Email Design
System
Crowd Cow’s email marketing channel needed a scalable CRM design system that balanced consistency with creativity across lifecycle, promotional, and targeted campaigns. The goal was to build a unified system that streamlined production, empowered cross-functional teams, and elevated the customer experience, while saving significant time and resources.
Creative Direction & Design
Core Colors
System Pillars
Modularity
Consistency
Scalability
Efficiency
Visual Elements
The Challenge
When I joined, the CRM workflow was fragmented. Every campaign required custom development, branding was inconsistent, and QA cycles dragged on. The team was spending more time fixing emails than strategizing customer engagement.
This fragmentation wasn’t just operational, it limited our ability to deliver timely lifecycle moments, run targeted campaigns in Iterable, and tell a cohesive brand story across the customer journey.
Approach
I led the redesign of our entire CRM email system, from research and strategy to design system creation and platform integration. I began by advocating for a design-systems approach to leadership, showing how modularity would improve scalability, creative quality, and lifecycle performance. After securing buy-in from the Head of Marketing and CEO, I audited every existing email across campaigns, lifecycle flows, and triggered messages, identified gaps in brand consistency and user experience and mapped opportunities where personalization and targeted messaging could strengthen engagement.
My team and I then designed a plug-and-play modular email system in Figma that balanced flexibility with brand identity.
Throughout the process, I partnered closely with marketing, engineering, and our CRM owner to ensure the templates integrated seamlessly into Iterable, including dynamic content, segmentation rules, and nurture sequencing.
This system standardized components and modules to ensure high design quality while staying simple and accessible
Component Library
The email design system was built on three levels of components. Foundation elements established our visual language through typography, color systems, spacing, and grid guidelines. Core components like buttons, headings, product cards, and imagery treatments formed the building blocks of each email. Modules combined these components into pre-built sections for specific purposes, creating ready-to-use elements. This hierarchy gave us strong brand consistency while still enabling fresh creative across lifecycle journeys and campaigns.
Welcome Flow
Once the system was built, we put it into action by rebuilding our entire 5-email welcome sequence.
Using the new components, we created a cohesive, narrative-driven experience that welcomed new members, introduced sourcing and quality, highlighted membership value and showcased featured products and producers.
This was something we previously outsourced, but our new system allowed us to build everything internally, faster, more strategically, and with stronger brand cohesion.
Content Strategy
The design system unlocked efficiency, but updating our visual content strategy was equally important. When I joined, imagery felt dated and didn’t reflect product quality.
I led a refreshed content direction, new photography, color tone, and visual hierarchy, that aligned perfectly with the modular email system. This elevated both the brand perception and the clarity of each email, making the CRM channel feel polished and premium.
Results
The impact was significant. Development time was cut in half, QA cycles became roughly 30% faster, and the brand’s visual language finally appeared consistently across every CRM touchpoint. Open rates peaked at 70% following the redesign, and our team was able to turn around promotional, lifecycle, triggered, and targeted campaigns far more quickly. Cross-functional partners could now collaborate directly in Figma, and engineering was able to redirect time toward higher-value product work. Most importantly, email, one of our most critical CRM channels, evolved into a reliable and recognizable extension of the brand.
Beyond The Numbers
This project showed how applying design systems thinking to CRM can transform not just production but the entire customer journey. By bringing structure to the channel, we unlocked more creativity, better storytelling, and stronger customer connection—the exact balance that makes CRM a powerful extension of brand experience.
An intuitive, scalable design system that elevated the brand experience & significantly improved CRM performance.
