Hood
Hood is a national company distributing dairy products throughout the United States.
How does Hood enhance their email newsletter when their current newsletter has a click-through rate of 0% and the initiative is de-prioritized internally?
The Problem
Hood approached us to create an email newsletter strategy, user experience and visual design recommendation. Internally, Hood lacks a clear process for creating an email newsletter because it is often a de-prioritized effort. We hypothesized that sending an email newsletter every two weeks to their users was the “sweet spot” for engagement, based on industry averages.
My role
I was the sole UX designer on an Agile team of two strategists, two account managers, a project manager and a visual designer. I am responsible for the strategy POV and the wireframe template recommendations using Constant Contact and Google Slides.
my proposed solutions
Analytics showed that Hood had a 0% click through rate on all email campaigns in 2019. This indicated the need to reassess user behavior and engagement tactics. Based on our user behavior and engagement tactic research, we recommended sending two emails a month, using one evergreen template and one newsworthy template. The evergreen template that I designed included a variety of reusable components: curated recipe cards, coupon callouts, about us content cards, featured product cards, and interactive elements - like quizzes, infographics and more. The newsworthy template that I designed included a focused group of components: event callouts, holiday feature cards, sweepstakes callouts, influencer content cards or timely news cards.
challenges I faced
During the template creation, I was limited to designing within the Constant Contact toolbox. I advocated for the exploration of a new email tool that would allow for enhanced interaction design, media elements and design styles, however, this idea was not pursued due to budget constraints.
my measures of success
Once implemented, the email strategy will both increase the number of quality subscribers and increase newsletter engagement. We anticipate the open rate (the percent of subscribers that opened the email vs. the number of emails delivered) will increase by 15%.
What I learned
Because of this project, I learned the importance of recommending an attainable cadence for client creation. Ultimately, the client team needs to implement the recommended strategy, templates and design system for this initiative to be successful.
