is that it uses a layout technique not supported by some prevalent versions of Android. In those versions, you need to work with tables sat next to each other, rather than table cells – which is the normal method. The problem with THAT is that Outlook can’t deal very well with that so you need to use some Outlook only code to fool it into thinking you are using table cells again. Remember what I was saying about email coding being a pain?! This technique is referred to as ADAPTIVE design and is really simple and effective. You can still use styling in the head of your email to do the more advanced mobile interactions – the expanding sections in the Air Charter email for example. This is another and more practical reason to just think about your message.
- In this last example, we’ve used a large background image which does a lot of the selling to you at first glance. It’s wider than a normal email (though the main content still sits within the best practice 600px). However, the message and call to action buttons are pure text – not images. This means that we are able to make sure that the key message – the promotion – is always the 1st content, it’s easy to engage with and the image is just some nice fluff on top
- Before starting to think about the functional requirements of any code, I encourage you to start with this question: I recommend that you consider this with all of your decisions. People should be told What the message is, Why they should care and How they can interact. You need to get round to these things as soon as possible, especially in an email where time is against you and people make their choices on whether or not to interact much more quickly. It won’t always be the same result – some messages need more copy, some can have an image that tells the story much better than text can. Just make sure your campaigns are built based on good decisions. So if you are a designer, think about what your brand’s visual language, how should buttons look – what will the next step in the journey lead to? Do they match up? As a developer, look at where your audience is and code accordingly. If everyone is on iPhones, then you can just use simple responsive code, if there is more of a mix, then you probably need to look at more adaptive methods. And as a marketer, if you are spending all your time worrying about things the developer or designers should be doing, then take a step back. The most value you can add is with your deep understanding of strategy, data, testing and bringing the message to the audience. Hopefully there are some tools here that can help you get back to what you love.