Article

Project Summary: Article Email Migration & Master Template

Article is a modern furniture brand that sells direct to customers online. When the team moved from Mailchimp to Iterable, their email needed to move with it, and the move was a chance to turn a collection of one-off emails into a system. We worked embedded with the in-house team from 2019 into 2021: migrating the existing emails, designing and coding a master template, and building out the lifecycle and campaign emails on top of it.

Migration

We started by exporting the existing Mailchimp emails and recoding their look and feel in Iterable, so nothing broke for customers during the switch. We compared Iterable's template options, then tested every template in Litmus and shared the results with the team before anything went live.

Foundations

An email style guide set the brand rules for email: type, colour, spacing and image sizes. Every new email started as a wireframe with a written rationale for its layout, so design decisions were agreed before any code was written. Later we added a grid system with layout variations, so new layouts stayed consistent without a new design each time.

Master template & emails

A single hand-coded master template became the base for every email. On top of it we designed and built:

• Lifecycle emails: a welcome series, abandoned cart, wishlist, product stock alerts and order confirmation
• Customer experience: review requests with user-generated content, and a thank-you-for-your-feedback email
• Campaigns: new product launches (including a dark-mode-ready launch email), sale and Black Friday emails, and seasonal editorial sends
• Motion: animated GIFs and cinemagraphs, built to stay light enough for the inbox

Documentation

Each module was documented with its image dimensions and the design process behind it, so the in-house team could build new emails from the template without starting from scratch.