Keeping runners moving with responsive email templates
Client
New York Road Runners
Studio
In-house
My role
Email template design
UX/UI
When New York Road Runners updated its email service provider, it also decided to refresh its email templates so that they’d be responsive and more engaging. Given that the non-profit is comprised of many brands and communities, it needed templates that worked across the board and could be tailored for specific branding.
The new templates incorporate more visual hierarchy, clear calls to action, custom fonts and less text. Elevated marquee race emails stand out with gradient backgrounds in the race branding colors. In reviewing what worked best on mobile, I also encouraged phasing out 600px x 90px ads in favor of 300px x 250px ads that would be more legible on smaller displays.
Improving comprehension and production
While newsletters may lend themselves to being long format, race confirmation emails should have snackable content. Text heavy emails are never welcome, and can also be daunting to new runners whose first goal is to make it to the starting line.
Since race numbers are distributed by scanning personalized QR codes, I made sure that the race logo and a runner’s QR code were easily identifiable at the top. The remaining content—routinely mentioned information like race number pickup times or guidelines—were then linked to websites so that content only needed to be updated in one place and thus reducing the amount of time spent producing emails.
New layout
Old layout
2019 Year in Review
New York Road Runners wanted to compile unique runner data for its community in a dynamic year-end email developed by Movable Ink. While some data is presented on its results website and other data often tracked by personal GPS watches, we wanted this to show a bigger picture in a fun way.
After consulting with the IT and marketing teams for data points, I created small animations to incorporate with these stats. The email was segmented to include optional sections for people who achieve milestones like qualifying for the next year’s TCS New York City Marathon.
