UX Case Study
Real Work
Designing Better Email Experiences with Product Thinking
🔥 Results
Increase in our average CTR YOY
Increase in open rate YOY
Higher CTR than industry average
The Challenge
The user-facing emails for SmartDollar had grown stale. Click through rates were low. We treated it like a newsletter, but other than that there was no real strategy to it.
Email is not just old school, it's ancient. Against all odds, it's very personal and important part of the product experience.
SmartDollar's user emails were always handled separately from the product experience, by a marketing designer. It was high time for a more personalized and research-backed approach.
Don’t Sleep on Email
Emails are part of any digital product experience. As a product designer, I love working on emails! At one point my leader asked me if I would like it to be taken off my plate to spend more time on other projects. I decided to keep designing emails, here’s why:
I get to be an active participant in split testing with the email team. I learn what is resonating with our users.
I get to regularly level up my graphic design/marketing skills.
The experience from clicking on an email to entering the product should be consistent.
Our Recent Results
SmartDollar user emails have been performing better than ever. Due to the hard work from each member of the team, we’ve seen some strong numbers when it comes to open rate & click through rate.
2022
2023
Open Rate
36.41%
39.19%
Click Through Rate
2.92%
8.49%
Industry Average Click Through Rate is ~2.5%
SmartDollar user emails have been performing better than ever. Due to the hard work from each member of the team, we’ve seen some strong numbers when it comes to open rate & click through rate.
Start with Credible User Research
We collaborated with a content specialist who was doing a lot of user interviews. We learned that our target audience right now was looking for practical money tips.
SmartDollar is all about helping people get better with money. Sometimes, that means providing some encouragement and hope, other times people just want some pro tips to save extra cash.
Our audience has significantly more whitespace than other parts of the company. That means we need to prove out trustworthiness and relevance.
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What's in it for me? → A product should exist to solve a problem for someone. Behavior is often driven by self interest.
This is really important for emails because we have a split second to get the user's attention.
Consider Current News
At this moment of time, groceries prices had risen dramatically (specifically eggs 🥚). We took that into consideration as we searched for content to feature in the email.
I found a great article internally that we could use: How to Save Money on Groceries. We all agreed this was a great piece for the email and pressed on.
Tell a Good Story with Your Visuals
In this email, I featured a familiar scene in the header image: a trunk full of freshly bought groceries. I combine this photography with our brand look, tone, and feel. We even included a gif of one of our personalities to add more humanity to it.
I was driving towards empathy. Groceries prices are high, it sucks, but we are here to help.
Choose Clarity over Cleverness
I applied product thinking to emails. I made sure the email was skim-friendly (because most people will skim it). I have a good rapport with our writer and I will regularly help try to cut down the word count and drive for clarity.
I didn't want to drain the email of personality, but I wanted to be sure the right moments are packing a punch and drawing people in. If the whole email is trying to stand out, it will take too many mental calories to process and people will most likely leave without taking action. This is a very product designer way of thinking.
When possible, I give the user one meaningful thing to do and make it super easy to do that thing. In this case, we wanted them to check out the article.
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Hick's Law → The fewer choices a user has, the quicker they will make a decision.
Learn more at Laws of UX. You can nerd out even more at The Interaction Design Foundation.
Build Relationships With Your Teammates
Listen more than you speak. Get to know your writer, product marketer, email specialist, or whoever else you are working with! Make sure you collaborate early and often. Avoid just handing work off.
I promise that your work will be better with multiple perspectives.
Split Test if You Can
We decided to run a split test on this specific email, half of the audience got version A, the other half got version B.
Version A: We did not feature any tips in the emails, but just drove them to check out all the tips in the article.
Version B: We featured a few of the tips in the email and tried to drive them to read the whole article.
It Worked. Run It Back!
We later sent a similar email about how to save on gas. Here are the results for that one:
Fun fact: I took that photo while driving home one day. Not recommended.
Spread the Love
The grocery email was essentially copied and pasted to other audiences in other business units and they got similar great results! Don't forget to share things that worked well.
It's worth noting that we continued to apply these learnings. Many more emails have been sent out and almost all of them have been above industry standard.
To Wrap It Up
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Apply product design principles to email design. Make things skim-friendly, clear, and based on user problems.
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Don’t forget to trust your gut a little bit. Ask yourself, would I want to get this email?
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Share your wins to the whole business. If you see something that is working well in other parts of your company, go steal it!
Original UX case study researched, written, designed, and built by me, Jack Hawkins.
