Designing and A/B testing lifecycle and promotional emails for Persona Nutrition, lifting open, click-through, and conversion rates while keeping the brand warm, personal, and on-message.
Email is where the relationship with a customer is either built or lost. It is the channel that welcomes new subscribers, nurtures the undecided, wins back the lapsed, and reminds loyal customers why they signed up, all in a crowded inbox that gives you seconds to earn attention.
I designed and tested Persona's lifecycle and promotional emails across the customer journey, from welcome and onboarding to subscription, winback, and promotions. Each send was built to feel warm and personal, reinforce the science and personalization behind the brand, and give a clear, single reason to act.
The defining change was how the work got made. Instead of designing in one tool and handing off to engineering to build, wait, review, and rebuild, I used Claude Code and VS Code to design and code the emails myself, directly in Braze. That collapsed the old back-and-forth into a single loop and cut production time in half, so I could ship more, test more, and iterate on what the data showed, faster.
The biggest shift was not a template, it was the workflow. I used Claude Code and VS Code to design and build the emails directly in Braze, cutting production time in half by removing the design-to-dev handoff.
Watch it come together: the code builds the email design in unison, then it flies straight to the inbox, no handoff in between.
<table class="email" role="presentation">
<tr><td class="logo">Persona</td></tr>
<tr><td>
<img src="hero.jpg" alt="Your plan" />
</td></tr>
<h1>Your plan is ready</h1>
<p>Personalized vitamins, just for you.</p>
<a href="{{shop_url}}" class="cta">
Shop your vitamins
</a>
<td class="footer">Unsubscribe</td>
</table>The old way meant designing in one place, then handing off to engineering to build, review, and rebuild, round after round. By designing and coding the emails myself in Braze with Claude Code and VS Code, I owned the whole thing end to end and shipped in half the time.
The old emails were dated and text-heavy. They rambled, buried the point in long paragraphs, and had no real design direction, no consistent layout, hierarchy, or brand system from one send to the next.
So I gave them one: a flexible, mobile-first template system that felt unmistakably Persona and led with a single clear action, consistent across the whole lifecycle.
Make every email easily scannable, clear hierarchy and short, skimmable copy so the point and the next step land in seconds.
Switch views, then hover a label to see what changed.
Variant A
Clicked · Winner
Variant B
No click
Variant C
Clicked · Winner
Before, the program had no rhythm. Communications would stall for weeks, then a batch would suddenly go out with no real plan or reason behind the timing.
There was no visibility into which cohorts got which emails, or whether sends were even going out at all, so the lifecycle was impossible to trust or learn from.
Bring order to the chaos: an orchestrated lifecycle with clear cohorts, intentional timing, and full visibility into what's sending, to whom, and when.
Switch to see the lifecycle before and after.
