Audience growth center

OVERVIEW

The Contacts Growth Center is a centralized place in Constant Contact for contact list growth tools. It provides recommended strategies on when/how to use them and reporting on users’ organic contact growth from these tools.

GOALS

• Increase average user contact list size
• Improve customer retention rates
• Boost engagement metrics for list growth tools

ROLE

Lead designer

TOOLS

Figma

TIMELINE

August - September 2023 (2 weeks design time, 1 week design QA, ~1 month total)

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS OF MVP

• Centralized access: Easy access to all Constant Contact list growth tools with meaningful explanations of their feature benefits and when/how to use them.
• Educational resources: Contextual links to articles, videos, and webinar invitations on list growth best practices.
• Insights: Data showing the benefits and ROI of using each tool.

PROCESS

Step 1: Persona & design ideation

When I was assigned this project, I had some ideas on how we could bring this center of growth tools to life in a meaningful way. The high-level persona for which I designed was a small business owner who is looking to grow their contact list but isn't sure what to try outside of sending emails. They see we have a lot of different tools, but aren't sure how to leverage them for growth.

I brainstormed some basic page layouts to start alongside my design strategist and content designer. Then, I turned them into more high-fidelity concepts to present to product directors.

INITIAL FEEDBACK

It was brought to our attention that another team was introducing a new feature throughout the app that would hold all marketing blogs, articles, and help assets which impacted the design of this product: instead of dedicating a column or section for help information, these assets would be accessible via a new global widget. This shifted the design by allowing more space for strategy tips and tool recommendations. Otherwise, we got the greenlight from our product partners to start scoping for development.

Step 2: Align on phase 1 scope with stakeholders

After syncing with product about the overall direction, it was time to define the scope for the MVP:

• Insight into what growing your audience means and why it's important for small business owners
• Awareness of the various list growth tools we offer
• Strategy recommendations on when to use each of the tools (lite, no AI to start)
• Access to the growth campaigns created/activated/sent in an account
• Reporting on audience growth performance over the last 7, 30, or 90 days from organic sources

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Step 3: Finalize designs for dev scoping

Given the short timeline, we weren't able to user test this design before it was live, but planned to analyze early user behavior once the MVP was released. I polished the design during critiques and after receiving scope feedback from product/eng. Some of the things I adjusted were:

• Removing metrics we couldn't have for the MVP and replacing them with "recipe" cards. These cards speak to different small business owner use cases (ex: "reliant on foot traffic?" gives a brick & mortar shop owner specific tool suggestions that differ from a business that's fully online.)
• Added a chip ("Created for you✨") on the landing page tool to call out that we auto-generate a sign-up landing page for them when they create their account.
• Added filtering and search capability to the "recent campaigns" section.
• Refined spacing on the tool cards

I also created an empty state, breakpoints, mobile web screens, and provided devs with detailed specs.

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As the design was being developed, I payed close attention to the engineering work and provided detailed feedback on visual changes that were needed before launch.

PROJECT RESULTS

Here is the impact 9 days after launch. (*note, no marketing promotion of feature launched for this first release)

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LEARNINGS

This project launched quickly, which was very exciting! I thought our process of ideating before the scope was defined was effective because design was able to drive the vision. Telling the visual story helped our product owner visualize what was most important for MVP and where we could take it in the future. I also learned a lot about the design QA process, and even worked with a senior designer to define standards around design QA for our org.

PLANS FOR NEXT PHASES

• More reporting to show ROI: Show specific details about which tools are working best (ex: contact growth sources) and industry comparison (ex: “how others like you” are succeeding with these tools)
• Personalized recommendations: AI-tailored list growth strategies based on user goals and current states.