The rescue nobody wanted to admit was needed
Five months with a US smart home security brand, working across consumer and business lifecycle email.
Straightforward enough on paper
In practice, it was something more complicated. A small team brought in because things weren't working: not
broken exactly, but unfinished. The voice was right. The instincts were right. Somewhere between strategy
and send, things fell apart
Marketing were firefighting
Developers were patching brittle templates
Twelve disconnected journeys were pulling in different directions
Inbox first
Render simulators will tell you what an email looks like. They won't tell you what it feels like to receive
one
So the obvious move was to become the customer
I signed up for everything. Every journey, every persona: the live customer, the lapsed one, the person
who'd just moved into a house with the security system already installed. Not on a simulator. In a real
inbox, on the devices that the data said actually mattered
It was the only way to feel where the experience held and where it quietly fell apart
The gaps weren’t in the strategy
They were hiding in the experience
What got built
Somewhere in the middle of this, an abandoned cart email arrived
You have some items left in your cart
That was it. No image. No reminder of what was in there or why it had seemed worth buying
But the customer was already interested. They'd already done the hard part. The email's job wasn't to bring
them back to the site: it was to do the thinking for them. To remind them what they'd seen, why it had felt
right, and make it effortless to say yes
