For modern retailers catching up to the e-commerce game of adapting to a user centered process can be cumbersome. Samuels was no exception to this rule. Their ‘Deal of the Day’ campaign was an opportunity to use my design skills as a gateway to help a client understand user driven interactions.
CLIENT • Samuels Jewelers
ROLE • Second Lead Design
TIME • 1 Month
TEAM • Rose, Marie, and Theresa
Challenge
Samuels Jewelers is competitively placed with other retailers such as Kay Jewelers and Jared the Galleria of Jewelers. Samuels was experiencing a slow in sales attributed to their lack of an e-commerce defined customer relations program/management (CRM).
In the first iteration of an email CRM, they found great success with a weekly newsletter. Their E-Commerce team monitored data by analyzing their CTR with their unique user traffic on-site during phase one. Their next step to optimize, was launching a daily deals campaign. After 4 months of tracking correspondences, Samuels brought me into the mix in a hope to improve the performance of the daily deal email CTR.
Research
My immediate instinct was to review the user data collected along the journey of the campaign. There I learned that all efforts thus far were solely tracked via click rate’s, there was no user specific feedback recorded. Creating this data became my first priority.
I teamed up with the social media and community outreach liaison to send surveys to all in store sales representatives. My aim was to understand the problem from the frontline. I knew that this data would help our team pinpoint our miscommunication to the customer. For our survey, we targeted in store sales representatives and their top spending clients.
We received a total of 87 responses in a week's time. The biggest take away, in my eyes, was the lack of recognition. We found that the "Deal of the Day" concept was being lost. This led me to conduct follow up calls with specific survey participants.
With the calls, I found that the deal information was being buried in the store email. Samuels was sending a general email that included the "deal" near the bottom of the page. This led the the customer to perceive the email as a general communication and not a sale sheet.
I brought my findings to my Creative Director and together we pitched a new direction to the team. We wanted to create a daily email solely for ‘Deal of the Day’ and nothing else. The Samuels email would exist as a weekly digest and the new ‘Deal of the Day’ email would be sent Monday thru Friday.
Design
Once the team agreed upon our new plan, Rose and I got to work building possible templates with our Commerce team. We wanted to ensure flexibility for their team during weekly email creation. We designed our aesthetic around a passion feeling emulated in some of our Holiday campaigns running simultaneously with to the launch of the new ‘Deal of the Day’ campaign.
Using MailChimp and Adobe Photoshop I was able to create two separate templates with guided branding to help the turnover process to the E-Commerce team. Within a week of delivery I was able to train their team on brand standards and optimization for delivery across email clients.
Final Steps
After implementation and prototyping we launched a test campaign and the feedback was stellar. Our team improved CTR by 8% in the first two weeks of our campaign. By week 4, I was done with my contract at Samuels and left the team feeling secure and fully responsible for the continuation of the product.
With this project I was able to transfer valuable lessons in user analytics and the need for user driven data. I knew that without a customer defined survey we could not have found the opportunities within the inital email structure.
Understanding your user is vital to understanding a clients problem. If you cannot dive into the brain of the person you’re targeting you’ll never be able to see how their problems manifest.
