Improving workflow and email referral traffic at Lentiamo
The problem
With 17 different online stores and 15 different languages, there was too much manual work. Frequently mistakes would occur when emails with mixed languages were sent. Subscribers didn’t use the links in the newsletters.
The outcome
Automated email templates, that cut the time for preparing banners by 36%. Improved email referral traffic to the website. Refreshed contemporary look that aligns better with the branding of the company.
My role
I was in charge of the end-to-end design process and collaborated with the Digital Marketing Manager, The Marketing Director and the developers.
Audit of the current state
→Less than 1% of subscribers, who opened the newsletter, used the link at the top right corner “Go to website”.
→The same statistic goes for the navigation menu.
→About 42% of the subscribers who entered the website, through our newsletter, would do so by clicking on the banner. The banners, however, were very time-consuming to prepare (17 different languages and 2 different formats for desktop and mobile). Furthermore, a lot of mistakes would occur. The process of creating banners would be:
So at least 2 people (designer and marketing manager) didn’t speak the local language. That led to a lot of newsletters written in Danish but sent to the Dutch audience for example. Of course that hurt the brand image.
→The CTAs often would be the same, and both would be displayed as “Primary“.
→Most of our customers participate in the “Bonus” program but didn’t use the link at the upper right corner as it didn’t indicate in any way that it is clickable.
→About 2% of of the Lentiamo blog visitors, entered through the newsletter links.
The ideation
→The navigation menu and the link “Go to website” were hardly used, but they would push down on the content that users were engaging with and make the newsletter look more cluttered, thus taking attention away from other links. We could test if removing these links would impact the website visits.
→The “Bonus program” could be presented more engagingly. A brainstorming session with the Digital Marketing Manager produced a few ideas, that I’ll discuss below.
→The banner strategy was created together with a Frontend Web Developer. She explained that the most cost and time-effective solution would be to use HTML only. We decided to also build the banners with HTML, thus allowing the subscribers, who have blocked image downloads to at least see our message and CTA. That also took care of the CTA mismatched styles.
→The blog posts in general were a great entryway to our website. A substantial amount of customers discovered the website, through a Google search on an eye health-related topic. This is why the Marketing Director was reluctant to remove the blog posts from the newsletters. However after I checked the data, I found out that only 2% of the traffic that the blog received, came from the newsletter. That proved that while the blog was valuable for SEO, but it didn’t work for the newsletter.
Driving subscribers to our website, through the bonus program
→After a quick brainstorming session with the Digital Marketing Manager, we decided to do a banner that shows the current status of the customer’s bonus points. The banner included a button that also helped the users understand that they could interact with it.
→The idea of gamification was generally well received, but the concern was the budget and time allocation needed. Thus these ideas were left in the backlog of potential future features.
Reducing the time we spend on banner prep
We already had a template for the static banners that massively shortened the preparation time from about 2 hours per campaign to 40 minutes. But I knew I can do it faster, without compromising the quality. I decided to split the banners into 2 parts – 50% of the banner would be HTML text and 50% would be a PNG image. There were That meant that the designer had to create only 2 .png images (one for desktop, one for mobile). Further more that meant that the subscribers can still read our message, even if they have blocked images when using mobile data.
Outcome
One of the most important outcomes was that we almost never sent another email containing language mistake, due to copy/pasting errors from the designers, who didn’t understand the copy. Further more, the traffic we started to receive increased both through the promotional banner, but mostly from the bonus program banner.
