Evolution over 2 years
Problem Statement
Ever since joining Pawp in 2021, the brand and everything that comes along with it has been changing and evolving. Our Growth Marketing Manager was brought on only a few weeks after I was hired and we quickly realized there was a lot of work that needed to be done to update and streamline Pawp’s emails.
01 An UnDefined Brand
The only thing we could do was to dive right in! Our brand was not yet defined at this point and the team was so small that we had complete ownership over this process. There was so much to do that we couldn’t dedicate as much time as we wanted to this process quite yet. The below emails were created for our new gifting program as a first stab at a cohesive look.
02 The First Brand Refresh
About 6 months into working at Pawp, we brought on an agency to help us establish a true brand. This was a turning point for design and allowed me, as the sole marketing designer, to start to build templates and work faster.
Using our updated color palette and illustration style, the Growth Marketing Manager and I truly started to build our transactional library. We created a cohesive style across all transactional emails and started to really see the brand come together.
03 Ever-changing Brand
After working with the agency to develop the last brand style, we ended up bringing on a Head of Creative & Branding. She was able to take the process we had started and push the envelope to give us a much more fitting brand presence. The evolution of the brand meant ✨updated emails✨.
It felt like a lot to keep up with at times, but the Growth Marketing Manager and I worked hand in hand to develop new designs and even new transactional emails. You’ll see in the below examples that this phase had several design variations as we explored what felt the most on brand. We also had more cooks in the kitchen at this phase, making more iteration a normal part of the process.
04 Final Destination
In my last few months at Pawp, my newest manager recommended that we go back over these transactional emails once more to make sure they not only were on brand, but connected visually to our product. That’s when we started the email revamp project detailed here. The outcome of that project and the final iteration on transactional emails are shown below.
These are true transactional emails, using live text, a simplified footer and very simple iconography. The goal of transactional is get a point across quickly, without the risk of triggering any spam filters or being confused as marketing emails. The Growth Marketing Manager and I researched best practices and accessibility while going through the rounds on these to ensure that we checked all boxes.
We determined font, button, icon and logo sizes for both desktop and mobile use to make creating future emails a breeze. An icon library for each email function was also decided on so that design wouldn’t even need to step in to build transactional emails in the future. The process was finally streamlined.
