In my day-to-day role as a digital designer I regularly support the CRM & Email marketing team with designing and building engaging Emails. wilko send up to 4 marketing Emails per week, usually on set days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. The content of our Emails can be usually categorised into 3 types.
Focus on deals and puts our best offers at forefront
Features product cutouts & price
Simple layout, easy to consume
Usually has best conversion rate
More in-depth description of products and categories
Features product & price often with lifestyle images of products in situ
Link to category/range pages rather than individual products
A bridge between buying & bonding Emails
Aims to inspire and help with quality content
Often links to blog not main sales website
Focus is NOT on selling
Often personalised & sent to a segment of the main database (such as those interested in gardening)
The CRM Executives devise an Email schedule for the year, which plans Email campaigns around the wider wilko marketing and social plan. For example we would send 'garden' campaign Emails alongside 'garden' social activity and in-store POS activity in the Spring. There is also scope for manoeuvre - If it's forecast to be a hot, sunny weekend the CRM executive may decide to run with a garden Email campaign on Friday instead of a planned home campaign.
My colleague Fran & I as the designers are supplied a more detailed Email plan for up to 8 weeks in advance where we are assigned campaigns to work on. Since the pandemic and working from home, these are provided as protected Google spreadsheets which we are all able to access and edit with our work accounts.
I'm going to pick the week 11 Refined Heritage trend Email as the example, which I have circled in orange above on the plan. This is the 2nd of 3 Emails we are launching fortnightly, to highlight a particular home range. This is a benefits Email
Live poll feature
Prior to this, we launched a generic Spring/Summer home trend Email in March, Subject line: "Our NEW spring/summer trends are here!" that featured a live poll at the end, asking viewers which trend was their favourite.
As you can see from the screenshot on the right, the results were:
Homespun 45% (Feature Email sent 3rd April)
Refined Heritage 32% (Feature Email sent 17th April)
Urban Oasis 23% (Feature Email scheduled 24th April)
From this poll we decided to send the featured trend Emails in order of popularity (marked above).
At the time of writing, I have already designed and launched the Homespun trend Email with the subject line: "Revealed: our most popular new home trend" (Click to view Homespun) and I'm now working on the 2nd trend.
The brief is created in another Google doc which all stakeholders can input into. There are a number of teams that have an input into the creation of an Email
The traders will input which products & offers they would like to feature in the Email. In the top rows they will input the product name, price and code (also known as a SKU).
The CRM Executives will put together a rough structure of how the Email should look with the info & SKUs provided, though it's up to me as a designer to create the email as I see fit within our brand guidelines.
The copywriters will input the copy within this structure in red text. (I would copy & paste this into the design)
The photography studio may provide lifestyle images to use in the design
The designers then create the Email in design software and build it in our Email client. (Cheetahmail content designer). We first proof this with our management.
The CRM executives add the links and send a proof to the wider wilko team members, they collate any feedback and amends are fed back to the designers & copywriters.
After the emends are made, the Email is proofed again and scheduled.
The CRM team analyse and collect the data associated with the Email and share with the team on Monday mornings.
I have embedded a copy of the Refined Heritage trend Email brief below.
Fran & I as designers are responsible for the general look and feel of all our Emails. Our Emails have a big design overhaul once a year or so in which Fran and I work together to devise the look and feel of our Emails going forward. Day-to-day our Emails are based on a template we created during that design process for speed and in order to ensure our designs are consistant with each other & the wilko brand.
wilko had a major branding overhaul in August 2018 which had a big impact on the look and feel of our Emails. Also the methods used to design the Email changed with the introduction of new Email marketing software. Below I compare 2 outdoor furniture campaign Emails I designed 3 years apart.
Square hero and 'polaroid' style photography
Hero/headline copy in boxes
Email created in its entirety in InDesign then spliced and put together in HTML.
Non-responsive - so will appear 'as is' on mobile which is not a good user experience. In the last 3 years mobile has become the most popular device our Emails are opened from.
Curved hero that 'points' down into the body of the Email. All images are framed within circles & spots - now a major brand element.
Hero copy using new brand font incorporating the 'tittle' (brand element)
Graphics are designed as individual elements based on a template rather than designed as a whole
Supporting copy is 'live text' inputted directly in the Email software
Responsive design which collapses and is easy to read on mobile
This is the part of the process which I do on a day-to-day basis. I use software called InDesign - part of the Adobe Creative Suite software - to create the Email graphics. As explained we previously created templates during our creative overhaul which speeds up the design process & ensures my designs are consistant with my colleague's work.
The screenshot on the right is from Indesign, the top half shows the templates we use. The magenta circles show where we would drop imagery in. Circles indicate price roundel size and position, there is an asset 'toolkit; that contains all the price roundels, branded font and other elements we can quickly grab from to place in our work.
The bottom half shows the 'pages' of our design. Indesign is traditionally a print based design software for magazines & desktop publishing. However we find it's also useful for digital work. I must consider both desktop and mobile graphics. Emails feature a different sized hero image between the 2 platforms for best user experience.
A desktop hero/full size banner is 640 x 425
Mobile hero/full size banner is 380 x 500
Most other graphics can work on both platforms.
Upon creating a new page in our document, I select a master template from the above section, then I would drop the required image or product in that frame along with the price roundel if required. Product images require cutting out in Photoshop using the pen or magic erasor tool and saving as a PNG so it has a transparent background, before using in my design.
Using Indesign allows me to create all elements in one document by using pages within a previously created template, and exporting them as JPEGS at once. Photoshop or Illustrator would require separate working documents for each element and would be time consuming.
After exporting all the design elements I then build the campaign in the Email marketing software. I create a new campaign (or select it if the CRM team have already created it) and within that I can fill in all the information from the brief.
There is a default template which speeds up the process rather than drag & drop each element from scratch, though I am able to move around elements to design the Email.
I first build the structure, dragging red placeholder image blocks, copy blocks and CTAs into position, I then drag each exported JPEG into the software. I copy & paste the copy from the brief into the Email, not forgetting the subject line. I repeat the process for the mobile design.
When this is complete, I review and share the Email with my manager, copywriters and design team. Once approved it's handed over to the CRM team to add the URL links. Each link has a unique tracking code which enables us to see exactly which part of the Email has been clicked by the viewer. They then share a proof with everyone in the business!
When the Email has been approved it is ready to be scheduled and launched. As this Email is going to be sent on Saturday, it must be scheduled in advance. We can segment the audience but in this case we have chosen to send this Email to everyone in the active database. (over 800,000). We have decided however to split the sending of this Email into morning, afternoon and evening, with a third of the database receiving it at one time (split at random). We normally send our Saturday Emails in the morning at 9am, so it will be an interesting test to see if we have better results at different times of the day.
Although this pie chart is the data for ALL Emails sent in week 11, its clear to see that a large majority of openers view the Email on a mobile device, nearly 3/4 of our database.
We can see from this chart our open & click rates are significantly higher than 1 year ago. wilko have grown their database steadily since 2018 when we lost customers due to GDPR regulations
From the above data, we can see its actually the evening batch that has the highest stats in both the open rate and click through rate. The revenue data is consolidated but between the 3 batches, the Email made around £2000. This was the least successful Email of the week and the stats were lower than the homespun trend Email that was sent previously - proving that the poll was correct and our customers do prefer that trend.
The stats below are from the Homespun trend Email sent 2 weeks previously. We can see the Email had a 10% higher open rate and an even click through rate. It generated around £1000 more in revenue.
The 3rd of the home trends Emails sent the week after the refined heritage Email. The CRM team decided to again split the Email send into 3 different times. 9am, 12pm and 5pm on Saturday. From the stats we can see again the evening send was the most successful overall with the highest unique open rate and clicks. The click to open rate % is slightly down, but the 5pm send was sent to 8000 more subscribers. Overall the Email made £2431 in revenue which was slightly more than the refined heritage Email.
One thing we've learned is that we can send campaigns later in the day (at the weekend at least) and our results can potentially be improved long term. This could be because our target audience are busy or out enjoying their spare time on a Saturday morning, but are sat on the sofa in the evening and scrolling through their phone whilst relaxing. It's worth considering the warm weather and the pub gardens reopening this week which may have contributed to lower stats than the homespun Email sent before lockdown restrictions were eased.
