Hostmaker Emails Communications Redesign - From workflows to coding
Summary
With the explosion of digitalisation, email communication has become a business must-have. As people receive an average of 50/100 emails per day, the challenge is now to break through into their inboxes.
With that in mind and to keep as much consistency as possible across the markets in terms of content and visual design, and make our communications more effective, we started to redesign our host communications flow and email templates. Which included anything from updates to maintenance policies, to news about a new investment partner, to changes to their host dashboard.
Another objective of the project was to automate the most emails as possible in order to reduce our customer team's workload.
UX Research
We began the project, running multiple internal interviews with the customer service teams, to what extent our customers read and understand Hostmaker communications as well as the frequency of inquiries regarding the topics addressed on the emails they received. Concurrently, we carried a backend audit to discover the delivery email rate triggered via our automated platform and run some sessions with the design team to analyse current emails.
The investigation allowed us to develop a holistic vision towards the entire client email communications along their customer journey and to analyse in detail the communications at three funnel stages: Acquisition, Activation and Retention.
After analysing them, we proposed new workflows per stage, and suggested potential emails automation.
Content Architecture Review
Subsequently, we started reviewing the content of the emails alongside marketing and the teams concerned by each email, to ensure the information was valuable for hosts, delivered at the right time and presented consistently with our brand experience principles (easy, enjoyable and engaging) and tone of voice.
We agreed that our emails needed to be simple and straight to the point, with just 2/3 bits of information per email and with no more than two actions per email. They also would have the most important information at the beginning and at the end, according to the serial position effect.
In communications, where a lot of detail was required, we decided to keep the essential content on the email, providing a downloadable pdf. with the extended information.
Time to redesign
In terms of design, we decided on using a minimal design consistent with the new brand design, illustrations to engage with our hosts, recurrent icons to reinforce user actions (e.g. remember finger, to do, etc.), and to highlight in bold the essential information so our hosts could get the message at just one glance.
Responsiveness
During the process, we realized that the emails were not mobile responsive. Besides, they were not prepared for the implementation of the New Dark mode, which at that time was the new hype. Knowing that more than 50% of our customers opened our emails from the mobile and that the Dark Mode was gaining wide presence among users, we decided to create the "doubly responsive" emails, making sure that our emails were not only mobile responsive but also that they could be viewed comfortably by any user, using whichever device they use.
Let’s code
Once the redesign was finished, we created its different templates in Mailchimp and with tech support we set up the corresponding triggers to automate them. Collaboration with other teams was key to success on the project.
