Alan Underwood

From 5,000 to 50,000: How we 10xed our customer base and 27xed annual revenue with User Experience by focusing on unit economics at iContact

"iContact is an award-winning business known for innovative cloud-based software and outstanding customer service. Based in Raleigh, the company has more than 70,000 customers and 1 million users." — UNC College of Arts and Sciences

Impact

Introduction

I was originally brought on to the marketing team to help with the post-launch of IntelliContact 3.0, which had been, to put it politely, a disaster. It was so bad that the CEO had been on the phone at the helpdesk taking tech support calls himself. The plan was to put out the fires on the back end and start an aggressive marketing campaign to raise the profile of the company and gain new subscribers.

"Our sole server crashed that Christmas, bringing the website down and product offline for a week. We lost a third of our customers. But we persisted." — Ryan Allis, CEO (Business Insider)

I had just left Koroberi, a full service marketing agency, so at first my role was largely visual design and marketing, but looking at the recent problems with launch gave me an idea.

Ryan, our CEO, wanted to rebrand from IntelliContact to iContact to make the brand more memorable. Working with the CEO, VP of Marketing, CTO, and CFO, we came up with a way to re-brand the company in tandem with a re-design of the product focusuing on unit economics so that we would have a cohesive — and positive! — end-to-end brand experience.

The plan was that marketing would focus on CAC (Customer Aquisition Cost) while UX would focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). By taking this two pronged approach, we would maximize investment and 10x our customer base while increasing our annual revenue by 27x!

Tools Used:

• User Experience (UX) Design
• User Research
• Content Design
• Branding
• Email Design
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Fireworks
• HMTL
• CSS
• JavaScript

The Team

IntelliContact 4.0

Content Strategy

Marketing Integration

Our marketing positioning statement was "Easily Create, Send, and Track Email Newsletters & Surveys" and our Information Architecture was designed from the ground up to reflect that. Our tabs were labeled My Contacts, Create, Send, and Track so that new users could easily orient themselves and navigate the UI quickly.

Focus Groups & User Testing

Growing Pains

With any major re-design, some users are bound to dislike it. This re-design was no exception. When we launched the new design we left the old design in place with an option to try the new interface or, from the new interface, to go back to the old one. We tracked how many people were using the old interface vs. the new one.

After a few weeks we sent surveys to the people who had either not switched to the new interface or had switched to the new interface and then back to the old one. We asked them more about their preferences and invited them to participate in user research sessions. We wanted to know why people weren't switching or were switching back. For people who hadn't switched at all, the survey asked them why.

For those who had not switched yet, we found that many believed that there would be an additional charge so we added the word "Free" to our verbiage and saw more people move over.

Personas: Allison, Bob, and Carl

Our personas were named Allison, Bob, and Carl. Allison was a newsletter creator, often for a church, small business, or hobby group. Bob was a business user who was sending newsletters about his product, company, or other business related emails, and Carl was sending bulk email in mass volume.

For people sending mass emails we created an enterprise services team with dedicated support to facilitate massive bulk sending and make sure they were getting the best service possible. This took pressure off the UI as with the new white globe service, they did not need to use it as much and could focus on their marketing message and newsletter creation.

The "Dark" Persona: David

There was also a fourth persona, called David. David was a spammer. We didn't want spammers using our system, so our goal was to convince the users who closely matched "David" not to use our product at all. We segmented the users who were not interested in upgrading and we found that they tended to fall into two personas: Carl and David. For users that matched the David persona, we simply encouraged them to use a different service.

The Last 10%

However, even after accounting for the Allisons, Bobs, Carls, and Davids on the system, there was still a small but stubborn base of users who did not want to upgrade. Several of them had accepted our invitation for user research so we focused our questions on what we could do better in the UI to encourage them to move. They said they were happy with the older interface and wanted to stay with what they knew. Unfortunately, there would be no way to convince them to move forward and when we discontinued the old interface, they planned to leave the product and use a different service. We had a good relationship with our competitors so we listened to their needs and recommended a competing product that would fit. This may sound counterintuitive but we wanted all of our customers to be happy, even the ones who were leaving. This principle did more for our brand that I can say. We did not have NPS at the time, but it definitely made quite a few promoters out of detractors and it built pleasant relationships with our competitors as well.

Growth

However after looking at our growth numbers compared to our churn, it turned out that new users were perfectly happy with the new interface, and not interested in the old one. The question was: are we growing faster than we are shrinking. After comparing with our analytics it turned out that not only were we growing at a rate of 2:1 with new customers, the new customers were spending more than the old one. We regretfully, but firmly, made the decision to discontinue the old UI and let the remaining 10% (500 users) migrate to other competing services.

Rebranding Madness

I designed the logo for the iContact re-branding and was featured in The Register, a popular tongue-in-cheek tech publication. I still consider this one of my proudest accomplishments to date. It's not every day that I design a logo that sits on the side of a building.