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 & design and the negative impact it had on email marketing performance (with consideration to engagement and lifecycle stimulation). More than simply operating within the natural framework of my role as a Sr Brand Designer, my goal became creating impactful engagement (both internally and externally) through modular plug-and-play email templates. To achieve this goal, I partnered cross-functionally to conduct industry research and completed the project (inception to CMO approval) within 6 months.

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)].

Observations

Value-added content was greatly sacrificed by the previous templates. Sword worked monotonously to dodge exceeded data capacity limits by adding entire sections as images rather than live text. Members of the lifecycle team were required to operate far beyond the scope of their roles as they built (and rebuilt, and rebuilt again) emails for clients without support from a dedicated designer or engineer. Operational efficiency, and therefore quality production and performance, was all but lost. Additionally, these templates were formatted solely for desktop, thus going against the mobile-first principle of UXUI and 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 modular & 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.

Solution

I constructed an elastic, responsive template no longer at the mercy of email client’s data capacity limitations. This template encourages modularity and is self-reinforcing in establishing agreeable boundaries around content inclusion, ultimately protecting the efficacy of the design. The content and lifecycle teams now can operate more efficiently and (still!) independently of designers and engineers.

More granularly speaking, we know that CTA buttons should appear redundantly, be concisely written, and match the styling of the associated landing page to further promote user engagement and brand continuity. If Sword proactively and strategically includes CTAs throughout each email, they will not only increase engagement but can reduce time and number of actions to reach the account creation page.

*Note: CTA buttons were added to every section of the email template design as use-case examples for our internal teams.