Email Design System: Transforming Workflow and Customer Experience
Staples, INC — 2022-2023
This project tackled the challenges of our previous email marketing approach, characterized by inconsistent design, accessibility issues, and time-consuming creation processes.
The Solution:
A collaborative effort with marketing and our operations team resulted in a robust Email Design System. This system empowers teams to create emails faster with:
Streamlined Workflows: Core templates and easy-to-use libraries ensure brand consistency and quicker email creation.
Enhanced Customer Experience: Responsive design and accessible features guarantee emails display beautifully and reach everyone, regardless of device or accessibility preferences. This creates a seamless brand experience that aligns perfectly with our website's UX.
Challenges of the Old System:
Time-Consuming, Inconsistent Creation:
Non-standard styles, inconsistent imagery, and scattered files created a lengthy email creation process filled with a lot of business partner negotiation and build-out.
Accessibility and Formatting Woes:
Emails relied heavily on images, making them inaccessible for screen reader users, and led to display issues and a poor user experience on different devices.
The Staples Email Design System.
Streamlined Workflows:
I collaborated with marketing to build a set of core templates, empowering our teams to create emails faster to help focus more on strategic campaigns. Easy-to-use libraries and brand styles ensure brand consistency across all communications.
Enhanced Customer Experience:
Responsive design and accessible features (mobile-friendly, rich text) guaranteed our emails display beautifully and reach everyone, regardless of device or accessibility preferences. This created a seamless brand experience that aligned much better with our site experience.
Workflows for the future!
Workflows for the future!
The new system has really allowed our designers, marketing, and copywriting to focus in on the content that we’re putting in front of our customers. It’s allowed us to stop putting so much time into figuring out exactly how we’re going to say something… and refocused our organization on what we’re trying to say to our customers.