Brand

Founded over 40 years ago by Cyrus Harvey, Crabtree & Evelyn has evolved since 1972 from a small, family-run business specializing in fine soaps from around the world, to an international company with over 500 stores worldwide. Today the brand is renowned and respected for its original fragrances, fine foods and gorgeous gifts, all beautifully packaged to transform the ordinary rituals of daily life into extraordinary pleasurable experiences.

Objectives

Create a mobile responsive template that will:

• Make the campaign creation process as speedy and efficient as possible.
• Create on-brand great looking campaigns.

 The Challenge

With as many as 78% of customers opening their emails on mobile devices, it was crucial that Crabtree & Evelyn made their emails easy to read and engage with on phones. Another concern was that their emails were composed almost entirely of images so the message was getting lost for Android devices and email clients like Outlook which automatically block images. Crabtree & Evelyn, however, was not willing to compromise on the beautiful design of their image-based emails. As a small team without HTML expertise, they did not have the resource to overcome these challenges in-house.

The Solution

Crabtree & Evelyn worked with the Adestra Digital Design team to create a customized modular template solution for use in the Adestra Email Editor. This was the ideal solution as it allows for layout modules to be quickly edited, repeated and re-arranged by a marketer, worry-free of display issues in any email clients. The template was designed to be fully responsive across all widely-used mobile devices. It also captures Crabtree & Evelyn’s elegant brand style, locking down core brand elements while fulfilling best practice email methods such as using overlaid text on images to ensure that the message can be clearly read before images are downloaded.

How the email displayed with images turned off and on mobile device before redesign

How the same email displays with images turned off and on mobile after the redesign

The Result

The final result is a great on-brand experience for customers viewing on mobile devices. Crabtree & Evelyn has seen an overall improvement in engagement since implementing the template, with an 11% increase in average open rate after just five months following the template launch.

The campaign build time has been greatly reduced. As well as easing pressure on resources, it has given their Email Marketing Manager more time to think about strategy and optimize their campaigns for better performance. Using the template has made it easier to routinely test the impact of their message by changing the layout, re-ordering the content or changing the calls-to-action.

 

“After noticing almost 80% of email opens were coming from mobile devices, we knew the existing image-only designs meant we were putting a barrier in front of the vast majority of our subscribers. The modular template design which the Adestra team developed for us means we’re now able to provide the same beautiful content but in a way that puts the customers’ experience first.”

– Colin Hall, Email Marketing Specialist at Crabtree & Evelyn

 

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