Date:
February 1, 2018
Role:
Lead Designer
We created a modern marketing email system in order to make an industry-focused newsletter tool, but we wanted to go a step further and offer our customers a way to take advantage of their transaction data to better convert customers and sell more tickets.
Tools like Mailchimp are awesome for small business, but presented challenges for cinema owners and small marketing teams who struggled to figure out how to integrate them into their point of sales.
With our systems already pulling into transactional information about the Cinema's clients and the ability for us to also connect to loyalty programs, we were in a unique position to use this data to help customers build campaign lists based on a variety of details like "Last movie seen", "Customers who haven't visited in 3+ months", or even genre based like "Superhero movie-goers".
We started by looking at what types of transactional information other email tools were offering at the time. We looked at various tools like Shopify, Mailchimp, etc. to get a baseline.
Next we talked with customers, we specifically focused on owner-operators and medium sized chains with dedicated marketing teams to find out what sort of challenges they were looking to solve. We found that, in general, the messaging wasn't the problem, targeting the customer and tracking conversions was the biggest roadblock.
Once we knew the main problems to solve, our PM started to work out the major requirements around various "criteria" we wanted to offer while I got to work on creating an easy way to build out these smart lists.
Most of the newsletter system is based around a drag and drop library, so I continued that approach here, with the customers being able to select multiple criteria from transactions, films, or even the clients themselves.
We also wanted to show customers the real-time number of subscribers that would be reached as they built out their list, so we added emphasis to the count as it increased or decreased to show how broad or specific each individual list would be.
My time with the company came to an end prior to the system being rolled out to end-customers, but our internal team had completely converted to using this list builder for managing white-glove customers. Feedback was increasingly positive as there was more visibility into the size of the lists and the overall targets of campaigns. Better lists allowed for more targeted campaigns and our teams saw a double-digit increase in both open-rates and click-throughs.