The first step was cleaning up the HTML and incorporating Costco Business Centers new branding look and feel from the recently redesigned print marketing. In the past, the emails were typically just product images on a solid colored background with a heading for each of the spots in the email. One of the primary design choices that was new to the Costco Business Center print marketing was large stylized images with bold text. I created a new template for each of the marketing spots where before the email was created all in one document and used Photoshop’s “Slice” tool it cut the document into all of the graphics for the email. The “Slice” email was imprecise, making many of the graphics slightly the wrong size. This was troublesome if you wanted to change the position of a graphic. The was the code and “sliced” Photoshop template was set up so that each graphic really only fit in one spot in the code. If you wanted to shift them around you would have to do it in the Photoshop template first and re-export the graphics. Otherwise, if you switched the position of any of the graphics the code would break. This also meant that the layout was very unflexible. It was difficult to add or remove rows of graphics due to the constraints of the Photoshop template. With new templates for each sized graphic, I incorporated stylized images for the larger graphics and switched to consistently sized Bold headings with lighter weight subheadings. Additionally, because the new templates weren’t reliant on slices, each graphic was a consistent size. Not only did this achieve the goal of incorporating the new Costco Business Center branding but the process was streamlined and more flexible.

As time when on more marketing spots were added to the layout and I became increasingly unhappy with the way the email looked and functioned. I understood that adding positions to the email brought in more marketing dollars but it was getting to a point that I felt like everyone was suffering. It wasn’t good for the user, the email was long and the content wasn’t targeted to any one user. It wasn’t good for the vendor, because of the high number of items being featured it was hard for any one item to stand out. It wasn’t good for our business either. We noticed as the emails got larger we were losing our user. The open rates and the click through rates were both suffering.

I began researching best practices on designing email campaigns when I had time in between projects and I looked at what everyone else was doing. I noticed there were a number of things that came up in my research and competitive analysis that we seemed to be doing wrong.

• Email Width around 600px, ours was 800px.
• Image to text ratio when dealing with spam filters, a 60/40 text to image ratio should be maintained for best results. (ours is 99% image) though this trend seems to be shifting to heavier on images.
• Don’t Depend on images, since most email clients default to not loading images the initial view of an email is without images. We need to design to increase attraction before images are loaded.
• Avoid using too many links, as some spam filters consider too many links spammy. Because of the number of marketing positions in our email, there are ~50 links.
• Use large clear Calls to action. Currently, our Calls to Action have been reduced to the tab in the bottom right corner and the clarity of them was questionable.
• The subject line should be Interesting and relevant.
• We have a general subscriber list, the more targeted we could become the better!

My analysis lead me to believe because of the complexity of our email campaigns the usability and thus, the click through rates were suffering and we may be hitting people’s spam folders. On top of that, the amount of content we deliver with each email is greater than the average attention span.

As it turns out the buying staff and our executives were also looking at our emails and wondering what we could be doing different. Luckily I had been working on a new concept and had something to present. My idea was to have one hero graphic at the top featuring a single item or vendor and take the rest of the content and group it into themes, the most basic of which would be the three different businesses we sell to; offices, convenience stores and the foodservice industry. Each of the three themed graphics would then link to a landing page that had more graphics and featured items that were related to that theme.

In the months since we redesigned the email, we have continued to experiment with a number of variations of the layout. Some including items and some with only a hero graphic and they have been unpredictably successful. While I believe strongly that the new emails are a vast improvement over what we were doing before I think there is still one piece of the puzzle that is holding back Costco Business Center from more successful emails. As stated in the list of issues I found in my research, number 7, Costco Business Center needs to segment their subscriber list and send more targeted emails. Costco Business Center services a wide variety of small to medium sized businesses and sending one email out to their entire audience is a mistake. By designing our emails based on themes, depending on the theme, we alienate a portion of our audience.

Unfortunately, to begin to segment their list it is going to involve an enterprise level change. Currently, Costco does not have an email preference center where you can manage what Costco businesses you want to receive emails from and what kind of content you would like to receive from each. Not only does this mean we can’t ask the user what content is important to them, it also means that we have a universal email opt out. Say the user has been receiving emails from Costco.com, Costco Photo and Costco Business Center. Then they decide that they no longer wish to receive emails from Costco Photo and they unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the Costco Photo email. That user would then be unsubscribed from all Costco promotional email regardless of the division.

Coming Soon: Segmenting subscribers with users behavior and some tricks.