Seatfrog works with innovative partners throughout the travel industry to reinvent what travellers can do when they’re on the go. Among plenty of features, their bidding system gives the opportunity to grab a last minute upgrade to business class when it suits you. They work with some of the best talents around the world.
Seatfrog wanted to revamp its comm’s and refresh its bunch of emails to drive more conversion (40+ emails), improve its messaging and better promote its brand and position on the market.
Emails is the most successful media at Seatfrog when it’s about to convert to booking and educate its users. The emails are extremely powerful and it’s worth to approach them as a system.
It was a super opportunity to work closely with the other Product Designer of the company, Oliver Puttick. We decided to revamp the existing funnel of our communications along our Customer Journey Map. He was taking care of the in-app messages and notifications while I was taking care of the emails. I worked then closely with Patrick Burke, our Head of Marketing.
There were several opportunities here:
More than 30 emails. They haven’t changed for the last 4 years. I did an audit first to approach the emails as a system and to be sure I was on the right direction. I identified the gaps and understood the user needs. To have a full overview, you can find the whole audit analysis of our current emails here (fake numbers).
First, I divided our emails in 4 different categories. They all have a different purpose, different segments, components and key messages.
I analysed the Opening Rate and the Click Through Rate for each of those emails and did an average. Those numbers will help us to create clear goals with proper metrics. I already started to collect some insights. The transactional emails were the most opened while branded emails were the most clicked. I noticed that one of our “mea culpa” email had an amazing CTR of more than 45%. It helped us to define a clear strategy when it was about to design the emails.
All the emails have been analysed according to their purpose, objectives, opportunity, key messages, brand personality and requirements.
Having all those insights in hand, we organised a workshop with the Head of Product, the Head of Marketing and my colleague Product Designer. We started to re-think what could be our new comm’ funnel. When should we trigger our emails, in-app messages and notifications? Whom should we send those comm’s? What will be the content?
We used Miro to deliver a clear roadmap for our comm’s.
We have our measurable goals. We know what emails do we need and how they are understood by our users. We know when, what and whom we’ll send the emails. What else? The design of course!
Because the emails have to be scaleable and adaptable as templates, I approached the emails as a system. I first decomposed all the email elements according to their nature (transactional / branded / promotional / research).
I went to get some inspirations from Hinge, Uber, Transferwise, Airbnb, Deliveroo among others. And started a moodboard of the different sections our emails could have for each of my categories.
I then started to sketch some ideas and imagine my different categories as template with 3 levels : excitement - showing app features - neutral and 3 sizes (long - medium - short) for better scaleability.
After having approved the sketches with the Head of Marketing and the Head of Product, I could finally start the Lo-Fi Designs. Because we don’t have an illustrator nor a 3D Designer yet, the idea was to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I had to be attentive to the Information Architecture. We decided to play with 3D and mockups for the transactional emails and use pictures for branding and promo emails.
The Lo-fi have been approved! We’ll keep a MVP look & feel until we judge it’s worth to rebrand the emails afterwards. All the Design System is now ready. It shouldn’t be long to adapt the different elements in case there is a rebrand. In the meantime I’ll use 3D illustrations made by Storytale.io.
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Agreed with the Heads of the Product team, I took some liberty to adapt our colours according to the nature and the purpose of the email.
I couldn’t be here to see the final results and test the emails among our users. I wasn’t part of the company anymore because of the unexpected COVID-19 that touched the entire world of designers. No worries though! This was a superb opportunity to revamp a whole bunch of emails and see them as a system, as I would do with a product.
When I started design, I wouldn’t have imagined to approach a whole emailing revamping as part of the product. I’ve been coached by the best Head of Product ever to reach this goal and communicated a lot with the different Heads of the company. It was extremely powerful. Definitely a super challenge!
