Designs fresh out the oven with June

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📋 TL;DR key takeaways from this episode:

1. Email can be an extension of a product. High-quality email design can give the customer an experience, setting the expectation for a high-quality product.

2. Imagery showcases how the product is made and the quality it's made with. Include product photography and visual content to show the product and entice your audience to buy the product.

3. Use A/B testing with your email imagery to see what works for your audience, like including photos with people in the email vs. photos of the product by itself.

*BONUS* Use a GIF to preview a video of the product in action. Keep the GIF light on size (aim for 600KB) to keep the email light.

Matthew Smith: Happy Feedback Friday, everybody. I'm hungry. Let's talk about some June cooking.

Matt Helbig: What's up, Email Geeks? Welcome back to another episode of Feedback Friday. This week, we're looking at smart ovens.

Matthew Smith: Are they smart, though? I think these are pretty cool.

The branding work on June is really attractive. Primarily it's beautiful product photography. And being able to move through some interesting visual content that they've got to show me and entice me into cooking with June.

This is the kind of thing that us lazy Americans are getting more and more interested in where it's like, let's put something in the oven before I go to work and then have it ready for me, and my neat little app tells me it's done. Yay! This is part of that mix, and I think June has done a really nice job.

One of the things that’s working really well is this live text, and it allows for a very convenient way to model it out here on mobile. I would probably change the heading size on mobile, just a little smaller so you can fit more words per line. It's a little hard to read in this context. But the body copy is great, and they do this throughout some of their other emails as well.

Again, this product photography is really great. It's not that expensive to get fantastic product photography in the long run. You can get it done. It doesn't always meet the highest standards, but several hundred dollars and you're off to the races.

They did a nice job here and I think it makes a huge difference. It’s giving me inspiration about what I could cook using June, and then seeing this beautiful imagery of the oven itself makes me want to go get it.

You can see, again, they start going after some holiday giving. This would have been done probably in the fall last year, and we start seeing “15% off,” a really nice big callout for that. And then we also get to see imagery here to let us know a little bit more about how June is made and the quality with which it's made.

Everything just feels really well thought out and designed. I'm impressed. You see this on every one of their emails. This is a GIF that's digging me into a potential video. I know that there's Sendspark that you can put video in email for the email clients that allow for it. But driving with a GIF and a video play button so that I want to go find out more about June. This is a great way to do it.

I can tell from the GIF that this is a pretty lightweight GIF. It's not overly heavy, which is important. Giving me this indication about some of these icons that they've created for it. It's a great visual into your experience and what you expect from June.

Everything's so refined. You really start to expect this is going to be a high-quality product. If the email were not designed this well, you wouldn't get that sensibility.

What do you think could be improved on this, Matt?

Matt Helbig: I really appreciate how premium these emails feel. I feel like that’s them really understanding their audience on what they're expecting.

And I think you've said this in previous episodes that email can really be an extension of product. For these emails, that really feels like that. I'm actually kind of interested in getting these types of emails and I'm really interested in what other sort of triggered emails they might have.

When they use live text like that, I was actually taken aback just because it looks so premium and it feels so thought out and great. There isn't a lot to really change. Maybe some of the copywriting and the offer stuff, getting in sync with those customers even more about what they're really wanting to see if it's more recipes or things like that.

Maybe with that product photography, they could try to bring in some user-generated content as well to make it feel a little bit more testimonial-driven when it comes to making you want to buy this product or subscribe or something.

But overall, I think they've done a really good job on taking the time with these templates and really building a design system so that they can put in different content and use their product imagery effectively to get that message across.

Matthew Smith: Yeah, I agree. I think one of the things that would be interesting too would be to split test different types of imagery. Seeing the oven over and over is helpful and it's interesting, but what about if I saw the net effect more as part of it, which is being around my family more because I'm not having to spend as much time in the oven maybe.

And some of the intelligence quality of the smart part, being able to give me that human interaction. Maybe seeing some faces of people could be an interesting split test to try that out. I think they've done a really nice job.

As usual, I'm always talking about design golf, and you can see, except for things like visuals like this, their primary colors might be four or five at the most. And they've just done a really nice job of keeping that limited. And same with their typography. It feels really balanced and helps this feel premium.

Well done, June. Looking forward to having some good food now because of all this. I'm looking forward to a good weekend. Happy Friday, Email Geeks. We'll talk to you soon.

Matt Helbig: See ya.