Marisa Rando

product/content audit

email optimization

In Q2 2018, I conducted an audit of the most frequently triggered B2B product emails to identify areas of opportunity for driving ad starts and among other key metrics. Below are some of the emails we’ve improved via copy and design to reflect email best practices and increase conversion.

Nurture campaign/transactional

Welcome email

This email is triggered when a business claims their first business on Yelp (~61k/month). The old email (left) had a CTR of ~12%. We looked to improve this with our new design (right) by highlighting clear/actionable CTAs. Our goal was to get more newly claimed business owners (highest converters) to engage with Yelp’s free tools and complete setting up their profile. Data showed us businesses who complete their profile are more likely to get traffic, and convert to paid products.

Structure for the new email was heavily influenced by a market research study our team had done to find out what was important to business owners and the language they responded to (i.e., “connect with your community”). Early results show this new email has lead to ~5% increase in CTR.

Product Marketing/Acquisition

Claim Flow Promotion

With a circulation of about ~113k business owners per month, this email is triggered once a user is finished claiming their business on Yelp. The email had a 1% unsubscribe rate and ~6% conversion rate.  We projected that with our changes made we could lower the unsubscribe rate to 0.2% and boost incremental starts/month by ~150. This projection came from bumping up the open to click rate by 15% (from what it is currently). 

My team took over this triggered campaign (moved from in-product to Salesforce Marketing Cloud) to track results and continue testing when necessary.

Language for the new email (right) was heavily influenced by a market research study our team had done to find out what was important to business owners and the language they responded to ("the right people", "grow", etc.). The updated email is scheduled to go out at the end of this quarter and will be eligible for a stat sig comparison within its first few days.

transactional email/retention

Advertiser welcome campaign

This email triggers when a business starts advertising on Yelp (~27k/month) . As an advertiser’s first impression of Yelp Ads, we prioritized this email in an effort to boost advertiser retention. In tandem with the advertiser onboarding module, we redesigned this email to show attention to the advertiser experience. The former version (left) is very text heavy and contains dated content that mostly points to other learning materials.

For our new design we wanted to include a receipt-like format for transparency (customer success team flagged this as a concern of business owner’s) and clear modules where business owners could go to complete an action.

Product Marketing/ retention

Rax initial email

This email is the first of three in a campaign that is triggered to a business owner after they receive a quote request from a user (e.g. a Yelp user asking a plumber for a cost estimate on a job). This email is triggered ~1.7M times/month. Engagement with this email is correlated directly with business owner retention, propensity to paid products and lifetime value. In an effort to increase engagement, we included relevant data points and content to help the business owner give a quality response. This lead to an increase the ~10% CTR by 15pp.

business marketing/lead generation

peak in engagement campaign

Amidst the many emails that feel like they tell how business owners how much better they could be doing, I ran this campaign as a growth experiment to businesses who were at their “peak” in engagement (at least 10% increase in user views from previous 30 days). The idea was simple. A two-touch celebratory email campaign to congratulate them and suggest they advertise to capitalize on their popularity.

Our hypothesis was that sending business owners a promotion alongside a positive message vs our traditional FOMO campaigns, we’d see an increase in conversion. This test drove significantly more leads than the control and is now rolled out to 100% all qualifying businesses monthly. Touches 1 and 2 are depicted above.

Product Marketing/ Transactional

Instagram Partnership email

For Yelp Reservations' Instagram Partnership email I wrote email copy for two populations. One transactional send to clients who Yelp was servicing their Instagram integration (depicted), and one commercial send providing step-by-step instructions for Yelp Reservations customers to integrate their page to Instagram.