Redesigning an email newsletter

Background

AdoptUSKids, a federally funded national project, serves individuals and families who are exploring or are in the process of adoption from foster care by providing information and connecting people to states and agencies. AdoptUSKids engages individuals and families through a variety of channels such as websites, social media, and email marketing.

Objective

The primary email marketing type AdoptUSKids uses to engage with individuals and families is a newsletter. During the period of the redesign, the newsletter had over 60,000 subscribers with above average open and click rates compared to similar newsletters in the nonprofit sector.

There were three main objectives for the redesign project:

• Redesign the newsletter to be mobile-friendly and improve usability
• Enhance the design to improve 508 accessibility
• Communicate to our family personas more effectively.

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RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

Research and evaluation

The first step I took was reviewing our personas in order to better understand the audience and their possible motivations. An example of one of our personas is called “Carrie Curious.” This persona represents individuals and families who are at the beginning of their adoption journey. They are exploring their options, perhaps heard or saw an AdoptUSKids public service announcement, or are trying to find information about adopting from foster care. The majority of newsletter subscribers likely fall into this persona type. Other persona types represent individuals and families who are further along in their adoption journey such as people who recently registered with the AdoptUSKid photolisting and are searching for kids to adopt or families who have already adopted and are looking for post-adoption support or information.

I researched best practices in email marketing and looked to sources like Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, and HubSpot. Additional sources such as Nielsen and Pew Research Institute informed my team on evolving digital habits.

I reviewed a wide range of email newsletters to learn the qualities of a successful email campaign. Some takeaways of a successful newsletter included:

• A clean visual design that strengthened the brand
• Relevant and well-written content with strong visuals to support it
• Easily accessible and readable on a variety of devices and email clients

Other evaluation methods my team utilized that also informed our content and design strategy:

• Content inventory
• Analytics
• User surveys performed by a University of Texas evaluation team
• Feedback from our communication channels such as social media, emails, and a 1-800 number

The analytics review involved looking at social media, website, and email analytics to determine which content was most popular. The user surveys and general feedback helped us understand what families liked and disliked about our website and what we could do to improve delivery of information.

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DESIGN

Wireframes

Coming out of the research phase, we identified the main content components of the revised newsletter:

• Profiles of featured children: The foundation of the newsletter is our listing of eight featured children and siblings available for adoption.
• Adoption story: People who are considering adoption and fostering consistently report (in surveys and conversations) that they want to read stories about other families. These stories serve as inspiration and also raise awareness.
• “Your questions answered”: A question-and-answer format to provide resources and answers to commonly asked questions about fostering and adoption.
• Child welfare news: A round up of news and stories to keep the family audience informed about current events and trends in foster care and adoption.

The wireframe showed the new information hierarchy and where each of the main content components would fall in the newsletter.

Final design and development

Final design involved adding brand elements and a new accessible color palette. One of the biggest changes was the layout of the featured children. In the previous version, child photos were much smaller. One of the challenges of featuring photos of children in foster care is the inconsistency in quality and size. My goal was to determine an “ideal” size that was large enough to highlight the photo but also ensure that most or all photos provided by caseworkers could be resized to the new dimensions without affecting quality.  

Although I was familiar with updating our current email templates, I had never created a mobile-responsive email template before. Through trial and error and a lot of learning, I developed a template and I performed quality assurance testing across numerous email clients, applications, and devices.

Prior to the redesign, the family newsletter’s average open rate was 21.3 percent. Average click rate was 3.1 percent. Just eight months after the newsletter redesign:

• Subscriber numbers had grown by 11%
• Average open rates had increased by 19%
• Average click rate had increased by 16%

The redesigned newsletter won a ClearMark award in the email and newsletter category. Some selected highlights from the judges:

• “Just enough use of white space, color, font size, and photos to keep the reader moving.”
• “The structure is very tidy and effective. Sections are clearly labeled and well planned.”
• “This newsletter is designed in so many ways with its primary audience in mind…the material needs to be pertinent and clearly aligned with the organization mission; this comes through in nearly all aspects of the design and content.”

View an archived newsletter. Please note some children's profiles may no longer be available for public viewing so images and links may be broken.

Working iteratively

The design of the newsletter has evolved since it won the Clearmark award. Periodically I conducted A/B tests to test design elements and content. I continued to make accessibility improvements and iterated based on data and feedback. Since I managed the design and development of this email newsletter, I was able to work more iteratively and learn from past mistakes and successes.

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