Summary - Email Campaigns

Email campaigns are created as a part of email marketing strategy in which digital marketers reach out to their brand’s existing and potential customers who have subscribed to receiving emails from the brand. The content of this email is commercial and is a way of advertising the brand and its offerings.

The Challenge

A streamlined and intuitive process is critical to creating an email campaign quickly and easily which in turn is a critical driver of a the digital marketing strategy’s success of a brand. Email campaigns help in encouraging repeat business and customer loyalty. From having the right content that can attract and trigger positive engagement of the customers with the brand to creating an email campaign with low spam score that is sent at the right time and lands in the customer’s inbox at a time they are most likely to open it, there are a number of elements that play an important role in making an email campaign a success.

Design Process

Research Phase

Generative User research

Qualitative (user interviews) and quantitative (surveys and questionnaire) was conducted to dive deeper into understanding the problems that users were facing while creating and scheduling an email campaign on Maropost. Some of the questions asked to the clients in research included the following:

• How many email campaigns do you create on a daily/monthly basis?

• How much time on an average do you spend creating an email campaign?

• What is your biggest pain point/challenge when creating an email campaign?

• How would you ideally want the process of campaign creation to be?

• What are the features/functionalities that you would absolutely want to have to enable you to create a campaign faster and quicker?

Findings

An email campaign is one of the most powerful mediums used by a digital marketer when trying to grow and retain the customer base of their brand. In order to do that they need a tool that is powerful enough to enable them to create campaigns quickly. User research on existing email campaign flow suggested the following gaps that made creating email campaigns a stressful task for digital marketers using Maropost:

• The three steps in which the flow was divided were not intuitive and lacked error prevention and recognition. The only way for a user to know that a field in a certain step has an error was when the error message would show up when they tried to schedule the campaign at the last step. To correct the error, they were then required to go back to that step and fix the issue before moving forward.

• All emails campaigns that are created and sent to customers are intended to land in the customers’ inbox and a low spam score is critical in ensuring that. While the current flow would indicate if the spam score of the campaign being created was low, medium or high, there was no way for a user to know how they could fix their campaign to lower the spam score.

• Creating an email campaign is a long process during which it’s probable for the campaign creator to make mistakes. There is no way for the user to review all the steps after the campaign has been created.

Design Phase

Proposal

The proposed re-design for email campaign creation flow would include the following:

• Intuitive step-wise process with clear labeling to help user know which step requires what information.

• Field level error messaging to enable error prevention and error recognition thereby saving user’s time.

• Ability to check spam score and indication of reasons for a high spam score so user could fix the issues and move forward.

• Ability to review the created campaign before sending/scheduling it to change/edit information, if required.

• Following the heuristic principle of minimalistic design and displaying relevant information on scheduling step to only show fields based on selected value for campaign scheduling.

Email Campaigns - BEFORE

Email Campaigns - AFTER (Wireframes)

Constraints

Technical limitations prevented implementation of saving the campaign as draft in the first two steps so the ability of saving the campaign as draft after the third step was introduced.

The current designs showcase original recommendation with auto-save functionality.

Usability Testing and Design Validation

To validate the designs created and to make sure that the re-designed process was simple and inline with customer expectations, Remote Moderated Usability Testing sessions were arranged for our participants in which they were given control of a working prototype created on InVision. The users were asked to perform the task of creating a new campaigns and schedule it and were asked to think aloud while performing them. Their reactions and thoughts were noted down. The sessions were performed remotely through usertesting.com. The feedback obtained from some of these tests included below: