Email Design System

Making cold leads warm again

Part 1: The Challenge

Background

Shopmonkey's marketing team desired to differentiate their brand by establishing a news station for all things automotive with the goal of becoming an industry expert in what's new.

In this approach Shopmonkey hoped to become the brand name for automotive shops even before they knew what the software was capable of delivering.

Problem

Lifestyle branding had only been tackled by other companies like Automotive News, Ratchet+Wrench, and a few other smaller niche brands were best known in this sphere.

The Challenge would be how Shopmonkey differentiates as a futuristic brand while still connecting relevant news to an audience which is highly connected to car culture spanning 100+ years old.

Scope

The Marketing Team objective to identifying Shopmonkey as a lifestyle brand directed this project to initially target email/blogs but had potential to be utilized in physical assets as well.

Platforms: Web, mobile devices, and desktop.

Defining Success: Serving 1 monthly email minimum that builds interest in Shopmonkey as a brand, informative resource, and produces 3-5% lead generation from lifestyle emails.

Timeline: 8 weeks

Roles

User research
Visual design
Art direction
Information architecture
Email design
Visual design

Part 2: The Process

Step 1: Brand Recognition

There were 3 key attributes to Shopmonkey's brand at the time we designed these emails.

"Fun" illustrations & shapes demonstrating the product.
Real customer giving relatable success stories.
Resources that we uniquely offered such as blog posts, ebooks, research reports on future trends, and even podcasts.

My objective was to communicate Shopmonkey's values amidst the other automotive news sources.

These emails would likely go out in addition to our other marketing emails so they would need to feel less sales focused and more insider automotive advice. This challenge would partially be addressed by my visual decisions but primarily by including less sales content.

Below are previously created emails that these news related emails would diverge from yet still feel as part of the same brand.

Step 2: Ideate

What I did

Created "Shopmonkey News" a unique extension of Shopmonkey's brand, only used for these branded services.

Designed unique headers, footers, buttons, content blocks, iconography, type styles, and content layouts.

Provided documentation for consistent branding to current marketing emails including margins, colors pairings, and font choices.

Prepared content for multiple devices with laptops as the primary device. (laptops have the highest open rates for the auto industry)

Provided Hubspot examples and updated our email marketing lead to ensure proper execution.

Provided at least 2 alternatives for each content type (headers, footers, quotes, articles, videos, buttons, ebooks, blogs, etc.)

Part 3: The Solution

Final Demonstration

After demonstrating the entire system to our VP of marketing he gave us the green light to proceed. The following content is what we demonstrated as an example email within context of an email browser.

Final Thoughts

After we concluded this project there were two roadblocks that could have been removed to help us speed up:

The director of design had too many projects on his plate to give proper attention to this project. Putting this project into more bite size portions so he could review easier would have helped immensely in our progress.
Initially our Email Marketing specialist and I had two different goals and found this out after putting in about a week's worth of work. Next time I'd like to sync regularly on our goals and avoid any diverging work.