eMarketer Email Strategy

eMarketer's business is built on two things: producing statistic-powered content and sharing it out to customers and newsletter subscribers. There was once a clear email vision, but over the years as new user interests and areas of the business developed, more and more emails were 'tacked on'. One of the most common complaints heard from customers is that they receive too many emails from the company. In an effort to listen to our users, this project was developed.

Roles:
User Research
UX Design
UI Design

problems:

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Stop the spam

An eMarketer user may receive up to 22 emails on average per week! – way too many.

{
Clean it up

Some mailings feel outdated or inefficient

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Communicate it out

Business need to be able to communicate new content updates to customers

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Give them a reason

Often, there is no added user value between client emails and non-client emails

goals:

To reduce the number of emails users get from eMarketer to an acceptable range

To update all email experiences to make them efficient and easy to consume

To effectively notify users about new content published

To demonstrate strong user value for eMarketer’s paying clients

process:

Background

  • For a baseline, I started with a competitive analysis of companies in the media space or with premium subscription products. Various companies handle email strategy in their own ways, but some notable solutions were:
    • Multitude of email subscription options available upfront (e.g. NYTimes, Business Insider)
    • Customizable user preferences to detect what content is relevant to a user so only that may best served to them (e.g. Netflix)
  • This analysis in conjunction with finding from user interviews led us to pursue a blended model: varied mailings available based on selection and intelligent mailings with user preference data taken into account.

Goal: To reduce the number of emails users get from eMarketer to an acceptable range

  • Mailings were combined, restructured and eliminated to create a plan that made sense:
    1. Either get Daily, Weekly or None (contains notification section for reports/forecasts published the day before)
    2. Featured Asset Mailing for assets users have explicitly shown interest in (alert profile +search history + job/company + etc.)
      1. user-relevant report published that day (including but not necessarily restricted to report/forecast notifications)
      2. special content we want to promote (to relevant users)
    3. Retail Daily, Weekly or None
    4. Analyst Mailing(s) or None
    5. FYI mailing only to users who have opted in && expressed interest in topic of that FYI
    Under this plan users who were previously receiving up to 22 emails/week could now realistically expect something in the range of 7-11

Goal: To update all email experiences to make them efficient and easy to consume

  • e.g. Report notification (client) emails:
    • Old: 2-3/week, basic layout, little UI or UX thought; “eMarketer has published a new report: Report Title”
    • Proposed tests:
      1. UI clean up
      2. Multivariate testing around subject, preheader and from: fields
      3. Multiple reports in a single notification
      4. Emoticons in header/preheader
      5. Longer form content notification with report summary & key stats included
    • Netted out with a cleaner UI + optimized subject, preheader and from content + longer form content included in the mailing:

Goal: To effectively notify users about new content published

  • e.g. Analyst mailing (new) is a newsletter focused around a writer, their content and readers.
    • This new mailing introduced a way for users to keep up with the pulse of a subject and writer:

Goal: To demonstrate strong user value for eMarketer’s paying clients

  • New strategy: clients get access to special communications/features that aren’t available to non customers.
    • Content (report & forecast) notifications that communicate when relevant or followed content is produced or updated (clients only)
    • Daily/weekly mailings take into account user preferences and recommendation engine suggestions (clients only):

results:

Goal: To reduce the number of emails users get from eMarketer to an acceptable range

Number of emails users get from eMarketer/week cut in half

Goal: To update all email experiences to make them efficient and easy to consume

All email experiences made efficient and easy to consume

Goal: To effectively notify users about new content published

Strong user value demonstrated for paying clients

Goal: To demonstrate strong user value for eMarketer’s paying clients

Business more able to communicate newly published, relevant content to users who care

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