Communication with customers

When I joined Spring, the company had raised a $25mm series B the year prior, was seeing immense growth in sales month over month, and was being delivered a rebrand by an outside agency. In typical fashion this agency came in with a logo and color palette, and some high level branding work, and left the rest to us. One such area to redesign was…emails. Here is what some of the initial emails looked like before the rebrand. They are fine, but a bit basic and bland.

A new look, and lots to say

Defining design constraints and business needs

The rebrand brought a new logo, and a bright look and feel. It was intended to be fresh, vibrant, and stylish like the user. It even had a color palette that changed four times a year with the seasons (I have feelings about this, feel free to ask me what they are 😅). In addition, with an increase in brand launches, more curated content, recommended purchases, and more, Spring was inundating it’s customers with emails, and they were unsubscribing within a few days of sign up.

Streamlining across teams

Strategy for a cross-functional solution

There were multiple stakeholders with vested interest in the success of email communication to users. The marketing team was seeing their subscriber list come and go and was also spending hours preparing each email design to ship. The design team was having to assist with each email, also sucking up hours of each week. The CEO and leadership team were concerned about user retention and also wanting to see the results of an outsourced rebranding effort on every aspect of the platform. First, my priority was two-fold: template different content blocks to make emails more efficient for the team, streamline the format to combine multiple emails into one to limit the frequency we email customers.

Bold and blocked content

Visual design and handoff

Next, was to really make these emails come to life and leverage the rebrand to its fullest extent. Using color and leveraging the content blocks to create email architecture and guidelines that prevented even the most content rich emails from feeling like an essay or an endless scroll.