💼 What we did to improve confidence in customer's email marketing

A small UX improvement with big returns.

At the time I‌ started, I worked on one of the least-used features– our email-marketing tool, which was designed for our power users and shipped as an MVP. There was a lot of room for improvement…

Customer interviews are the foundation of Product Culture and Design Practices at Kajabi. It was standard was Product Designers to host no less than 9 customer interviews per project, small or large.

Unless we were doing a deep dive on a particular feature, I liked to keep our interviews open-ended, allowing our customers to talk about what mattered most to them…which helped us discover opportunities organically.

The Problem

During my open-ended interviews about our email marketing tool, we uncovered a common emotion that many of customers faced: anticipation and anxiety –about their deliverability rate.

A common practice for our Product Department was publishing our research to our teams in the Jobs-to-be-Done Format.  Here are some examples of how our customers framed their needs, and direct customer quotes that supported these JTBD‌ stories.

While not a company practice, my favorite way to parse through qualitative data like our open-ended customer interviews, I liked to run Zoom recordings of our interviews with an audio-to-text transcripting service like Otter.ai – that way I can playback the audio clips that were charged with emotion, and identify common words or phrases across all the interviews.

Research

Since at the time all Product Designers at the company functioned also as the Product Owner and Manager of our cross-functional teams, I set up some time to learn about email deliverability and what affects it. Much like credit scores or SEO, the deciding factors of email deliverability were constantly changing, different for every email provider and was a combination of both the email sender’s domain reputation and email copy content.

Our tech lead and I spent alot of time at the whiteboard, brainstorming ways we could help our customers move the needle and improve their email deliverability. We’re big fans of Opportunity Trees. We steered away from suggesting granular solutions, like UI mockups and instead, favored high-level solutions.

That way, we entertained all sorts of ideas: non-feature solutions that required little engineering, to

[Deliverable Here]

In the end, we moved forward with a multi-disciplinary solution.

Solution #1: Soft Email Subject Line Validation

We knew we couldn’t tell customers how and what email copy to write, but since it played such a large factor into whether their email went into someone’s mailbox or spam folder, an inexpensive solution was to display suggestions in real-time as a customer typed out their Email Subject Line. Similar to error messages on say, a password creation flow.

Solution #2: Educating Customers on Email Deliverability

From our customer research, most solopreneurs aren’t concerned or passionate about email deliverability until it’s a problem. Since many of our customers first experiences with email marketing happens on our platform, we wanted to take a proactive approach at educating them on the subject as Kajabi customers are learning as they go.

We added an event listener that watched for the first time a customer interacts with our email marketing feature. That triggered our CRM software to send an email to our customer on best practices for Email Marketing.

In addition, we added a tool-tip that is auto-expanded on a customer’s first visit to our email marketing tool page thru a software called Pendo.  This cost zero developer time. #win

Solution #3: Encouraging users to use our email domain instead of their custom email address

Because our domain had higher trustability scores than our average users since our reputation with email providers was reliable, we made aggressive recommendations to customers, steering them to opt our subdomains, rather than their branded email addresses.  While this solution was least adopted, it was also the most impactful on email deliverability.

In the end, those two solutions were enough to improve our customers deliverability by a median of 12%.

In our first round of iteration, 60 days after implementation, we re-interviewed the same customers. Although we couldn’t solve the mystery of the puzzle of email deliverability for them, our updates helped engender trust with our customers, and empowered them to feel ownership and control over their own deliverability. #nps