Etsy’s emails makes up one of the many touch points that helps Etsy build relationships with its customers. After the marketing template redesign, it became clear to outfit our transactional emails with mobile responsive capabilities. The transactional emails’ framework had become fragmented and stagnant due to no ownership which made it difficult to develop it. As emails are thought of at the end of the product’s process, we needed a tool to make email development scalable and mobile-optimized.
The framework
The Marketing Communication team at Etsy took this opportunity to rebuild an email toolkit from scratch. The Marketing team and I considered how an email should be consumed and best practices on how to design an email. I audited how emails are developed in the industry, documented each of the components, and created best practices on how to design emails for the customers.
The execution
Kevin Gessner, an engineer, built the email framework using SMARTY language to make the emails more robust, mobile-responsive, and easier to change. I contributed to the email’s visual language and mobile-responsiveness to maintain a consistent visual language across all platforms.
The impact
I advocated for the use of the email toolkit and led workshop sessions on how to use the email toolkit for new design hires. The email toolkit, being modular and mobile-responsive, helped teams create new emails without writing a single line of an HTML table tag.