Results
Retention result of readers per month
>400k
Customer acquisition rate result per week
>200
SEO article rankings with design components
Increased
Production cost change due to expanding current freelance team skills
Lowered
Project Process
🤝How I Worked with the Team
I collaborated with the team through an iterative process and served as the synthesizer for the needs from marketing, design, and engineering. Initial project development began with collaboration between myself and the content team regarding their needs and then working with the Creative Director for feedback. All projects were based on insights from qualitative user research and digital analytics analysis.
💬 How I Received Feedback
Feedback was given through team retrospectives and recommendations based on digital performance and customer acquisition data.
Additionally, I would receive feedback from the team freelancers regarding implementation and would always keep that in mind as well.
📖 What Informed Design
We maintained continuous check-ins with analytics, customer feedback, and freelancer feedback to optimize the assets and components to keep customers engaged and easy to use for the design, content, and engineering teams to reuse.
We developed a strategy to keep each goal in mind:
🏆 Goal 1: How we increased customer acquisition with the challenges in mind
To increase customer acquisition, while keeping production costs were low and maintaining the visual strategy desires of both the design and content teams, I focused on designing the following digital touchpoints to focus on the following:
📖 Highlighting Education
Based on competitive research and click-through analysis, I designed a number of sustainability-centric educational assets to increase reader engagement and trust that show the benefit of PG products. and to develop long-form assets used for long-term email acquisition
✉️ Optimizing CRM Conversion
After increasing the number of visual assets as touchpoints for conversion, we developed subsequent email marketing flows to encourage conversion. The flows were designed referencing the current PG campaigns and iterated on based on Klayvio analytics.
☝️Adding CTR Opportunities
After analyzing reader to customer flows, we noticed that besides the "shop" link, at the time, there were not a lot of avenues to incentivize click-through conversion. So we developed targeted in-article banners to grab attention.
We had Challenges to Consider
💰 Content Production is Costly
The teams did not have a lot of labor resources to expend and asset production development is costly for both the content and design teams.
🤜🤛 Differing Internal Team Strategies
Both teams shared the goal of focusing on acquisition, but were not initially aligned on the visual strategy (Design wanted to follow eCommerce exactly, whereas Content wanted to have distinguished visuals).
We developed a strategy to keep each goal in mind:
🏆 Goal 2: How we reduced production burdens with the challenges in mind
To reduce production burdens, while keeping production costs were low and maintaining the visual strategy desires of both the design and content teams, I focused on designing the following assets, guidelines, and touchpoints.
⚪️ Designing Minimalist Components
As a way to combine the strategies of both the content and the design teams, I developed organic content-specific components to be used on social, email, and for the blog after analyzing visual trends in competitive branding and maintaining the standards of the design team.
📸 Establishing Imagery Guidelines
There was an opportunity found to utilize the current freelance writer workforce to also serve as visual content producers. I developed photography guidelines keeping with the PG brand, but also acknowledging the specific challenges they would face as newer photographers.
🧭 Optimizing navigation
The content team discovered a productivity barrier they faced was the long time it took to find articles they needed on WordPress. They also realized that if readers had the opportunity to navigate by tags as well, this could increase on-platform engagement and chances of encounters with conversion touchpoints.
PUBLIC GOODS
OPTIMIZING THE SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION ARM OF A HOME GOODS STARTUP
Public Goods is a home goods startup that focuses on delivering sustainable and high quality products direct to consumers.
I worked with the Public Goods team to enhance their sustainability content experience by working with their Content Marketing, Lead Generation, and Development teams on a remote basis and did a range of projects to enhance the educational experience.
🤔 The Challenge
I worked with their content team to use design to reach business goals when the company was a small-stage startup looking to develop additional sources of customer acquisition and revenue outside of their paid marketing initiatives.
🤔 The Opportunity
How might we optimize the sustainability content arm to create a valuable experience for readers and encourage customer growth?
🖐 My role
As part of helping the company grow and increase consumer knowledge about how to be more sustainable in the home, I designed growth-centric implementations to increase acquisition for the organic content channel verticals.
⚙️ How I Did It
I sought to reach these growth goals by optimizing digital customer touchpoints to funnel into conversion, developing a collection of UI components and patterns, and creating style guides and assets for organic content. Assets included were web pages, email flows, on-site conversion banners, e-books, infographics, illustrations, and photography guidelines.
Project Summary
TIME FRAME
2019-2020 Ongoing client project
PROCESSES
Visual Communication, Design Strategy, Creative Direction, UX/UI
DESIGNER
Margarita Zulueta, along with the content, marketing, engineering, and design teams
TOOLS
Adobe CC (Photoshop, Illustrator, XD), WordPress, HTML, CSS, Trello
Business Strategy & Methodology
DEVELOPING DESIGN SOLUTIONS WHILE KEEPING KEY BUSINESS-CENTRIC GOALS IN MIND
There were a range of business goals that I kept in mind with the iteration of each project.
The first was to increase low-cost customer acquisition through developing the content platform's SEO and social media.
The second was to reduce the production burden on the content, design, and engineering teams so that production costs do not outweigh the costs.
As this is a compilation of multiple long-term projects, I am including my methodologies here >
Highlighting Education
VISUALIZING EDUCATIONAL CONTENT TO CREATE A GREAT READING EXPERIENCE WHILE INCREASING CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Visualizing educational content was highlighted by through data illustration to enhance the reading experience and:
1) Provide a supplement to the overall article to increase reader engagement with content as they would stay longer on page.
2) Rank in Google Image searches, which served as another channel to increase customer acquisition.
3) Boost SEO standing of the articles with infographics
Highlighting Education
OPTIMIZING LONG-FORM CONTENT TO CREATE INFORMATION THAT IS EXCITING AND INTERESTING
Visualizing education content was also implemented by developing lead magnet flows to have a long-standing email acquisition touchpoint:
1) Touchpoint to increase email acquisition without regular production maintenance.
2) Shows Public Goods' interest in sustainability and education
3) Provides an opportunity to better understand customer motivations and product interests by analyzing acquisition through "lead magnet utms".
Optimizing CRM Conversion
HELPING THE TEAM WITH THEIR STRATEGY TO OPTIMIZE CRM CONVERSION
We developed a parallel CRM acquisition strategy and enhanced it through sustainability education to convert readers to customers. One of the key strategies was utilizing the lead magnets to welcome customers to Public Goods.
1) Provided additional points of customer input that were not previously accounted for
2) Served to not only educate the readers about the brand, but also to highlight additional articles and other content of interest to increase engagement
3) Having a standardized email flow for all lead magnet assets to reduce production time, but also provide a potential avenue for increasing email subcribers
Increasing CTR to DCOM
KEEPING THE READING EXPERIENCE ENGAGING AND DIRECTING TO THE SHOPPING PLATFORM
After doing some analysis engagement on the e-commerce site, it was discovered that there were not as many touchpoints for targeted product clicks outside of anchor points, so we developed cross-page targeting:
1) The banners were relevant to the content of the article, which was already developed to increase SEO and highlight product benefits.
2) The assets were keeping with Public Goods' minimalist style and could easily be re-used after swapping in product photos.
Designing Components
PROVIDING CREATIVE DIRECTION AND LONG-TERM VISUAL VALUE TO THE PUBLIC GOODS TEAM
The implementation of minimalist design icons provided 2 key benefits:
1) Could easily cross-reference between the Public Goods' minimalist branding, and thus easily replicable and usable by other departments, e.g. social media
2) Tied into the visual research regarding what appeals to the customer base, while also giving a highlight to the written content
3) Components were created based on highly-used content tags, so they could be used repeatedly so as not to increase production
Establishing Photography Guidelines
PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND CREATIVE DIRECTION TO OPTIMIZE STAFF DESIRES AND PRODUCTION
We also needed to focus on how to better organize content production to implement these visual directions. We decided to leverage the freelancer force and combine their photography skills to rapidly develop assets.
1) The guidelines scaled content production needs to the established group of freelance writers that combined the PG brand guidelines and addressed challenges at-home photographers would have.
2) Reduced strain on the content and design team's labor load, which allowed them to focus on additional projects outside of production.
Using UX Thinking to Optimize Reader & Staff Navigation
COMBINING THE TEAM GOALS OF EFFICIENCY AND CONTENT DISCOVERY TO OPTIMIZE THE PLATFORM
We developed navigation improvement strategies, such as on-page archive site that the internal team could access to locate articles and for customers to have an additional avenue to navigate the site. This project was not shipped due to internal team restructuring.
1) Developing an on-site archive page by category, tag, and month/year would provide three navigational methods to discover content.
2) This also would reduce engineering's burden by having the clickable assets be based on WordPress integrated links, so there was no additional coding needed for each article implementation.
ONGOING RESULTS
The assets and language I developed for the company are still used for email acquisition and in Public Goods visuals available online.
As a result of these methods, the Public Goods content vertical was able to acquire additional customers with a reduced production burden on the design team.
The content and design team were freed to optimize other features due to the presence of digital touchpoints to increase customer acquisition that did not need labor maintenance and by the education of the freelance writer team to create visual assets.
The assets and language I developed for the company are still used for email acquisition and in Public Goods visuals available online.