As a Senior Designer on the Mercedes-Benz team, I participated in the ideation and designed the CRM newsletters, the Dealer Delivery App, and helped with designing new parts of mbusa.com amongst other tracks in the account.
Role: Visual Design
Agency: Razorfish
In early 2019, the Mercedes-Benz eCRM team set out to give InRoads, the Mercedes-Benz bimonthly newsletter, a grand refresh.
Challenge
Previously, InRoads was a low-funnel sales channel promoting vehicles, service maintenance and other products to a broad audience of Mercedes-Benz hand-raisers.
Opportunity
But with a strategic upgrade to the Salesforce platform, we were able to better target customers with relevant design variants and fully express the different lifestyles that the vehicle lineup represent.
The transformation began by exploring web friendly fonts to refine Corpo A and Corpo S, yet be similar enough so that the newsletters matched mbusa.com.
Playfair Display and Source Sans were the chosen fonts.
A typographic logo with the chosen fonts allowed for the editorial elegance we were looking for.
This sophisticated editorial now displays full-bleed imagery for a glossy magazine feel, with storytelling that connects the brand’s many fans on a relevant, yet aspirational level.
Since the launch of the new InRoads, we saw tremendous open rates over the old newsletter performance, which continue to climb substantially across both owners and prospects segments.
2,500,000 Subscribers
30% Subscriber Increase
60% Open Rate Increase
27% Average Open Rates
2,800,000 Unique opens
300,000 Resulting visits to MBUSA.com
InRoads is now the digital conduit that transports readers from their screens and into the driver’s seat of Mercedes-Benz.
Following the success of the InRoads newsletter refresh, the client decided to launch another set of newsletters to educate customers about AMG line of vehicles.
Challenge
The look and feel for this one was aiming more towards a masculine, race-like editorial, following the style as the existing of AMG website. Because these were never done before, there wasn’t a name for it.
Opportunity
This posed an opportunity to yet again create a luxurious newsletter representing the masculinity and speed of the AMG vehicles.
After the exploration of several names (Such as Torque, Turbo, Treads) the client decided to go with AMG Off The Line which allowed for an incorporation for the AMG typeface in the logo.
Using the InRoads template and bringing in the existing AMG elements allowed for the series to still look like a part of the same MB family.
Challenge
The MB Dealer Delivery App, is an ever changing platform.
With the previous design, we found ourselves having to redesign the homepage every time something new was added.
Opportunity
To come up with a modular design that can not only house the web views, but allow for continual change with no need to redesign every time, and make it look congruent with the rest of the existing web experience.
Idea
A homepage containing an introductory video with links to different sections of the page. This allowed for elegant minimalism, rotational information and consistency of the brand.