Liberty Skis produces high performance all-mountain skis. They were the first (and remain the only) ski manufacturer to use bamboo in all their skis, just one of the many ways they show their respect for the environment.
When we met Liberty we were impressed by their well designed, well organized website. It's full of pics and info about their skis, bindings, poles and other gear. And they're already able to keep fans up to date with their frequently updated News section. Unfortunately their email newsletter wasn't on par with the rest of their online identity (old version below).
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In addition to the disconnect with the site's design, the email template was also difficult to update. Each new edition required the Liberty team to fiddle with the HTML, often producing less than ideal results and wasting valuable staff time.
Using their website as a style guide we designed the email to use many of the same features. The same background, header, navigation and several other key design elements were used, and we also kept the social media links to drive engagement with Liberty's other online hangouts.
Thankfully Liberty was already using our favorite email platform, MailChimp, meaning we could use MailChimp's template language to make updating the email dead simple. Now, updating the email is about as hard as editing a Word document. They simply click the section they want to change (text, image, etc) and can swap in new content and images.
Like always, we tested the new email template across all the major email systems - Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberrys and even the iPad. This ensured their new email looks and works correctly regardless of where someone reads it.
The first use of Liberty's new email template (December 2010) garnered their highest open and click rates to date.