CASE STUDY
Introducing campaign branding to enhance operational efficiency
I streamlined the branding process for campaigns, enabling users to effortlessly apply their chosen brand elements across all pages and emails within a campaign. This enhancement reduced the time spent on campaign creation by 70% and eliminated repetitive tasks. By empowering brands to easily customise their own campaigns, I directly contributed to the business goal of promoting self-service and enhancing operational efficiency.
THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
The current platform limited users to applying brand styles on a per-page or per-email basis, rather than across entire campaigns. This restriction forced campaign creators to manually adjust branding for each individual page and email, making the process tedious, time-consuming, and prone to inconsistencies across campaigns.
OBJECTIVE
USER GOAL
Efficiency: Maximise user efficiency by reducing manual work, eliminating inconsistencies, and accelerating the campaign creation process.
Empowerment and control: Empower users to establish and manage brand styles universally across all emails and pages within a campaign.
User experience: Ensure a seamless, automatic application of brand styles, enhancing the user experience.
BUSINESS GOAL
Self-service for users: By enabling brands to manage their own styles, the business reduces the reliance on customer success teams to manually apply branding for every campaign. This allows the platform to scale more easily as the customer base grows, without needing a proportional increase in support staff.
Faster campaign launch: When brands can apply their styles automatically across multiple assets (emails, landing pages, etc.), it dramatically speeds up the campaign creation process. This helps brands launch campaigns faster, which is particularly valuable for time-sensitive marketing efforts.
Reduce operational costs: This feature would free up Customer Success Managers’ time, lowering operational costs and freeing up resources for other strategic initiatives.
USER STORY: CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER
“As a Customer Success Manager, I want to be able to apply brand styles to an entire campaign so that they are automatically applied to all emails and pages, ensuring consistency and saving time on manual adjustments.”
USER STORY: BRAND
"As a brand, I want the flexibility to self-serve campaign creation by logging into the SoPost platform, uploading assets, and easily applying brand styles, so I can quickly launch customized campaigns without relying on external support."
USER RESEARCH & IDEATION
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
I conducted a comprehensive competitor analysis to gain insight into how the market was approaching this feature. This process not only provided a clear understanding of industry standards but also served as a source of inspiration for my own implementation. I researched platforms with branding features such as Klaviyo, Typeform and Mailchimp for inspiration and noted common themes and best practices. I created a board in Figjam, adding screenshots of the branding feature for each of the competitors, identifying what made them unique, and the advantages and the disadvantages of each feature.
GATHERING EARLY FEEDBACK
To gather stakeholder feedback, I created and presented two wireframe options:
Wireframe option 1: Detailed navigation with preview
Design: This wireframe featured brand categories split into separate sections. Users would navigate through these sections by selecting “Next” or using the navigation menu.
Preview: A preview section was included, allowing users to see real-time updates of brand styles applied to an example page or email.
Purpose: This option aimed to provide detailed control and visibility of each brand category, enhancing the user’s ability to see how changes would affect the final output.
Wireframe option 2: Simplified layout without preview
Design: This wireframe displayed all brand categories on a single screen, streamlining the user interface.
Preview: The design did not include a preview feature, which simplified the build process and reduced technical complexity.
Purpose: This option was designed to be more straightforward and faster to implement, focusing on ease of use and efficiency.
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
STAKEHOLDERS
I presented both wireframes to the Customer Success teams (users) in both the U.K. and U.S. to gather feedback from a diverse group of users, ensuring that any regional differences in user needs or preferences were considered.
OBJECTIVE
To better understand stakeholder preferences and needs, I conducted interviews focused on several key areas, including campaign-level branding, design preferences, and preview options. The primary goals were to identify which features should be managed at the campaign level, how best to categorise different style elements, and to gather feedback on the proposed designs. The following questions were asked:
Campaign branding: If we implemented campaign-level branding, what specific elements would you expect or want to be able to edit?
Preview functionality: Would you find it necessary to preview the brand styles as they are applied to an example page or email? If so, how would you like the preview to work?
Wireframe preferences: Do you have a preference for any of the provided wireframes? If so, which one, and why?
Current experience: How do you currently find the process of branding an email or page in the builder? What features do you use most/least, and why?
Design feedback: Is there anything you would change or add to the wireframe design you’ve selected?
Priority assessment: What are your highest priorities when it comes to campaign branding? Which features are "must-haves" versus "nice-to-haves"?
KEY FEEDBACK
From the stakeholder interviews, several important insights emerged regarding the preferred functionality for campaign branding:
Priority elements:
Campaign branding was identified as the highest priority, while improving the UX for the existing email and page branding were considered less critical.
Must-have features:
Logo upload, hero image, background image, and cover image were considered essential at the campaign level.
The ability to set campaign-level colours was also required.
Overriding brand elements at the email and page level was considered a must-have for flexibility and customisation.
Nice-to-have features:
A preview option was seen as beneficial but not critical for initial implementation.
The option to upload email-specific hero images at the campaign level was considered useful but not essential.
Fonts were recognised as useful but were a lower priority compared to other branding elements.
Time-saving suggestions:
The U.K. team highlighted the potential time-saving benefits of adding a copy section at the campaign level, where users could select and include predefined text, such as email subject lines or product descriptions. This suggestion required further research and was noted as a future exploration project.
SOLUTION
Following the stakeholder feedback, I developed a high-fidelity prototype designed to meet the core requirements of simplicity and efficiency. The prototypes featured:
Unified brand categories on a single page: This layout consolidates all brand settings into one view, streamlining the user experience and making it easier and faster to make changes.
Logo upload: Allows users to upload their brand logo for consistent branding.
Background style: Includes options for background image uploads and colour selections, as well as setting colours for email and block backgrounds.
Image upload: Facilitates the upload of hero and cover images to align with brand identity.
Font specification: Empowers users to specify fonts and colours for titles and body text, ensuring cohesive branding.
Form styles: Provides customisation options for button and input field aesthetics, including colours, border styles, and radius values.
TECHNICAL INPUT
Throughout the design process, I regularly shared feedback with the technical team and sought their input on which styles could be included at the campaign level. This collaborative approach ensured that the final design not only met user expectations but was also technically sound and easy to implement.
QUICK WINS
Design simplicity: The simplified design approach not only addressed user feedback for ease of use but also allowed for faster implementation and changes.
Technical feasibility: Features such as styling input fields were also chosen to include for their ease of implementation from a technical perspective. These quick wins were included to enhance the user experience without compromising on technical constraints.
USER TESTING
To ensure the new campaign branding feature met user needs, I conducted a user testing session with the customer success team using the above high-fidelity prototype. This session aimed to evaluate the usability and functionality of the design and to gather insights on how effectively it supports campaign branding tasks.
PROCESS
Scenario creation: I designed a realistic scenario where participants needed to apply Cara Beauty's brand styles to a campaign, including uploading assets and configuring various brand elements.
Task definition: Participants were given specific tasks to complete using the prototype, focusing on navigating the interface, applying styles, and reviewing their work.
Observation and documentation: I observed five participants as they completed the tasks and documented their interactions, noting any challenges or areas for improvement.
EMAIL AND PAGE BRANDING IMPROVEMENTS
As part of this project, I refined the user experience for setting email and brand styles, focusing on simplifying and standardising the process for consistent application across emails and pages. I aimed to integrate brand style settings with new campaign branding categories, making it more intuitive. By reducing complexity and minimising clicks for overriding fonts and colours, I enhanced overall usability and supported streamlined, self-service branding.
ENHANCEMENT 1: ACCORDION STYLE MENU
PROBLEM STATEMENT
The user experience for setting email and page brand styles was hindered by several issues:
Inappropriate categorisation and labelling of brand styles.
Ineffective components for style application.
Limited email branding capabilities.
Nested tabs within the UI/UX design (see below).
SOLUTION
Improve the branding experience for pages and emails by implementing the following enhancements:
Streamlined categorisation: Refine brand style categories to improve clarity and consistency between campaign and individual page/email settings.
Elimination of nested tabs: Replace nested tabs with accordion menus to enhance usability and align with best practices.
Appropriate components: Use suitable components for applying brand styles to ensure seamless interaction.
Improved labelling: Clarify brand style labels to facilitate easier selection and understanding.
Enhanced email branding: Expand email branding options to match those available for pages.
Campaign-level branding: Set campaign-level branding as the default, with the option to override on a per-page or per-email basis.
ENHANCEMENT 2: OVERRIDING FONTS & COLOURS
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Users found it cumbersome to override brand styles for individual colours and fonts due to excessive clicks and multiple steps. This process led to inefficiencies and frustration.
E.g. previous flow for overriding fonts
SOLUTION
To enhance the user experience for overriding fonts and colours, I implemented the following improvements:
Fonts: Consolidated multiple dropdown menus into a single, streamlined dropdown. By default, the dropdown highlights the global font for quick access. Users can select from custom fonts directly within the same dropdown, with the brand font clearly labeled at the top under "Brand Font" to minimise confusion.
Colours: Simplified the colour selection process by integrating a single colour picker. The picker defaults to the brand colour, allowing users to easily choose custom colours and revert to the brand colour seamlessly within the same component.
RESULTS
The new campaign branding feature, combined with the enhancements for overriding brand styles, reduced the time required to brand campaigns by 70%.
Three brands that requested self-service capabilities successfully adopted the new campaign branding feature to upload logos and images.
UX improvements reduced the number of clicks for overriding fonts and colours from three to one.
RELEASE
Given the project's scope, we chose a phased release approach. To clarify this breakdown of work with the engineers, I created a visual spec which included all of the requirements for each phase of the project.
We developed and released each brand category sequentially, prioritising the logo upload, images and colours first (as mentioned during user interviews) followed by the UX enhancements to page and email branding, ensuring users could start benefiting from the feature immediately.
FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
A key future enhancement was the ability to preview branding changes across all pages and emails directly from the campaign branding screen (as seen in the wireframe demo). This feature was added to the backlog and was planned into upcoming sprints, based on user feedback and further exploration.
Based on the insights from user interviews, I planned a discovery session with stakeholders to learn more about the need for being able to set pre-defined copy for subject lines and product descriptions to assess how we might tackle this potential problem.