Transactional Email Strategy for UnderArmour.com
Proposed Q1 2018
Objective
Improve UA.com’s post-purchase communication cadence and clarity through a refresh of brand voice and visuals across the suite of transactional email touch points.
My Role
I led user experience strategy and design by wearing the hat of both lead researcher and designer. Some of my key tasks include:
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Conduct discovery and research into customer communication strategies and best practice across the e-commerce landscape.
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Extracting key customer insights through first-hand observation of customer contacts and in-depth interviews with customer service agents.
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Define core communication strategy and socialize key insights to help inform decision-making.
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Collaborating with creative designers on production-ready designs.
Research and UX Audit
To kickoff this initiative, the team needed to understand areas of friction and success within the existing email experience. I started by researching transactional email best practices and established an understanding of common triggers for inbox spam filters.
I then spent some time with the customer service team to understand known pain points by interviewing experienced service agents and observing incoming calls from customers with questions about their recent orders or returns.
During this time, I also set up a method to crowdsource transactional email samples from the personal shopping experiences of fellow Under Armour employees and friends and asked participants to note points of delight or friction during their post-purchase journey experience.
To diagnose the areas in which Under Armour was faltering, I conducted an audit of the customer communications experience via transactional emails from the point of purchase through delivery and returns and cross-referenced each touch point with the pieces of feedback captured via customer service feedback.
Customer Journey Map
As I dissected the existing experience, I created a customer journey map marking known points of delight or friction as identified from customer service data and used it to share learnings and opportunities with the cross-functional team, and to reference as a guide for our strategy going forward.
Service Blueprint
Using the domain knowledge regarding operations and distribution house processes I attained through my work on the Online Returns project preceding this initiative, I compiled a service blueprint to map operational dependencies that triggered each piece of email communication.
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​Using this service blueprint, the team was able to triangulate and address behaviors within the processes that resulted in communication gaps with the customers. This lead to a reprioritization of roadmap items that would allow the e-commerce team to meet user expectations and reduce customer frustration with shipping delays, inventory issues, and other operations headaches.
Content Hierarchy
At this point I compiled a list of content pieces essential to meeting user expectations and alleviate concerns for key moments throughout the post-purchase communication cadence (9+ email types).
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​I listed the content pieces in order of priority to users which was validated via research studies with participants completing real purchases.
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This documentation was created as a guide to be used in collaboration with my content strategy partners.
Creative Design Collaboration
As I partnered closely with content strategy, I also kicked off creative collaborations with partners in creative design to produce several iterations per email type that accommodated the findings I had compiled while refreshing the brand’s voice and style.
