Responsive email design for Nuffield Trust

Email templates aren’t the sexiest projects to be working on but they can be an important part of an organisation’s digital marketing. Nuffield Trust came to us with a set of wireframes but I asked Claire Richardson, our client at Nuffield Trust if she’d mind us trying something a bit different. It was a big departure from the existing approach, but they were interested in our ideas.

There were a few issues with Nuffield Trust’s existing emails that we helped to address.

Each email felt like a formal letter from their Director including a “Dear…” and a signature at the bottom. For a modern and forward thinking organisation this was coming across as stuffy. We suggested breaking down the copy into discrete points - each with an individual action. People don’t have time to read long emails and tend to scan headlines. Breaking down the content in this way made the information more engaging and easier to scan.

Over the years, HTML emails have morphed into mini versions of an organisation’s website. The problem with this is that multi-column layouts are hard to scan — should I be reading top to bottom or left to right? I wanted Nuffield Trust to use a single column and focus on a single lead item at the top, listing other content, in order of importance, underneath. People glance quickly at newsletters, so you have to get them interested straight away; we lead with a big striking image followed by a nicely laid out list of content below, allowing recipients to easily scan through the items. There’s a nice blog from Campaign Monitor that includes some eye-tracking research to illustrate why this is a good idea: Email usability: The science of keeping it short and sweet.

When the existing email templates were originally conceived, mobile wasn’t really a consideration. However, a significant number of Nuffield Trusts subscribers were opening their emails on smartphones and would have been finding them difficult to read as the text was so small. With all email templates, you’re very much at the mercy of the email client but we were able to do lots with the iPhone’s native Mail app, which made up a large proportion of Nuffield Trust’s mobile users. 

There were some other benefits too — Nuffield Trust’s main typeface, Futura, is a standard iOS font, meaning we could keep the emails on brand and fallback to Helvetica and Arial for other users. Campaign Monitor’s Responsive Mobile Guide is a great starting point to see what’s possible with mobile on email these days.

We took a mobile first approach to the redesign, which helped to trim down the content to the minimum that needs to be there to get users to click through to full articles or to download reports.

Nuffield Trust were really pleased with the end result and so were we. Click through rates instantly went up by 10% and the emails look modern and are easier to read both of desktop and mobile. However, one of the best things to come out of the re-design is that Nuffield Trust have changed the way they communicate with their audience. Gone are the long, stuffy formal letters and scrappy images, which have been replaced but eye-catching photos and snappy copy. 

Since the redesign, Claire Richardson and the rest of the organisation have done a great job with editorial — keeping the copy short and using images well. I now get a little glow of satisfaction every time one of their emails drops into my inbox.

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