Personalization and Conditionals
Designing an intuitive way to leverage CRM data to personalize email marketing content
Why are personalizations and conditionals important to marketing administrators?
After conducting several initial rounds of discovery interviews with users, one of the key insights we learned is that personalized email marketing content is much more effective at driving donations and conversions.
Subsequently, Luminate Online’s biggest differentiator from other email tools is its ability to leverage Luminate CRM data to generate this personalized content. The CRM collects all sorts of data, ranging from basic information like name and location, to specific interests and events that an individual might have opted into. Luminate also contains powerful features that allow admins to conditionalize email content and use if/or statements to further ensure that emails are personalized to each recipient.
Our main problem then was: How can we make the experience of adding these personalizations and conditionals as intuitive as possible so that more marketers can leverage these tools?
Subsequently, Luminate Online’s biggest differentiator from other email tools is its ability to leverage Luminate CRM data to generate this personalized content. The CRM collects all sorts of data, ranging from basic information like name and location, to specific interests and events that an individual might have opted into. Luminate also contains powerful features that allow admins to conditionalize email content and use if/or statements to further ensure that emails are personalized to each recipient.
Our main problem then was: How can we make the experience of adding these personalizations and conditionals as intuitive as possible so that more marketers can leverage these tools?
Before
In our first round of discovery interviews, we learned that many email marketers found the process for selecting and inserting personalizations and conditionals complex and confusing, to the point where many abandoned using it at all for fear of setting it up wrong and sending the wrong content to their recipients.
Many email marketers who did use personalized content preferred to write their conditionals directly in code, using if-statements - but this required a knowledge of coding that many other users simply didn’t have.
Many email marketers who did use personalized content preferred to write their conditionals directly in code, using if-statements - but this required a knowledge of coding that many other users simply didn’t have.
Exploration
Our next step was to begin researching and exploring ways to handle this - how were other products letting users build conditional statements? Outside of the email, one of the most fruitful areas of research was in database querying and filtering - I found that querying often required users to set up complex if/or statements and there was a lot of inspiration to be drawn from the different interfaces that were used.
I then designed many, many different iterations of how we might want our conditional selector to look, and discussed with my PM and team the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
I then designed many, many different iterations of how we might want our conditional selector to look, and discussed with my PM and team the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Solution
We found that one of the most effective ways to convey understanding of how conditional statements worked was to add actual lines indicating each branch of the conditional.
Users could follow along for each condition and clearly see the text that particular set of recipients would receive in their email
Users could follow along for each condition and clearly see the text that particular set of recipients would receive in their email
The group selector for building conditionals with specific group members was also simplified to remove all extraneous information and clearly indicate if the marketer is targeting members or non-members.
Instead of displaying the entire conditional selector and builder, we only included the conditional text inside a token to indicate that it was dynamic content, as well as a simple icon toggle to switch between conditions.
This allowed for users to better preview the email they were writing, as the new conditional token no longer impacts the text spacing and layout.,
This allowed for users to better preview the email they were writing, as the new conditional token no longer impacts the text spacing and layout.,
Results
With the redesign, email marketers were able to better understand the concept of personalizations and conditionals, and saw them as an opportunity to build more effective emails. In general, marketers felt more comfortable building conditional content thanks to the clear visual layout, and more admins who had not previously sent personalized emails began doing so.