Email Visual Refresh
Email Visual Refresh
Role: Experience Strategy, UX/UI Design, Visual Design
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Overview
Increased both CTR and conversion rate by redesigning the header space of customer-facing emails creating consistency, personalization, hierarchy and scalability. Collaborated across 6 lines of business, including 25+ people in brand, product, marketing and design. The new header was rolled out across the enterprise in January 2021 and is still used in customer-facing emails today.
Challenge
Past customer research revealed opportunities to improve the visual consistency and personalization within our email templates. The proposed solution would help customers feel more secure about the email messages they were receiving from Capital One and could scale across partners, products and message types.
Opportunity
A refresh of our templates will create a consistent and frictionless messaging experience that aligns with our imperatives of integrated experiences and design quality. By starting with the header space, I solved immediate business priorities by adding more personalization to the template to foster awareness and create an experience for customers that strengthened trust and account recognition.
Strategy
Using qualitative research and quantitative data, I developed a list of benefits for making a visual refresh to our email templates. These included eliminating inconsistencies, elevating personalization and delivering consistent visual patterns that would align with our imperatives of integrated experiences and design quality.
I followed a design thinking process to innovate on solutions based on what I heard from customer research.
Competitive Analysis
To gain a better understanding of what elements our competitors were using in their messaging, I collected examples across the financial industry and conducted an assessment of the current email template to determine how other financial institutions were using personalization.
Ideation
I was able to move straight to high-fidelity mockups in Figma by using the already established messaging design system to quickly iterate on options and still keep in line with industry best practices and enterprise design system visual style. My intention for the new design was to bring more attention to the account information to ensure customers felt more secure about the legitimacy of the message. This also gave me the opportunity to bring more consistency to the visual design and create patterns that easily scale across partners, products and message types.
Original Template
The sign-in link is pushed above the logo on the mobile version which is usually in line with the logo on desktop screens
The customer's last four account number is buried in the message body
Full name is not included in message which could be a personalization and security miss
Lack of consistency between core brand and sub-brands
Refreshed Template
Sign In link moved to make room for logo lockups and visually matches what is used on the website
Account information is included as a separate section allowing for more personalization with card art, product name, account last four and brand colors
Full name included in account section to increase personalization and security
Remove brand color within the headline to create more consistency across partners and products
Addressing Accessibility, Scalability and Email Client Constraints
Dark mode: Users may prefer dark mode because it minimizes eye strain in low-light situations, reduces screen brightness to save battery life, improves content legibility or simply is a preference.
Progressive enhancement: For email clients that support progressive enhancement, the logo and banner background color swaps in dark mode, and a drop shadow is added to the card art. For certain email clients that don’t support media queries, a box with more padding and slightly rounded corners is used to make the background on the logo look more intentional.
Scalable: Accommodating branding across different products helps build trust and recognition for customers while also keeping messages consistent.
Color and font size: The background color from the headline was removed to ensure that color isn’t the only way information is conveyed. The font size was increased to make the headline content more readable, especially on mobile devices.
Spacing: Enterprise design system spacing guidelines were used to aid readability. To help with scannability, white space was increased between sections of the email and around the header.
Customer Level Production Test
Through user feedback, we were able to validate the new design and ensure alignment with the messaging experience principles before moving on to a production test.
Results from the production test showed an increase in both CTR and conversion.
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