Keep calm and design on with JUDY

This FF episode was sponsored by emfluence. Get paired with a marketer to see how your strategy will work in the emfluence Marketing Platform.

📋 TL;DR key takeaways from this episode:

1. Help your audience focus on a specific goal per email. With e-commerce, keep the design focused and simple with the combination of design colors and product photography.

2. Invite your customers to make a buying decision on a landing page rather than trying to immediately convert them in an email. Bring in personalized, dynamic content to speak directly to your audience.

3. If you’re sending an all-image email, think about accessibility. Make sure text is easy to read on mobile, include alt-text, and be consistent.

Matthew Smith: Happy Feedback Friday, everybody. It's another good day to be here with Matt Helbig. How are you? 

Matt Helbig: What's up, email geeks? Welcome back to another Feedback Friday with Matthew Smith. 

Matthew Smith: Well, today I've got some of my favorites. I don't know if you knew, but preparation is the way, and JUDY is how that gets done. I had an enjoyable time going through their brand.

They popped up as just an excellent brand not long ago. And of course, during COVID, all this stuff got pretty interesting. I think it's an exciting brand to follow, but they have some exciting emails. I thought I'd take us through a couple of these.

They're not just talking about what happens if you're in a pandemic, but also what happens if you're in storms? How ready are you? What is the problem? Is preparation a real thing?

They're trying to legitimize preparation where many people think about preppers out there being a little bit cuckoo. They're making us think a little differently.

I'm pretty interested in what they're doing and on an email level they check off many boxes for me. Simplicity and a focused number of colors. What's working for you? What are you noticing?

Matt Helbig: Interesting to see their email strategy because I've been targeted online on Instagram a bunch with a lot of their advertising. I think they are leaning into the branding aspect of this brand.

Their email strategy is similar to their Instagram, which is getting some excellent product photography, bringing some cool layouts. I think many of these emails are pretty image-heavy, but I think they stand out by trying to use different fonts and unique designs to make their creative stand out compared to some of these other brands that might not be so flashy.

Matthew Smith: If you're going to do all image, one of the main critiques that we've had has been that all image emails tend to be small.

Several levels of accessibility:

• Is it responsive so that people can just read it in a different environment than your desktop?
• Can somebody who has temporary sight impairment, read it and get access to it?
• Can somebody who has permanent sight impairment, do they have access to it?

They're covering their ground, at least on the first one, where these type sizes are readable in a mobile context. I've been pretty happy with that portion. I would love to look at their copy and their strategy. I think these are smart.

They play on this idea of the fear of missing out and being prepared, which is an integral part of their brand. They do things like, "Don't miss your chance to make a choice." Somebody has done some excellent work with the copy on something like that. They always have this consistent CTA in black and this great use of orange and sometimes yellow. I think that this gets the point across so well. It's just super consistent. The type sizes are consistent. There's very little that's getting in my way here to make a purchase. I love that.

I'm interested in their strategy on this one, how they've captured this idea of like in the car, on the go, hunkering at home—these different levels of kits that you can get. Whereas prepping, in general, can seem overwhelming, they've done an excellent job of making it seem pretty accessible just to be prepared and a lot less cuckoo feeling.

So, what would you change, if anything?

Matt Helbig: I appreciate how short and to the point these are. They don't dive in too much about what's in the packs, at least in this series. They're just inviting you to a landing page and letting you know what you need to know when it comes to these products. I appreciate it's this invitation to a click to go to a landing page to make a buying decision rather than convert you into the email.

These are pretty hard creatives to make fully live text and fully accessible. Even if they spent all that time doing that, I'm not sure if the ROI would be there for them. I think optimizing for mobile is probably the best thing they can do with these. Maybe they could try to bring in some more personalization or dynamic content or something, depending on the different segments they have in their audience. 

Overall, I feel like they're doing a pretty great job with the products that they have and how they're marketing them using email, social, and different channels to do that.

Matthew Smith:  I'm pretty impressed. One of the things I particularly liked, too, is using these notifications to drive people into traffic. Good work, JUDY folks. Come check out the emails on reallygoodemails.com and see how they're doing some of this stuff.

The driving points that you can walk away with are: JUDY has done a great job with simplicity and playing design golf, getting down to the simplest number of colors, and the least amount of differences to focus the user on a specific goal job email so you know what you need to do in each of these emails very quickly. Well done, JUDY. Thank you for being a good inspiration. See you on the flip side.

Matt Helbig: Peace.

Matthew Smith: Happy Friday. Talk soon.