REI Mobile Email Templates

October 2011 – November 2012
Responsive Design, Creative Direction, Mobile Content Strategy, Testing & Analysis

As a design director at Responsys, I worked with REI to create responsive email templates for their award-wining Gearmail marketing program. REI’s team observed an increase in mobile users, and wanted to be sure that all subscribers could open and buy from their emails. I led a yearlong project to design and test a set of responsive email templates. REI began using these templates during 2012 holiday season, becoming an early adopter of responsive email and ensuring that they captured sales from mobile shoppers.

While responsive web design was gaining traction in 2011 and 2012, resources on responsive email design were almost non-existent. I worked with Responsys' lead developer, Trisha Smith, to research what was possible in email environments, which are often very buggy.

We developed prototypes to test out support for media queries and CSS in email and created guides to help share information about responsive design could be used.

As we were researching responsive design, REI and other clients were starting to see significant spikes in mobile email opens.

Seeing an opportunity, we designed prototypes and presented them to REI during our regular planning sessions. These demonstrated how responsive design tactics could be applied to recent campaigns to improve the mobile experience.

We worked with REI to set up several A/B tests to measure the impact of responsive design. We targeted a few sale campaigns (which were low-risk) and sent the same content in responsive and non-responsive layouts. 

We had a hunch that responsive design would improve the user experience, but it was also important to see if responsive design would improve performance and be realistic within our production cycle. The test results were positive (though not dramatic), and REI's interest in responsive design grew.

Once REI had evidence that responsive design was working well, they were eager to roll it out during the holiday shopping season. I worked with the designers on my team to help them get comfortable with responsive grids and design techniques.

We collaborated on the sketching, content planning, and visual design exercises and worked closely with our developers to get feedback on which patterns worked best. 

We rolled out the new responsive framework with the first holiday campaign of 2012, and implemented it on nearly every campaign after that. The initiative was a big success for REI, and was even recognized by a several industry publications.

As clients like Nordstrom and Amazon became interested in responsive email design, I used this process as a guide for setting up the project for success.