Intuit — U.S. Data Evergreen Email Series
Case study
Intuit needed a full redesign and build of a 15-email evergreen series targeting data science professionals — a talent community nurture campaign spanning three distinct content tracks: a Welcome series, a Tech Stories series, and a Benefits series. The existing email template had aged out. The ask was a cleaner, more sophisticated design direction that still lived within Intuit's current brand guidelines, followed by full production of all 15 emails including copy, code, animation, and testing.
The approach
One direction to build from.
The project started where it should — with structure. Before any visual decisions, the priority was establishing a layout system flexible enough to handle three different content types across 15 emails without requiring a rebuild each time. The goal was a single underlying template that could carry different messaging, imagery, and hierarchy depending on where a subscriber was in the sequence.
Three design directions were presented for the first email. All three followed Intuit's brand guidelines — the differences were in layout, typographic hierarchy, and how aggressively the marquee was used as a design moment. One direction was selected, refined through a round of revisions, and then locked as the foundation for the full series.
From there, the work was about building a system, not just an email.
The system
Color as the signal.
With the approved direction in hand, the next decision was how to differentiate the three series without fragmenting the visual identity. The solution was a color-coded marquee system — each series gets its own accent color pulled from within Intuit's palette, applied consistently to the header and primary CTA areas:
Everything else — the neutral shell, body typography, layout grid, and footer — stays identical across all 15 emails. The color becomes the signal. A subscriber receiving a Tech Stories email sees a different visual mood than a Benefits email, but both feel unmistakably like the same campaign. The system scales without breaking.
Animation
Built to be tested.
The client had specified A/B testing for the Welcome series marquee — static image versus animated GIF — to measure engagement lift. The animated versions used a staggered text reveal in the marquee area, built as separate desktop and mobile GIFs to ensure the animation held up across both breakpoints. The static and animated versions were coded as separate files, ready to deploy against each other in the testing environment.
Build and testing
Delivered to work everywhere.
Each of the 15 emails was built in HTML and CSS using table-based layout — the standard for email development where CSS support is inconsistent across clients. Responsive behavior was handled through inline styles and media queries for clients that support them, with fallback layouts for Outlook and other legacy environments.
Every email was run through Email on Acid before delivery — testing across 90+ client and device combinations including Gmail, Outlook (2016 through current), Apple Mail, iOS Mail, and Android. Issues flagged in testing were resolved before final files were handed off. Each email was delivered as a complete package: HTML file, image folder, PDF reference, and JPEG reference.
Fifteen emails. Three series. One system built to hold together across all of them.