Overview
Product-triggered emails are essential for users to progress in the home closing process online. Users need ample time to review each document carefully and work with their arsenal of folks: whether a broker, title agent, sellers, or even just their partner purchasing the home with them.
I was brought on to help our product designer overhaul our product emails.
My role
• Content strategist
• UX writer
• UX writer
I collaborated closely with our awesome product designer to improve the content in tandem with her updated product-triggered email designs.
Tools I used
• Excel: to audit all of the email templates we currently had and share edited content with the designer
• Sketch: to review proposed designs
• Sketch: to review proposed designs
uncovering the problem
If you’re planning to close on your home online using Notarize, what you might not expect is to receive lots of emails with all the important documents throughout the process. Since all of the home closing documents are essential, email delivery of these messages is key.
While I’ve never closed on a home myself, I can only imagine it’s an extremely daunting task. The mere thought of all the paperwork, making sure you have all your details in order, all while signing away a good sum of cash is anxiety-inducing!
Since our company existed to make one of those steps of the closing process a bit easier, the communications from the product had to be just as easy. Since many of our product-triggered emails were really basic and borderline un-branded, users were mistrusting of the authenticity of the emails that did come in. It was absolutely essential that users had ample amounts of time to carefully review their documents so they could progress to the subsequent stages of closing.
The ask
If an email gets stuck in a prospective home owner’s spam folder, they potentially lose a ton of time in the process. And if a prospective home owner doesn’t receive their documents when they expect them, it’s a failure on the product’s part.
A product designer on the team was doing a major overhaul of our product-triggered email system because we saw low deliverability rates and a high number of calls to customer care of users who couldn’t locate their product-triggered emails. I was asked to overhaul the content of the emails so it was clear to users what was being asked of them at each step of the closing.
The outcome
We now have new email templates for each step of the home closing process!
I took an audit of all the emails, subject heading lines, and what each email was meant to ask a user. We didn’t content brand guidelines nor a voice and tone guide so edited each email to sound more human and conversational. When re-writing the content, I leaned heavily towards templatizing what we could since we didn’t have a UX writer who could be on the project for subsequent edits. I repurposed many elements we used throughout our website and marketing assets, such as taglines, boilerplate language, and CTAs.
I worked with our product designer using Sketch to see how each message looked within the product, in both desktop and mobile.
If I were still working on this project…
Looking back on this work, I see so many improvements I'd want to make if I were still working on this project.
I’d want to rework the hierarchy of each email and add clear CTAs closer to the top. Although these emails are relatively short, if a user can spend even less time reading our emails and getting on with the closing process, that’s a win for us.
I’d also work closer with the product designer to make each email more consistent. Some content in header images note the Notarize product (Notarize for Business, Notarize for Mortgage) while others simply say Notarize. Users could become confused if they’re using us for the first time and they see different terminology used throughout the experience.
Since I was the only content person at the time of rewriting these emails, I had to templatize as much of the email work as I could. I would have loved to capture my learnings to create a voice and tone guide which could be applied to any communications to users, in the product and beyond.
