eDM master template.
Optimisation and creation of a multi brand responsive eDM master template.
True Alliance is the house of worldwide brands in Australia, such as Lacoste, The North Face, Coach, Wrangler, among others.
The request was to create a responsive eDM master template for its marketing platform., giving the creative team the tools to create attractive emails quickly without worrying about code or cross-platform issues.
Learning.
Research about internal processes, marketing tool documentation and customer behaviour
Initial review on the internal process of creating emails, including the creative team feedback, work flows and goals. I learned about email marketing and best practice as well as the entire documentation of the marketing tool to be used. I also tracked several email marketing (litmus and GA) to get an accurate source of information in order to create a user profile and their behaviours. Conclusions as as follows:
Team capabilities
Team needed to be up-skilled for basic html troubleshooting and the new tool would need to remove some of the coding complexities in order to speed up production.
Technology
Templates needed to comply with many available devices in the market (Android-IOS / Desktop-Mobile) as well as integrating best practice, like text/images amount ratio, and easy maintainability.
End-user behaviour
More than 70% of the end users check emails on a mobile device and later on through a Desktop device. A mobile first approach needed to be taken.
Creation.
Complex layout and a new workflow
Taking the creative team’s feedback, I designed an initial pool of possible layouts based on three factors: feasibility, flexibility and in accordance with best practices. Out of more than 40 possible layouts, I selected 24 that followed this criteria. I performed more than 350 litmus tests to the master template in order to get the modules working on all the target devices showed in the initial study.
Final prototype of all modules tested and integrated in the marketing tool.
Iteration.
Cleaner interface and more tools available to create
The master template was tailored to match brand guidelines. A total of 22 responsive templates that are fully customisable were made containing a strong base that is easy to maintain in case of new releases. After lodge, several iterations were made in order to correct bugs as well as removing redundant modules and adding new ones in order to maximise creativity and production.
Results
Faster production, up to standard coding, better experience
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Production speed
After team training, they were able to double the amount of emails sent per week as well as getting more flexibility to create.
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Click through rate
Due to more flexibility on the creative side, reports showed an increase of 12% on average of click through rate.
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Responsive emails
Getting the company into the responsive path, improving its product for the 60% of people opening emails on mobile.