QuickBooks Email

Intuit

QuickBooks Self-Employed had multiple product entry points, each with its own messaging, branding, and onboarding flow. Historically, the team relied on static, one-size-fits-all emails—each designed for a single audience. For complex, multi-path campaigns, this meant creating 15-20 unique emails per campaign to accommodate product intricacies.

Overview

To free up bandwidth for cross-functional teams, we developed a dynamic communications framework that enabled high-performing campaigns without compromising design quality. As a key designer in updating the QuickBooks Email Template, I also ensured the framework’s durability by integrating it seamlessly with the new modular designs.

Stakeholders

  • Group Marketing Manager, Relationship Marketing

  • Director of Design, QuickBooks Self-Employed

  • Sr. Content Designer, QuickBooks Self-Employed

  • Customer Marketing Communications

  • QuickBooks Core Design lead

O N E

Identifying an opportunity

Discovery and analysis

After a year of working on email production for QuickBooks Self-Employed, I identified an opportunity to streamline email design across the organization. Intuit had multiple entry points into its ecosystem, each with its own design language.

Streamlining messaging

While top-of-funnel engagement across Intuit was effective with varying product value props, the inconsistency in content and design strategy led to downstream churn as users encountered fragmented communication experiences. This was especially true for users that would eventually transition from QuickBooks to TurboTax, and vice-a-versa.

Auditing Intuit’s email ecosystem

Diving deeper into the E2E experience, I also observed these inconsistent top-of-funnel experiences led to deeper product complexities, affecting both user experience and communications. This resulted in overlapping campaigns, disjointed messaging, and unclear linking between different product areas, creating unnecessary friction for users.

From all my pressure testing, I documented the current email experience architecture to inform my efforts in streamlining production and gaining cross-functional and leadership buy-in.

T W O

Streamlining email production

Assessing the current workflow

I began by identifying the current email production workflow across multiple verticals of QuickBooks, interviewing several designers about their experiences. This allowed me to illustrate and provide example resourcing efforts for content and design functions.

Mapping manual effort to system design

After reviewing content and design workflows, I was able to begin mapping modular approaches to email production. This was an imperative step in being able to gain cross-functional leadership buy-in. Based on the varying ingress-points, target customers, and product complexities within each segment, the dynamic framework would need to flex accordingly.

T H R E E

Rolling out a framework

A successful and scalable solution

The result was a scalable solution that QuickBooks Self-Employed and other QuickBooks offerings adopted. After its success in my segment, I redesigned Prep4Prep to be dynamic, leading other design partners to adopt the system. QuickBooks Payroll also sought me out to design their FTU series, eager to implement the dynamic framework for improved efficiency and consistency.