Email Template
for Sword Health

Project Overview

In the early phases of my career at Sword, I became acutely aware of the disconnect between content and design — especially in regards to email marketing. More than simply delivering compelling visuals that support well-crafted messages, I wanted to see the visuals and messaging combined drive impactful user engagement. I partnered cross-functionally with members of Sword’s lifecycle, content, engineering, and product teams to conduct industry research and develop a high-performing email template. The result? Since the launch of the new email templates in Q4 of 2023, Sword has seen a 207% lift in email click rate and 30% lift in member enrollment rate [YTD (01/2024)].

I’ve organized my work in a case study format below to show my process as it relates to growth and performance.

Observations

Displayed in the image below is a preview of the old templates — one is for a monthly newsletter and the other is for general marketing communications. There are several notable opportunities for improvement. The primary issue here is that these templates were constructed using Iterable. A lot of content was sacrificed because of the WYSIWYG tool — Sword had to build out entire modules as images rather than contained live text, as the content and design regularly exceeded email clients’ data capacity. Members of the lifecycle team, too, were responsible for building and tailoring the templates for clients without support from a dedicated email designer or engineer, which only exacerbated the maxed capacity issue due to the clutter from unnecessary rows and containers. Lastly, these templates were formatted solely for desktop, going against the mobile-first ideology of user experience design and therefore negating easy opportunities for high impact and performance.

Problem

As a channel, email has one of the lowest account creation conversion rates. And opened emails from Sword are not being clicked through.

Hypothesis

If well-crafted content is housed by a sophisticated design system with a mobile-first approach and further emphasis on CTAs, then click rates, account creation rates, and enrollment rates will increase.

Research

I conducted independent research while also leaning on findings provided by my cross-functional partners. Learnings from heat maps, aggregate data from A/B tests, reviews of relevant industry studies, as well as email design inspiration from leading brands were compiled during this phase. The heat maps and email design inspiration, in addition to Sword’s website and mobile app, had the most impact on the final email template.

Solution

Most users today view content from a mobile device, hence why it is imperative to lead with a mobile layout. Additionally, we know that CTA buttons should appear redundantly, be concisely written, and match the styling of its associated landing page to further promote user engagement and brand continuity. If Sword includes CTAs at the bottom of each section of the email, they will not only increase engagement but can reduce users’ number of actions to go to the account creation page.

From a general content and design perspective, I constructed a responsive template for both desktop and mobile breakpoints and did so in a manner that safely housed live text without exceeding max data capacities. This template, too, encouraged modular plug-and-play, so that content and lifecycle teams could operate more efficiently and independently of email designers and engineers. Also, the template allows for both short and long form content while also placing an agreeable limitation on character count in order to protect the design’s efficacy.