Email Campaign Management System

by on

I worked as part of a 2-person team on building a system to manage customer lists and email campaigns. We’d been using MailChimp up until this point, and while robust, we needed a platform tailored to our company’s needs.

Please note: the information displayed in this case study has been significantly altered to adhere to confidentiality agreements.

Project Overview

We found that rather than needing access to all of MailChimp’s features with a confusing interface, we would create our own system with the functionality we needed and flows that would require the least amount of training.

Research

The inspiration for this project came from the constant barrage of “Mailchimp makes this really complicated, but…” statements when our Director of Operations was training others on managing email campaigns.

We were able to sit with her and figure out what it was specifically that she didn’t like about the way things were in Mailchimp. Some of those complaints were:

  • Tedious to set up automated campaigns. Even more tedious to edit them after the fact. To edit something as simple as a subject line for an email in an automation campaign, one had to go to Automation > Find the Campaign > Click “Edit” in the dropdown menu > Find the email > Click “Edit” > Land on the template html editing screen > Find the “Setup” screen which appeared to be 3 steps ago the way it showed up in the UI > Click “Setup” … and only then would one be able to find the subject line field in a page of equally weighed fields and edit it.
  • No easy way to preview all emails that will be dropping in the near future. The CEO often asked “what communication is going out this week?” and there was no quick way to find a report on that info.
  • No easy way to access reports on large, overall sends. Only individual campaigns. What was needed was a way to look over the previous 3 months’ sending patterns.

To The Drawing Board

A lot of our whiteboard time was spent figuring out the best way to organize data in the backend, including nomenclature that would carry over into the front end. Naturally, there were disagreements. And naturally, after finally coming to solutions we were both happy with, we breathed a sigh of relief and went to go grab a coffee together to celebrate.

Building

Between good, old-fashioned whiteboarding to get our thoughts down and wireframing to refine our ideas, the project started to quickly come to life. Once the high fidelity designs were complete, it was time to produce.

My project partner started building out a robust back end set up while I worked on the visual front end to be able to “meet in the middle” and speed up the delivery of this project. Due to effective communication and a shared dedication to producing a quality product, this project ended up making it across the finish line ahead of schedule.

Features of this system include:

  • The ability to create and manage subscriber lists by pulling info from the customer database. This includes the ability to pull and filter names based on strings, dates, status fields, tracking codes, etc.
  • Segmentation within subscriber lists, with real-time previews of the results produced by the criteria that was set.
  • Pre-loaded templates with company branding, customizable through a rich text editor without the risk of the overall formatting of the email being broken.
  • One-off campaign creation, with a simple process for setting up the email, matching it to a list, and testing it prior to scheduling the send.
  • Automated campaign creation and management, with an interface that allows the user to clearly see the list, sending schedule, template, and post-send action(s) associated with each step of the campaign.
  • A reporting interface to allow the user to see the statistics for each campaign, list, and template.
  • A “Queue” section to show the upcoming sends, down to the email addresses they will be going to and the data they will contain within the template, as well as a “panic” button to pause some or all sending in case there is a need to do so.
  • Various user permissions so that different levels of users are able to use different parts of the system. For example: someone who shouldn’t be managing lists may still be able to log in for the purpose of viewing the reports and queue.

Some Sample Screenshots:

One-off Campaign Settings
One-off Campaign Settings – We were able to condense this process into a single page and use approachable microcopy that even someone new to this role could understand and work with.
Automated Campaign Settings
Automated Campaign Settings – Example Campaign – This screen was also able to house a majority of the settings on one page, rather than making the user navigate between complex sets of actions to accomplish simple tasks.
sendy-single-list-primary
List Management – Standard View – The list management page allows users to create “lists” from our database of email addresses and existing accounts. There is also a section that shows the current campaigns a list is being used for to provide context and to serve as a warning about carelessly modifying existing list criteria.
sendy-single-list-segment
List Management – Segment View – One can also create segments within list for further customization.