How to make a year-in-review email

I partnered with OpenPhone, the best phone system for teams, to ship their first year-in-review email. Learn the actual steps we took to make it, so you can do the same for your company. This email won Customer.io’s Best Email Campaign Design award.

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Step 1: Sketch your concept until you’re convinced users will love it

For OpenPhone’s year-in-review email, I made four rounds of sketches before we landed on a concept we were confident users would love.

This is the concept work behind the scenes.

This is the year-in-review email we shipped.

I literally made sketches on paper, scanned them with an app on my iPhone, then dropped them into Figma for us to review live.

I recommend using pen and paper because the stakes feel low. You can’t ship a sketch, so nothing feels set in stone. You can play around and figure it out.

Do not start thinking about logistics like the data you need or the exact design implementation at this point. Focus all your energy on what could be valuable and shareable.

Go digging for the best metrics and numbers and charts to use by looking in these spots:

• In your product
• In your previous emails
• In your imagination

We decided to show a bunch of personalized and dynamic charts to show each team’s progress. I had no idea how to implement this. John MacGaffey, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at OpenPhone, is the brains behind actually making the charts and also the most technical marketer I know. He made a whole presentation on how we made the charts with all the nuances behind the implementation.

The charts are the centerpiece behind the email. We landed on making them through sketching to land on the best concept.

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Step 2: Make the design to bring your vision to life

If it’s not obvious by now, making a year-in-review email is a team sport. Carolyne Gardener, Senior Marketing Designer at OpenPhone, turned my pen-and-paper sketches into a beautiful design that won Customer.io’s Best Email Campaign Design award.

Your job here is to just pass off the sketch and concept you made to a designer to let them do their thing.

In Figma, I put the sketches and written out copy next to it, so the designer has real copy to work with. They can easily copy and paste the text into their design too.

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Step 3: Pull in the data you need to populate the email

Your year-in-review email will include personalized data. You need to get this data into your email marketing tool to populate the emails.

Phil Jones, Principal Analytics Engineer at OpenPhone, did the heavy lifting getting the data into Customer.io.

Your job is to organize all of your data asks into a doc. Here’s a glimpse of what ours looked like.

Notice how a lot of data we needed was still needed. You can expect this, especially if you’re trying to ship the most valuable year-in-review email for your users, and because you didn’t constrain what’s possible in the concepting process.

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Step 4: Build the year-in-review email in your lifecycle automation tool

We used Customer.io’s Design Studio to build the year-in-review email in Customer.io. I built out the structure of the email by trying to replicate the Figma design as closely as possible. John added the final polish with formatting needed and adding in all of the dynamic fields and charts.

Input:

Output:

The build in CIO:

Again, John MacGaffey did this piece and you need to watch his presentation on how if you haven’t yet!

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Step 5: Ship after a ton of QA

Make sure all of your segments are right. Make sure all of the data is coming through. Make sure all of your charts are populating. Push the big send button, even though it’s probably going to feel scary.

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Step 6: Celebrate your results

The coolest thing is seeing people share their results.

Even for those who don’t share, they’ll be reminded of the quantified value they’ve experienced through your product. What they’ve done, their progress, and the value it’s added to their life and business, because you helped them see their year-in-review.