Revinate Marketing:
Email Content Creation Tool Enhancement

Overview

The Revinate Marketing app is a web-based application that allows hoteliers to drive revenue and build better relationships through Email Marketing, Guest CRM, and Upsells. This project aims to improve the user experience in the email content creation process.

As the project lead designer, I worked closely with product management, engineering, and customer success teams to determine project needs to enhance the tool.

Intended User:
Email Marketing Specialist and Hotel General Manager

Status:
Shipped in 2018

My Role:
Lead product designer

Problem

The old email content creation tools were very clunky and lacked crucial functionalities. For example, users were unable to manage email templates and image libraries unless they created a new email campaign. This leads to a lower usage rate and a lack of discoverability of the features. Some clients would rather use third-party solutions instead of the Revinate Marketing app for email content creation, this causes client frustration and a higher churn rate.

Old email editor and image library

Research and Discover

In addition to collecting usability feedback from existing users, I investigated dozens of campaign creation services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, and Stripo to learn the pros and cons of each app. By conducting the competitive analysis, I was able to determine the potential improvement areas.

Prioritization

It is tempting for designers to design all kinds of features that match user needs. However, with limited engineering resources, it’s crucial to prioritize the enhancements. Here is how I approached it:

  • Review existing user feedback that PMs and CS collected along the way.
  • Talk to target audiences to extract pain points and define actionable insights.
  • Communicate the potential business values by reviewing usage data and success metrics with stakeholders.
  • Review potential enhancements with product and engineering to define the project scope.

Explorations and Validation

After the discovery and research phases, I did a few rounds of concept designs and talked with product, design, and the CS teams to get feedback. This helped with prioritization by providing the teams tangible concepts during discussion.

Feature Highlights

1. Email Template Management Tool

Email Template management tool allows hoteliers to better create and control their brand voice and style. Also, a new collection of responsive email templates is added to the template library. It provides users with a jump start while creating new email contents.

2. Image Library

Provide hoteliers access to free stock images to make their email campaign more attractive to hotel guests.

3. Email Editor

Micro animations were added to help users navigate the interface smoothly.

Learning and Iterating

To validate the usability of the new features and redesigns, Invision and Craft were leveraged to conduct user tesings.

Google Slide was also used to collect and share testing insights across different teams.