Email

[gavinwye]

Screenshot

Email template

Other links

GOV.UK hackpad: https://designpatterns.hackpad.com/Emails-9PkJ3LxdWFO

[gavinwye]

Email sent from Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme. Contributed/designed by Lisa Rae.

[katephipps1]

Emails sent from Apply for Venture Capital Schemes - Advance Assurance. Designed by Kate Phipps from ITR team (HMRC).

Email sent to users that uploaded their supporting documents during the main flow:

Screenshot

Email sent to users that want to email / post their supporting documents (and need to do so in order to complete their application):

Screenshot

[jennifer-hodgson]

Exists on the GOV.UK Design System backlog here.

[mikeash82]

Contributions moved to Sending emails on GOV.UK issues backlog

[jennifer-hodgson]

I'm reopening, following a discussion in the HMRC content community meeting. Although we should certainly align x-gov, we have agreed to work on an HMRC pattern for emails to later upstream.

[TWDHughes]

Hi all - following up on the doc shared recently.

We’ve been doing some preliminary research (qualitative only) on email subject lines, and would love to open this up to discussion/further work by the community.

To recap: we tested alert-only emails as part of our work to develop two way secure messaging. i.e. emails which tell you to sign in to your account for the details. We tried different ways of making that inbox view (particularly on mobile) jump out at the user, and explored this with test participants using elicitation exercises.

With alert-only emails our high level hypotheses are:

• Subject text has an effect on the conversion rate.
• Jargon in the Subject text lowers the conversion rate.
• A generic Subject text lowers the conversion rate.
• A behavioural hastener in the Subject text lowers the conversion rate.
• The acronym ‘HMRC’ in the Subject text raises the conversion rate.
• The words ‘tax' or ‘tax message’ in the Subject text raise the conversion rate.
• The words ‘reply’ or ‘replied’ in the Subject text raises the conversion rate.
• The word ‘new’ in the Subject text raises the conversion rate.
• The word ‘change' in the Subject text raises the conversion rate.
• The words ‘sign in’ in the Subject text affects the conversion rate (whether higher or lower).
• Some combinations of the above approaches to Subject-text wording raise the conversion rate more than individual approaches do.
• Preview text seems far less important, if it is noticed at all.

1 = sender 2 = subject line 3 = preview text pulled in from email

*Standard emails - which don’t ask the user to sign in - pose their own challenge. This is because they can often have quite unwieldy headings. Initial thoughts are that front-loading with the key information is essential (particularly because it’s easy to cut off the important bit, such as ‘we received something’, when it follows a long service name, for example). I’m exploring with our devs whether we can specify subject line and email headings separately - currently they are one and the same thing. Decoupling these would give greater freedom to customise the messaging.

Thanks Tom

[Edem-Ag]

There is limited email guidance from GDS and HMRC (the HMRC guidance is on internal systems). Our current guidance is not collated and could be improved. Writing for GOV.UK also has some relevant information.

Dedicated email guidance will make it easier for designers to write effective, consistent, accessible emails. They need more information about how emails should be written, when they should be written and security considerations.