How do we get customers to open and engage with Avery's EDM
I worked on a project alongside the lead UX/UI designer at the digital agency, Hustle Digital, to help Avery, a long term social media marketing client of ours, increase their open rate and engagement with their electronic direct mail. We conducted research into who exactly Avery's key customer segments were and identified the issues they had surrounding the EDM. Through further research we created a formula for the content and scheduling of Avery's EDM that catered to the three key customer segments.
Avery is the largest label company in the world and has produced over 7 billion labels. They have a range of different products like labels and stickers, office, conferencing and craft supplies, as well as software to work hand in hand with their products, for example online label designing templates.
We began the process by conducting user interviews with Avery customers who were subscribed to the newsletter so we could discover more about who they were. We asked questions like...
What does your day to day life look like?
What has your digital and online usage over the past two months looked like?
What's your relationship like with emails you receive?
We also wanted to discover what their relationship with Avery was, so we asked more questions like...
What is your relationship with Avery products like?
What Avery products do you use?
What do you know about Avery as a brand outside of their products?
Once we had gathered our information we created an affinity map to synthesise the results, and we then quantified our results by sending out a survey. 359 people responded to the survey and here are some of the key insights we found...
Only 19% wanted to receive information about Avery as a company that isn't directly to do with their products
81% wanted to receive information about tools and products that would help them in their daily life or professional role
90% wanted to receive information about Avery products
Only 13% of people wanted to receive the newsletter weekly
Some more information we found out was that 12% of customers didn't work, 33% of customers were corporate employees, and 25% were small business owners. From these results we created a problem statement.
Problem statement
Avery customers who are subscribed to the newsletter are not opening it because most of the content is not relevant to their interests or lives, as well as the fact that they receive the email more frequently than they would like to.
The next step was creating personas from our data to help us further understand Avery's customer segments. Our primary persona was Oliver, our secondary persona was Kate, and Georgia was our tertiary persona.
With these personas as a guide to who we were designing for, we then moved into our design studio phase where we created a test newsletter with content catered to the three main personas. The content sections we include were:
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Showcasing business or craft related products, as well as other chosen products in the range and use cases for these products.
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Product placement
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Developing a deeper connection with Avery by offering information linked to both products and Avery as a company, for example a warehouse video tour showing how products are made, or short facts about Avery products.
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Brand connection
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Featuring accelerated and beginner tutorials for using Avery's online products, as well as content and tutorials external to Avery like tips and videos on business success, work productivity and craft.
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Up-skilling
Conducting a second round of user interview was the next step in the process. We gathered customers that fit the persona type that we were tailoring the newsletter to and asked them to think aloud while reading the newsletter. We also asked the customers interview questions to get further clarification on their feelings towards the content.
Some valuable findings we gathered from these interviews:
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Users related to almost all of the content in the newsletter that was specific to their key customer segment
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Users didn’t feel as much of a connection to the up-skilling content external to Avery’s brand. They favoured Avery specific content
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Just over half of the users were engaged in the content surrounding brand connection
We then successfully validated this qualitative data with another survey where we showed customers the same content used in the user interviews and asked them to rate from 1-5 how much they would like to see this content in the Avery EDM. We also asked them how often they'd like to receive the EDM if it consisted of this kind of content. Here are our results...
95% of participants were interested in the product section
84% were interested in tutorials and tips specific to Avery, and 63% were interested in tips and tutorials external to Avery
65% were interested in brand connection content
75% of participants wanted to receive the newsletter once a month
Conclusion and final deliverable
We presented Avery with the final deliverable; a formula for their EDM with content sections tailored to the 3 key customer segments. The formula specified that the Avery EDM be sent out once a month, and that it have the following content:
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Primary content
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Products targeted at the 3 key customer segments
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Use case examples and tutorials for different Avery products
Secondary content
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Content designed to create more of a connection with Avery as a brand that is easily and quickly digestible, specific to the key customer segments, and related in some way to products
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Up-skilling content and tips that is external to Avery's brand