Emails & Newsletters

Context

The suite of PMMI Media Group editorial newsletters is an ever-evolving product that remains one of its most profitable. With distribution to large audience lists covering topics of the packaging and processing machinery trade industry, the product team monetizes newsletters through lead generation and click-through rates to publication websites. The combination of flagging performance, a sorely needed design update, and flawed production workflow resulted in an overhaul of design, from aesthetics to workflow design. Challenges met on this project included sales team and client buy-in, and continued buy-in for further automation updates.

My Role

UI Design
Wireframing
Branding
HTML & CSS

Completed

2020

Collaboraters

Individual effort

Status

Shipped, no live example

Inception

PMMI Media Groups' newsletter performance was tanking across all facets in 2017. Click-through rates and lead performance were steadily dropping and production rendering errors were not getting better. In 2017, 75% of PMMI Media Group’s lead-generating email deployment types were not responsive and had been using designs and layouts that dated back as late as 2008 (not to mention, 22% of unique users visited on their mobile devices). The main goal of this project was to begin re-strategizing email products to help remedy click-through rates, and lead performance, and optimize mobile and production-related rendering errors.

Process & Insight

Industry & internal research

I had full agency in producing designs and concepts for emails. I began by conducting B2B newsletter research, allowing myself to also draw from the more B2C. We audited our audience lists for the most popular email clients, operating systems, and devices, using this information to influence wireframing. We found that our mobile users were growing, something that was historically slow-growing in the B2B email space and our audience.

Additionally, we paid attention to ad ratios, as emails are one of our largest profit-generating products, and we needed to keep some sort of advertising in our emails.

The old emails were outdated and a cacophony of content. We were giving our users too much, and the ads by alwasys being on the left, mede it easier for users to skip over them in favor of editorial content. These designs had not been revised since 2008.

Initial wireframes produced different ad models, shorter formats, larger images, no images, and the introduction of a conversational intro. We wanted to imbue more personality into our newsletters, especially since a single newsletter was often curated by a single editor. Unfortunately, these ideas were either nixed before launch or shortly after.

Rework design to become responsive and automated

I began to wireframe, producing various examples of advertising and editorial ratios, with suggestions for new advertising strategies. In the end, I pushed for short, topical emails with low advertising, after researching that shorter newsletters had a better engagement.

Up to this point, I had become familiar with the email coding process. I worked with our software developer, who was responsible for creating our compiling program, on the best practices to optimize the design for an automated process. Part of this was moving our emails to a narrower, one/two-column format, and making sure there was a clear delineation between separate blocks, components, and content types.

It was the easiest to think of our emails as modules. Especially as the person who would be implementing these technically, this helped to break down the work, and give flexibility when it came to building a full email.

The final wireframe was built using the modules.

Interface Components

Color

The color scheme was chosen by sampling colors from our websites. Former newsletters each had an individual brand and template header that in no way referenced the core magazine brands. The website schemes at the time had moved to a black header, with brand accent colors.

Typography

We chose to reference Rift in brand headers, but due to Webfont reliability issues in Outlook desktop clients (our largest audience segment), we chose to stick with Arial/sans-serif for the text body of the email.

Challenges & Solutions

Advertising: Ratio (part 1)

The former ad ratio was about five ads to 12-15 pieces of editorial; however, most of that editorial was regurgitated "fluff". I wanted to push for less advertising and more poignant content, drastically reducing the ad ratio and placing a larger focus on quality editorial. Ultimately, clients and our sales team felt this change was too large, and the five ads remained with editorial reducing to eight instances.

Advertising: Aesthetics (part 2)

The former standard of ad materials collection was to take whatever advertisers provided us and put it in our emails, no questions asked. Of course, this contributed to flailing lead-gen and click-through rates for advertisers, so to mitigate this, we embarked on client education to help them provide more aesthetic materials.

Final Result

Consistent, responsive email design

We revamped all brand topical long-form newsletters to be completely responsive. Simultaneously, the development team helped implement “eBuilder”, our email template compiler and ad collections tool that aided immensely in smoothing our production workflow process (see the project here!).

A preview of how the newsletter template stands in its current form. At the top there is a featured editorial item, then followed by a list of editorial and ad content, mixed in an alternating pattern. Additionally, a mobile view was considered and executed in design and development!

A full preview of the newsletter. Showing additional sections promoting generic announcements ("What's Trending") and a trade show marketing enticement.

Conclusion

A huge win for our user experience was achieved in focusing on mobile compatibility.
Updated aesthetics matched newly reskinned websites, helping with brand cohesion.
A new system of automation improved the user experience for our production and QC teams. As the main technical contact for email HTML troubleshooting, this took a huge load of responsibility and work off my plate.

Next Steps

Continue to automate! There are still parts of our email process that are manually touched.
Introduce new types of content. Moving our email strategy to a templated, automated process was necessary to solve through workflow issues, however it has made newsletters more vulnerable to becoming stale, ultimately dinging engagement.
Re-evaluate ad and sponsorship strategy. The ads are still too intrusive and given too high priority in our newsletter content. This strategy must be re-addressed so that readers can feel genuinely nurtured.

PMMI Media Group Emails