Project: Careerbuilder Email Lifecycle
Client: Careerbuilder
When: Q3 2015 (Ongoing)
Role: Information Architecture, Visual Design, Front End Development
The Challenge
Email is one of Careerbuilder's top sources for returning traffic, but the lifecycle of users through emails has never been thought out before. As the emails team first designer we set about rethinking our strategy for email.
I took the email team through mapping out that lifecycle and using our collective creativity to sketch out what some of those emails might be.
Mapping it Out
Taking one of our 5 user types we plotted out the actions that user would be able to take on our site that would trigger an email, decided upon a singular business goal, how we will delight the user and finally the content which the email may consist of.
Our biggest opportunity came not in what actions the users could take, but rather in actions they weren't taking.
How do we reengage users who haven't been to our site in 30, 60, 120 day or even out to 13+ months.
Understand Why and Figuring out How
So why aren't users returning. The group brainstormed individually on the topic and came back together to propose why users may of not returned be certain time frames. Out of that we were able to make a list of assumptions to test against with users.
Using those testable assumptions we also came up with clusters of content that could solve the issues of that user. In this case users who haven't been back to the site in 30 days.
"Franken-comp"
As a team we took those ideas and sketched out our own versions of them. I lead the group through a small critique where we choose the best parts and combined them into one sketch. Showing this team that it's not just me who can do the design, but that I am a design catalyst so we can always put the best work in front of users.
Three "franken-comps" for 30 day missing users and one for 13+ month users.
Testing Assumptions and Content
We put our assumptions and content through the test, by utilizing our feedback tool Usabilla we gather responses from users as to why they haven't returned. Furthermore we targeted the content to the top job classifications in the pool of users and a generalized email sent out to the rest.
From our tests we determined...
- Users had a higher than expect open rate for the email
- 2/3 assumptions as to why users were not returning were true
- The Career Coach content didn't meet the expect level of engagement