Goal: 

Notify Allrecipes users that their personal recipe was published on the site.

My role:

I worked with the Email team to iterate on several versions of the email notification.

Deliverables:

• One email notification encouraging further engagement with the published recipe.

• One email notification encouraging social sharing of the recipe.

Results:

These emails have an 85-90% open rate and a 35% click-through rate.

This indicates most recipe submitters are notified when their recipe is published! This is especially useful given there is often a long stretch of time between submission and publication, and users have no other way to check the status of their submission. The notifications drive 3 types of user actions: visits to the site, photo submissions, and/or social shares. All these actions contribute to Allrecipes user engagement goals.

Before:

Several years ago, users used to receive an email notification after their personal recipe was published and became publicly available on site. This was a bare-bones email message without visual ties to the brand. When the company switched to a new email marketing platform, the emails were no longer sent. Our team decided we needed to bring them back and use them to increase user engagement with their content.

After:

After several rough sketches and rounds of feedback with different team members, this is the design and messaging that was implemented. The emails have been going out to users since February 2018.

Process:

After initial discussions with the Email team, it quickly became clear we actually needed 2 different emails, based on the status of the published recipe:

• If the published recipe didn’t have a photo, the submitter would receive an email encouraging him/her to upload a photo (pictured above on the left).

• If the published recipe already had a photo, the submitter would receive an email encouraging him/her her to share the recipe on social media (pictured above on the right). We reasoned users wouldn’t be interested in sharing recipes that didn’t have photos.

The next step was to start sketching out the emails. I didn’t have any design tools at the time so I used Microsoft Word. I printed out the sketches to get feedback from various stakeholders.

After making the suggested changes, it was time to pass the mock-up to the Email team via JIRA. They created an HTML proof. It looked simple, to-the-point, and fit well on a mobile screen. 

Next, it was time to choose an email subject line. Instead of “Congratulations! Your recipe’s been published,” we opted for “Great News! Your recipe has been published.” 

Once the proof was tested and the subject line decided on, all that remained was validating the intended recipients. I sent over the required information so the team could put the emails into production.

I enjoyed the process from start to finish, and am reminded of it every time I publish a recipe and get an email notification!

What I’d do differently:

I worked on these email notifications a year before taking my UX certificate course and discovering UX writing as a field in its own right. I learned a lot that I could have applied to the process. 

• First, I would have looked at more content across the site to inform word choice. Even though we don’t have official brand voice guidelines, consistency is important. The language in the original email doesn’t match other language on site. 

• Then, I would have gathered feedback in a more formalized way. I would have printed different variations on the wording and showed them to 3 to 5 stakeholders for input. If there were no common themes in the feedback, I’d reiterate and repeat.

• I also would have sought feedback from some of our brand ambassadors, who are the ones most likely to receive the emails given the volume of their contributions to the site. 

• Given time and buy-in, I would ask the Email team to do an A/B test on the subject line. We made a judgment call, but test results would have been a more reliable indicator of the most effective choice.