Showings on Demand Confirmation

Showings on Demand - a feature that allowed renters to request a showing from any of the agents representing a given apartment - was one of Naked Apartments' premier innovations.

Key to the feature's success was ensuring that once an agent had agreed to a showing, that they were in close contact with the renter; and emails were key to that process.

The original confirmation email was quirky but had a poor clickthrough rate (CTR). We cleaned up the design, whittled down some of the details, created a prominent call-to-action, and almost doubled that rate.

Agent Notification

Possibly the most important email on the site was the notification sent to an agent when a renter had expressed interest in an apartment.

NYC rental agents move fast and receive dozens of notices - emails, text, calls - every day; so this email needed to cut through the clutter and claim their attention.

We redesigned it using a clean, simple layout and a stark call-to-action. The ensuing CTR was significantly better, resulting in more communication from agent to renter, and, ultimately, more closings for the agent.

CSS

Inbox management - the art and science of making sure your emails make it to the intended recipient, and display correctly once they do - is maddeningly difficult. Different platforms, different email clients, different operating systems - all have their own methods of parsing email content, left over from the early days of the Internet.

One aspect in which they differ is how they handle CSS. By rigorous testing of different ways to inject CSS - external, inline, etc... - we managed to significantly improve our open rates, the first step to getting the recipient to click on a link.

Images in Email

Some emails require the use of images - an apartment listing, for example, would be pretty uninteresting without them, for example.

But in general, the fewer images the better. We tested our renter welcome email with and without images, and the results spoke for themselves. The image-less welcome had a far better CTR than those with an image. Engagement is more important than visual interest!