Saas Marketplace Email Redesign

An overhaul of all Shiftgig’s product emails.

Introduction

Over the years a lack of strategy and consistent created a situation where many of Shiftgig’s emails were ineffective. Also, all the emails were created for Shiftgig as a marketplace owner, which didn’t support the branding needs of their new SaaS customers and confused their users (it was unclear if the email was from Shiftgig the tech company or their employer or staff provider).

Problems

Unhelpful emails that no longer served a purpose or were redundant with other communications
Inconsistent layouts and styles with other system emails and marketing emails
Confused our customers and their customers when it is expected that the emails were coming from their brand

The project focused on creating consistent emails with better content, adding support of the brand of the SaaS customer, and creating a foundation for the future evolution of the email channel.

The work was completed with three others. I acted as the project and design lead.

Proposed Solution

An email design system, template consolidation, and removal of ineffective emails was the completed solution. The design system was created to maintain consistency throughout all the emails. The consolidation and removal of ineffective emails were to reduce the technical overhead to better support future iterations.

Outcomes

Increased customer satisfaction and adoption
Efficient email design and implementation
Better email content comprehension and effectiveness

Highlights

First time hosting a workshop style silent critique where participants each added likes and dislikes of each email. It was very effective at quickly aggregating a lot of feedback on the previous designs.
A lot of testing has to go into emails due to email apps rendering things differently. The level of thoroughness resulted in a high-quality experience that was reliable.
Establishing the design system upfront empowered delegating the design work of a large system (32 emails) and it’s completion quickly (design delivery took less than 2 weeks).

Process

Discovery Phase

Using our qualitative observations database from past research, we were able to determine which emails were effectively providing value and why.

After leveraging our audit of past research, we used it to guide our interviews with existing users. Due to the quick turnaround of the project, we focused our efforts on speaking with operations users to collect information on their preferences and used them as subject matter experts for our other user bases.

Define Phase

A complete audit of all the emails that the system sends was created with each email categorized by purpose and technical template that generated it.

Exploration Phase

The exploration phases was a little lighter due to expanding on the existing web components. We collected inspiration for what makes an effective email – looking at layout, clear call-to-actions, and amount of content.

The other key methodology leveraged was a design workshop that included a silent critique, where we used Post-Its to capture what we liked and disliked of the existing emails. The participants included product owners, marketers, and engineers.

Decision Phase

Again, we leveraged our operations users as subject matter experts and did quick usability tests of the new designs.

After some iterations based on the usability tests, final stakeholder reviews took place.

Delivery Phase

While others defined the problem and solution space, I created a design system and project template for emails. This allowed us to divide our emails amongst the team and expedite the redesign process. Desktop and mobile versions were created for all emails to specify the expected responsive behavior.

Lastly, a relatively extensive QA testing took place to make sure all the emails displayed properly in the multitude of email clients. Emails clients are notorious for rendering poorly so we had to be extra thorough with our tests.