Designing for email communication in B2B wholesale
In B2B wholesale, sales reps often juggle scattered tools to manage quotes, inventory, orders, payments, and confirmations. WizOrder puts all of it in one place seamlessly.
What are we solving for?
> Communication through email shapes the B2B wholesale experience in WizOrder.
> Improving the existing methods and building a scalable, org-wide system for handeling emails more efficiently.
Why are we solving this?
In the B2B wholesale space, companies often rely on external sales reps and multiple vendors to manage orders.
Once a conversation begins, a typical deal involves around 8–12 email exchanges - covering inventory discussions, quote revisions, approvals, order confirmations, and post-sale follow-ups.
Given this volume and the number of people involved, well-timed email nudges are critical to avoid delays and misalignment.
Email nudges in user journey of a sales rep
♦️Rethinking the
Email Input method
Problem
Entering the email flow creates a false sense of completion and lacks clear feedback, causing users to skip adding the email. This leads to skipped logs of mails and unintended communication gaps.
Goal
Improve the email input experience to prevent ambiguity around whether entries have been successfully added.
>Introduced inline email suggestions to reduce input effort and errors, these suggestions only come around either when an already existing email in the database is being used, or when an email is valid.
>Replaced explicit “+ Add” CTA with implicit confirmation through selection
>Minimized total clicks
2- to drive communication across quotes and orders
Problem
Email recipients were frequently left out during quote and order creation resulting in missed updates, fragmented visibility, and broken communication loops.
This led to broken communication loops across the organization, causing key stakeholders to miss out on important deal information and updates.
> The email step is visually deprioritized.
> Current UX expects the user to remember to add mails rather than prompting a critical workflow step
🤡What did not work and why:)
Wall of the dead
The UX correction of this email flow did not come easy at first. And it feels very obvious that I state some "wall of the dead" pieces that helped in this decision making.
🎯Solving the riddle
Finally, things came along together
> Stepper UX was implemented
Turning email checkpoint into a necessary and intuitive step, ensuring it's never missed without adding unnecessary friction.
> Progressive exposure
Prefilled emails are tucked behind a secondary layer, keeping the interface clean while giving reps full control when they choose to engage with it.
> Suggested emails
Sales reps see relevant email suggestions instantly thus helping them move faster without having to look up or type each contact.
Redesigned UX for order/quote submission
♦️Org settings for emails
Building a scalable email management system
Context
Managing email communications during key actions such as order confirmations, quote submissions, and payment processing is challenging and different clients keep asking for custom workflows.
Some teams want automatic emails for every transaction to ensure clear communication with customers, while others may prefer to minimise email traffic.
Goal
Create org setting for handeling multiple email triggers and recipient lists.
Email catagorization
> We catagorized the underlying 61 unique email triggers on internal/external emails as these are distinctly handeled. Therefore this became the base of our differentiation.
> Then further on we divided these email triggers on the basis of the modules they were assosiated.
For example - Payments, import-export, integration emails etc.
Trigger handelling
> Since back then it was not possible for us to have an in-line HTML editor for emails, we used the template structures for the same.
The concept of User buckets
Grouping concept
> Need? When emails are processed in bulk, it's easy to lose track of who should receive which email. Introducing a grouping pattern allowed us to automate recipient selection and reduce the risk of missed or incorrect recipients.
> We adopted a role-based grouping system instead of a hierarchy-based one, as roles handled the many edge cases more effectively and provided a simpler, more scalable structure.
We’ve started building and iterating the remaining link in the ecosystem, an HTML editor enhanced with a layer of AI. The idea extends to automatically retrieving the required data based on the subject and prompt, generating a structured email draft ready for publishing.
Learnings and impact
What started as a simple email field redesign grew into a robust communication architecture.
With almost no support tickets or rant calls that i forgot to add "X" stakeholders.
A flexible system that works for 10-1000s of reps seamlessly, be it be small or mid size smbs, the email communication is covered in and out of the company