Green Dot
A design system for email
Green Dot is a financial technology and bank holding company that provides solutions to Americans unbanked with its range of prepaid debit cards (plastic) and financial digital products. It is the world's largest prepaid debit card company by market capitalization. Green Dot is also a payments platform company and is the technology platform used by Apple Pay Cash, Uber, and Intuit.
Date
2018 - 2019
Role
Branding, Design, Production, Development, UX/UI
In 2018 the marketing team began work migrating to a new version of it Salesforce CRM Platform. The also marked a great time to refresh the current lifecycle email program. While my marketing teammates sought to develop new content, I began looking at ways to help automate the system to make the team more efficient.
At the time, email development was a very manual process. Emails would be designed and then manually coded and uploaded into Saleforce for the marketing managers to test and deploy. Put across the many different brands, the process wasn’t sustainable for the long run. It would have to be simplified.
I began to look at email design not as individual emails or pages, but rather as a design system – a system of components. We had been using the Flex Web design system for all of our web and digital properties, so it was a matter of translating those components into Salesforce. I began with the flagship Green Dot brand, starting with the basic building blocks including such things as buttons, color palettes, and fonts. Elements that were frequently used together in emails were combined to form their own content blocks. For example, footers usually consisted of combinations of social icons, legal language, and important links. Finally, page templates were created for layouts that were often used. Creating the design system within Salesforce would save a lot of time for everyone involved. The design team wouldn’t need to continually recreate content, and the marketing team could actually build emails themselves without needing to touch code, and since the system had already been tested that would cut down dramatically on rendering issues.
The biggest challenge was learning the Salesforce content editor. It was the first time I had really used it, so I basically had a learn as you go approach. Another challenge were instances where custom html code was needed. These often took long longer to develop and test in order to accommodate the various email clients.
Templates:
I created templates and custom coded email for the lifecycle marketing campaigns for the following brands:
Example lifecycle emails:
