What is a "UI Emailing Designer"? Interview with Mickael Gascoin, Sarenza

It's rare that an interview starts this way, but what caught my eye when I contacted Michael for the first time, it's his title on LinkedIn! "Emailing UI Designer". We can't say that this is a very common title, especially in France. First of all, a designer who is exclusively dedicated to email marketing, then the notion of "User Interface" which evokes a much greater investment in the logic of email design than what is done in the field in general. Then, Sarenza is not a small machine, considering the volume of emails produced each month ... it was a very interesting meeting.

The interview

Could you briefly describe your background?

During my studies of visual communication, I had the chance to work in a company based in Rennes, it was in 2001, this company edited internet terminals whose interfaces were created internally. It was my first contact with user interfaces. At the time, my job was to identify interesting websites that could be loaded on the terminals.

Then, when the company abandoned this niche, which in hindsight was not sustainable, I went abroad, to Northern Ireland, to perfect my English. At the beginning, my goal was to go to London to work in the web, there were at the time a lot of activities related to the internet that were being born there. But in practice, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than expected and I came back to France where I learned PHP and web programming. One thing leading to another, I created my own web store by trying to buy back end of collection from brands, but at the time nobody believed in this kind of concept, especially from an unknown person.

As the store didn't grow as much as I would have liked, I started to work as a freelance on website creation. This led me to work for brands such as Hello Kitty for which I made banners and newsletters, these were my first contacts with email.

In email, what I liked right away were the many constraints that we encounter and that we don't find in other media. No possibility to use Javascript, animations limited to what GIF allows, that's what interested me. How can you do it with so few tools at your disposal? On emails, you have to think!

At the time, we started doing basic responsive, with tables at 100%. Media queries already existed, but knowledge on the subject was limited and it was far from obvious for the email world.

So I arrived at Sarenza to take care of the email among other things. It was five years ago and we were three in the web design team. At that time, the bosses of Sarenza had already understood that email was a strategic channel for their business. Today, the Sarenza studio is composed of 8 webdesigners and I am now exclusively in charge of the email part.

What is interesting to note, to add on the complexity of email, is that at Sarenza, we have a large part of our target that is using the webmail of Orange and that of La Poste. This means that the advice given on the Internet by American sites is not valid. So we had to manage and build our knowledge internally.

What led me to contact you for this interview was your job change that I saw passed around on LinkedIn. Why make the change from "emailing integrator" to "emailing UI designer"?

In terms of work organization at Sarenza, we now have a UX designer who is in charge of the coherence of the user experience across all the mediums we use. In discussing with him, we realized that more than design, more than advertising, we have a real reflection on the user interface. It's not just design that we produce anymore.

It's a change of vision, a change of mentality that comes, among other things, from changes in user behavior and usage. With the mobile, it's not just the terminal that changes, it's the environment, the place, the moment of reception of the message that we have to anticipate. To reflect these changes in our functions, we have therefore also changed their title.

What is your scope of work in your team?

Today, my specificity in the team is that I also do HTML integration while the web designers do not.

But beyond the purely creative aspect and HTML integration, I am also integrated in projects related to the exploitation of templates and the automation of their production. We recently redesigned all our emails by working on templates composed only of variables. This was a very big project to industrialize the production of newsletters. Previously, we did everything by hand by duplicating old newsletters.

But with the multiplication of the number of markets we target, it was no longer possible to work in this way. Today, each market manager can compose his own newsletter via a dedicated tool. The only thing they still send us briefs for is the images that will be integrated into the emails. For everything else, they have become autonomous.

As nothing existed on the market to automate the composition of emails based on templates, we designed this tool in-house.

Is there a community of email designers in France?

The job is relatively new in France, so I know very few people who have a job similar to mine. Many people still think that a newsletter is an ad with an image and text. Today, it's much more than that. Email is the beginning of a journey and this journey cannot be isolated, managed by others. The multiplicity of uses means that there is a need for a great deal of reflection around email.

Rare are the boxes which have a reflection of this type.

How is it that Sarenza has passed the stage of email industrialization and UI reflection?

It is a development logic that we have every day at Sarenza. The whole company is oriented towards industrialization. All countries combined, we have more than 200 newsletters per month, so it was logical to go that way.

What are the relations with the CRM team of Sarenza?

The CRM team analyzes all the newsletters in order to get figures and measure the performance of the different areas of the newsletters. On this basis we analyze the relevance of the modules to see where to place them in the newsletters.

We work by iteration. We define together the projects that we want to test and a few months later we make an evaluation to verify what to generalize, abandon or optimize.

What changes do you see coming in the business over the next few months/years?

Today, we need to move forward on the technical side. The email will be richer. For example, there have already been tests of forms directly in emails at Hotmail. Email will continue to be enriched on a technical level to offer more possibilities of interaction with the recipient. We have to prepare for this!

Bonus: computer graphics, from the sketch to the final version!