Keepsake Marketing Emails
Design Challenge in creating marketing emails for Grandparents' Day
Keepsake gave a challenge of a designing a marketing email, providing copy and an intended audience. The time constraint and the information provided meant I would not need much research into the WHO but would work primarily on the HOW.
Industry Research
First off, I looked at some articles regarding designing a good marketing email. Some findings included the following:
1. The email content should ultimately lead to a call-to-action button (or two)
2. Color is a great opportunity for branding and visual appeal, and there should not be too many colors
3. Negative space is important to emphasize certain parts of the email
4. Typography can define the feel of the product or design
5. Animation is a great tool to capture attention through movement, and convey more in a smaller amount of space
Competitive Research
I signed up to some email newsletters for some similar sites to Keepsakes and took a look at some of their newsletter designs. In addition, I also browsed around the internet and Pinterest to get a feel for how marketing emails usually looked, so I could internalize some of the design patterns and understand some of the concepts that I had read about in my industry research.
Img 1. some of the marketing email designs I pinned to my Pinterest board for research. They range from text heavy with information panels to a more visual and stylistic art direction.
Wireframes
I drew several wireframes quickly on my iPad to brainstorm some ideas of layouts. I experimented with various designs while adhering to the guidelines I had learnt about in my research.
Img 2. I drew a variety of wireframes with different layouts based on my research. I made these shorter and scrollable for easy viewing, both content-clutter wise, and also resizable if it were read on a phone as it is estimated that 70% of all emails are read on a phone nowadays.
Designs
Design 1:
I wanted design 1 to be friendlier and warmer and have a more casual look. That’s why I chose the warm fall colors. It has two images, one of a family and one with the product, and as such is mostly a feel-good sort of marketing email
Design 2:
Design 2 was more elegant and had a sleeker design with the blues that Keepsake currently uses, as well as a variety of gif images that show product features and other things one might want to advertise about the frames.
