Optimizing High Value Emails

Bonanza is an online marketplace that empowers entrepreneurs to create their dream businesses, minus the busywork. I worked with product director James and product manager Reilly to refresh a handful of high value emails. One in particular was a great opportunity for an update: the shipping notification email.

Defining The Problem

Our support team keeps track of user issues that are reported on a regular basis. This feedback helps us identify the biggest pain points in our user experience and use them as a road map for feature updates. I wanted to tackle the following problems on this project:

• The existing email doesn’t contain an order summary, so users have to seek out information about their order on the site. Additionally, the tracking information is buried deep in the email.

• The use cases for this email vary greatly in length and content, and the emails don’t provide a consistent experience across use cases.

• The language used in the existing email is outdated and doesn’t align with our current brand voice.

Identifying desired Outcomes

In the project kickoff meeting, Reilly presented data about current email performance metrics. She also presented research about industry standards for shipping emails alongside some examples from relevant competitors. From here, we decided on our primary outcome for this project would be to reduce the number of support tickets sent regarding order status.

During our kickoff meeting we also discovered that this email had a significant open rate, transactions, and attributed revenue. This created our secondary goal of increasing revenue.

To simplify our primary and secondary outcomes, we created a few user stories:

As a buyer, I want to:

• Be informed about the overall status of my order

• Be able to review more granular details about my order easily

• Manage my expectations throughout the shipping process

As a business, I want to:

• Provide a better end-to-end experience for our buyers

• Leverage our high-performing emails to increase revenue

Designing a solution

The primary purpose of this email is to inform buyers about the status of their orders. However, the current email doesn’t include any order details, and the link to view the order on Bonanza is not mentioned until the last line of the email.

For the new email, I designed a progress bar graphic that would indicate where in the process the order was. I made the tracking information easily accessible, and included an order summary table with a photo of the item, all purchase details, and a way to contact the seller if needed.

After the order summary, I created a new tertiary upsell module at the end of the email. The module would feature one of three things:

1. A selection of recommended items based on the purchase;
2. A curated collection of items from the same category as the purchase; or
3. A selection of discounted items from the same category as the purchase.

Showing items relevant to the buyer’s interests was a way for us to monetize this email and also provide a positive experience for the buyer. To further include relevant shopping opportunities for buyers, I added seasonal banners that would appear during peak shopping seasons.

Measuring the outcome

After six months, we checked the performance of the shipping notification email. The results were significant:

• Our click through rate increased by 56.7%.

• Our sales made as a result of the email increased by 116.7%.

• Our final value fees (the commission we collect) increased by 52.8%.

Key Takeaways

• Keep your user stories top of mind. It’s important to identify the primary purpose of an email or page and carefully map out a content hierarchy that aligns with that purpose.

• Personalized content is a win. Using a buyer’s purchase history to guide our upsell modules gave us the best chance of conversion. It also gave our team peace of mind knowing that we were being ethical and responsible about advertising through a non-marketing email.

• Wash, rinse, repeat. By optimizing the shipping notification email, we created a new revenue source and identified a new email pattern that can be used in other high value emails to drive sales and traffic to the site.

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