Time
Agu. 2024 - Sep. 2024
Role
UX Designer
Team
2 UX Designers
3 Developers
2 Marketing specialists
1 Content Designer
Tools
Figma
Midjourney
Alibaba.com EDM Revamping
In 2024 Summer, I joined Alibaba.com’s ICBU Team as a User Experience Design Intern, contributing to the interaction and user experience design of the GGS national site's seller side.
Alibaba.com is a world-leading B2B e-commerce online platform. However, the EDM (Email Direct Marketing) template of its seller side is not uniform, and the information structure is confused, resulting in a low CTR (Click Trough Rate) and user activity. I researched and re-designed the EDM components, and selected a key email as MVP for preliminary design optimization. After the pilot launch, the increased CTR of this MVP email indicating the success of design strategy, and provides a reference for the reuse iteration of EDM design in the future.
Impacts
Significantly increase CTR
Used “Consider” email as the MVP to design and development, increased the CTR of it by 2.3pp (from 0.75% to 3.05%) in 2 months.
The 1st EDM component library
Unified and designed the specification for the EDM Header and Footer component, and summarized 14 basic Body component styles for whole Design Team.
Background
Problem
EDM (Email Direct Marketing) plays a pivotal role in boosting a company's growth, serving as a crucial tool to elevate the conversion rates of new members. For our seller side marketing team, EDM is an important means of seller growth, it directs users to the Seller Center to learn how to better sell products on Alibaba.com, increasing the seller's platform activity. Currently, our EDM's design lacks consistency, presents weak brand essence and lags in providing a quality user experience, leading to an ineffective performance data: a high PV (Page View) but a disappointingly lower CTR, which averaging at merely 1.05%.
Design Challenge
Devise strategies to unify EDM user experience consistency and improve email CTR, thereby leading users to Seller Center and increasing user activity
Ideation
“Set a small goal”
Designing EDM components is a long-term endeavor... It is not realistic to wait until all the components are designed to improve each email. Using an agile development model, we expect to validate design value in a short period of time and promote reusable design strategies.
MVP
Preliminary & Testing
Future
Reuse & Iteration
Choose one key email as MVP to improve the layout and the design approach, and reuse the design strategy to other emails after confirming the design utility
Process
Even if I chose only one key email for optimization, I still need to support the entire EDM system. Therefore, structure is super important as well as strategy and appearance. I likened the design process to drawing a character, and broke it down into the following steps:
Step 1: Building Skeleton: Research and form the basic EDM component structure.
Step 2: Defining soul: Analysis and research to form EDM design strategy.
Step 3: Filling flesh: Optimize theme and text contents / UXUI design for key email.
Step 1 - Form component
Step 2 - Define strategy
Step 3 - Design key email
Step 1
Form Component
Summarize variable component styles
Through the analysis of our current EDM emails' categories, combined with the research of competitive products, I found that Header and Footer could be used as the "General Components", but Body components are variable. By ensuring the simplicity of the structure, and easy reuse, I summarized 14 basic Body component styles.
Unify general components styles
For the General Components, I designed and output specifications of Header and Footer, support business in different scenarios, enrich the EDM component library.
Step 2
Define Strategy
How to choose the key email?
EDM's primary role during the Seller Growth Phase is to steer users towards the Seller Center, boosting platform activity and business transactions. Through systematic analysis, I choose the "Consider" email as the MVP for the following reasons:
Strong functional importance: “Consider” is the email as the second email to registered users, based on the “Welcome” email, it introduce the advantages of the platform in more depth.
Large sending volume: 25% of the total volume of sending.
Poor legacy data: In last few months, PV is 15% but CTR is only 0.75%.
How to get the design strategy?
After selecting the key email, I first analyzed the user composition of it:
Firstly, the data shows that 74% of the target users of this email are both buyers and sellers, among which the buyers are less aware of starting business by selling goods on Alibaba's platform.
Secondly, 82% of the target users have never been to the Seller Center, which indicates that the trigger provided by us in the email is not strong enough for users to click, and it is not enough to promote them to become active users.
At the same time, it can be seen that the current design of this email has a lot of user experience problems, including:
Attention: too many words cause the visual focus is not clear, and the key theme is not explained.
Interest: narrative content is loose and does not distinguish the key points, which makes people tired.
Desire: the core values are not strong enough to convince users.
Action: the CTA is placed too far back, users may not have the patience to read the entire email, and the purpose of CTA guidance is not clear enough, resulting in weak user actions.
Generate strategy
Combined with the analysis of competitive products and data, I finally got two design strategies:
Uniforming a themed story to enhance user awareness: Keep one theme for the whole email, and tell story step by step.
Enhancing the interaction to increase user activity: Provide compelling content and the right instant action opportunities.
Uniform a themed story
Enhance interactions
Design Solution
# Uniforming a themed story to enhance user awareness
# Enhancing the interaction to increase user activity
Step 3
Design Key Email
Optimize layout
In this design upgrade, I first re-constructed the structure of this email and re-created the story line. Through the storytelling way of exposition, development, climax and echo, I attract users to read step by step, deliver core values, and provided users with opportunities to become actively at every node.
Design iteration
For the "Exposition - Intro" module, I pay more attention to the text content and visual presentation to improve the effectiveness of the message, accurately convey the main theme of this email, and firmly grasp the user's eye.
The core theme of this email is -- "Alibaba.com can help you sell things to all over the world", so the keywords of this module include "global sense", "shipping capacity", "happy characters", etc. After competitive product research, I explored different design styles, and selected a form through the evaluation of development cost, stability and information delivery efficiency.
Introduction module
This module is the beginning of the whole story, I use Midjourney to generate the banner to show its core theme.
Core value module
This module is the development of the story, which tell user the core functions of Alibaba.com platform. In order to show information more clearly, I optimize the information hierarchy and use key data to attract users.
Success story module
As the climax of the story, I provide successful cases to impress users more rather than simple words.
Final Design
Design impacts
The design was launched on September 24, 2024. Two months later, the user CTR was significantly improved, which verified the rationality of the design strategy.
