Quick wins: Follow-up Broadcast
Project details
Role: Product Designer
Design timeline: 3 days
Team: PD, PM, 2 engineers
Background
In November 2021, our team at Emotive, an SMS marketing platform, started receiving feature ideas and requests aimed at increasing brands’ SMS volume but which did not seem to benefit the brands’ marketing goals. Example requests involved adding default text like Brand Name into outgoing SMS broadcasts, adding more messages into commonly used automation templates, etc. By digger deeper, we discovered a company goal to meet revenue targets by the end of the year, and a very short timeline of only a few weeks to ideate and ship these improvements, hence the focus on quick, easy improvements that could increase message volume. Emotive’s revenue is directly tied to SMS send.
Our team requested a few days to brainstorm our own solutions to this problem. We wanted to find a feature that would take very little development time and resources, have an outsize impact on message volume/revenue for Emotive, and genuinely benefit the brands’ marketing efforts.
How might we drive a high volume of messages in a short period of time, while providing benefit to our brands?
Explorations
The idea of “following up”
I had been on the Core team which covers messaging tools for over a year and been on close to 150 brand calls, so I was lucky to come at this problem with many hours of user research spent understanding the goals and needs of our customers as it pertained to their marketing strategies. A few things I definitely know about our brands:
It was difficult for them to regularly come up with new content to send via SMS, so it was not realistic to try to get them to come up with more new content to send
The price-conscious are well aware of how SMS messages are billed and would take care to remain within the limits of their budget, so adding characters to increase the number of SMS messages was not an option
Repetition and re-use was an important part of the marketing strategy; in other marketing channels, marketers expected to have to hit the same customers several times to lead them to purchase, and to save themselves effort they would use a single campaign multiple times across many channels
I also had personal experience and success with point #3: I always sent a follow-up email to any potential user research participants and generally saw a 60% increase in response rate, and when I worked on exciting projects I knew it was important to socialize these over and over in different channels for recognition.
Thinking more about the idea of “following up”, I remembered some of our top brands who would sometimes create 2-3 Broadcasts at a time, all around the same topic but spaced about a day apart.
What if there was a super easy way for brands to add this little extra follow-up to each one of their Broadcasts? Could this encourage brands who weren’t already doing this to double their Broadcast usage?
V1
The next day, I returned to my PM with the idea of the Follow-Up Broadcast and a V1 design, which would allow users to easily toggle on a follow-up message to send to customers who had received the first Broadcast, had not purchased since, and had clicked a link (therefore were engaged and more likely to buy). The PM decided that, since we did not know if it was better to filter to only people who had clicked the link, we could start without this filter. This would also increase revenue for the business as the brands would be sending to a larger audience. I tested with 2 Customer Success Managers who were happy with the feature and suggested that the follow-up message form also show the customer how and why they should use the feature. We were able to identify that most end customers did purchase within 24 hours of receiving a Broadcast, so we included this in a description, as well as some example placeholder text of the type of message a brand may want to send. The design was finalized and released into production within the week!
Solution
Easily toggle on a Follow-Up Broadcast
When creating their initial Broadcast, users have the option to append a follow-up which will send to anyone who received the first Broadcast and did not purchase. They can also easily adjust the delay between initial and Follow-Up Broadcast, ranging from 1 to 48 hours.
Users can toggle on the Follow-Up Broadcast.
Once toggled on, users can create their message. Placeholder text gives an example of the kind of content we suggest sending.
In the scheduling step, users can configure when they want the Follow-Up Broadcast to send.
Outcomes
Overview
For Brands: Sending a Follow-Up Broadcast on average resulted in an extra 85% of their original campaign sales! Meaning, that if a brand’s original Broadcast earned them $100, they could expect another $85 by sending the follow-up.
For Emotive: Follow-Up Broadcasts generated $162k in company revenue in one month and help us meet our end-of-year revenue goals!