Improved marketing email designs consistently saw a small increased CTRs (between 0.04-0.27%) and open rates (between 0.71-1.11%) in the A/B split tests by being more transparent, focused, and drawing better urgency on the 24-hour deals.
However, we communicated to the business that to see better rates and increased transactions, more fundamental changes needed to be done such as creating categorised email groups, e.g. send beauty-related offers to customers that have previously transacted with beauty brands (as currently they were non-targeted and sent to all eligible members.)
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Client
TopCashback USA
Myself and two other UX designers worked on the entire project from start to finish, including the research, testing, and design.
background
Different marketing emails are sent out to customers who signed up for them. This includes brand-specific offers and 24-hour limited time cashback offers.
BRIEF + GOALS
We were tasked to improve and modernise these promotional emails.
Main Goal: Increase CTRs of the emails (Clickthrough rates)
Secondary Goal: Increase Open rates of the emails
It's also worth noting that one of the aims was also to simply update the design in a way in which TopCashback's affiliate clients and their relationships would be satisfied with something 'new and fresh'. This was not something we could test or qualify but rather something our account owners would communicate with the brands.
Research
The existing retailer marketing emails were very outdated as they had not been updated in over 5 years. When we analysed the emails, we identified several UX, content, and trust problems that could be contributing to the low CTRs.
For example, overall, the current emails had poor accessibility, outdated branding elements, too many styles, and not enough focus on the main parts of the email: Which retailer it was and their cashback rate.
However, from further research and analysis, we explained to the stakeholders that the emails sent are 'random', meaning, they are not part of any personalised emails sent to members. We expected that this was a huge contributing factor to the low CTRs and we were transparent that our new hypothesis was that changing the designs massively compared to their current emails, would probably not yield any significant rise in CTRs nor open rates. I.e. a member who is not at all interested in Beauty products, receiving a Beauty-related email, will not care to open nor click through the email.
The above are examples of what the emails used to look like.
We produced wireframes of our concepts
Testing
We tested a few design/hierarchy iterations that included testing an offer-focused messaging (instead of cashback, voucher codes, and countdowns.) The emails were more focused on the brand.
We also tested subject lines as our hypothesis was that by drawing urgency to the emails, they would yield higher open rates.
Results
All of the emails saw a very small increase in CTRs: between +0.04% to +0.27% increase.
All emails also received a similar small increase in open rates: between +0.71% to 1.11% increase.
Despite the massive difference in designs, we trusted our hypothesis was correct that although the new designs were cleaner, easier to digest, more branded, and more focused, it only saw a slight uptick in the numbers.
We suggested that in order to see fundamental change in the numbers, the emails will have to be more personalised and sent to the appropriate interested member groups.
Despite the low increase in numbers, the business still decided to roll out these new styled marketing templates for the USA and then the UK sites. This is also because the affiliates and brands were happy with the new designed emails.
The final marketing emails