New customer onboarding
Problem to solve: Five of us were tasked with creating a cohesive, customer insights led, onboarding campaign that demonstrated the value of Expedia and begin to build trust with new customers within the first seven days after acquiring an email address.
My Role: I directed the cross functional teams that consisted of two different design organizations and two different business organizations.
The Solution: Emails that were tied to each users interests and new components that aligned with Expedia’s Unified Design System. These emails also supported and performed based on business goals.
Challenges: Since this was a new series that encompassed Expedia’s brand core value propositions we needed to seek approval from several levels of senior leadership before we could go live.
Insights: The image to the left showcased all of the onboarding emails that customers would get from multiple internal teams. Every email had business goals tied to them and it wasn’t until we showed the full flow (middle panel and far right panels) that we are able to garner the full understanding of what the new customer experience. This visual enabled us to join teams, create new business goals and create a simplified onboarding user experience.
Risks:
Ability to suppress existing campaigns for new customer cohorts.
An new customer engagement metric rather than the existing transaction metric.
Email system required new flagging capabilities and auto send capabilities.
Phase 1: The Design process
Created a segmented framework looking at high value actions and repeat drivers
1/2 day workshop to deep dive into research, prior marketing UX work, applicable line of business work to influence strategy
Integrated existing brand iconography and illustration
Mapped content to a hierarchy strategy supported by data and observations
Results
Based on the results from the first Welcome email, it appears that we are getting 7x the App Downloads by having it as the featured CTA.
When we compared test and control buckets on an impression basis, the number of transactions from both buckets are at par. This would suggest that featuring the member prices call to action, which is meant to drive transactions, is non-incremental in the welcome email and we can redesign the layout in the next iteration.
The initial welcome email with illustration focused branded illustrations rather than destination focused.
Phase 2: Research Discoveries
The research team completed a groundwork interview study: “What do people want to know about?”
Next up
Program ranking and evaluation
Traditional usability evaluation of design coming out
Diary study - travelers who are very close to signing up and follow them for at least 7 days and they will report daily on their feelings towards how Expedia is interacting with them.
Think-feel-do exercise to consolidate frameworks and map repeat drivers to emails for pre and post-bookers
Identified existing capabilities and limitations, and developed a plan for MVP
The Launched Welcome Series
Day One Email
The customer gets this email after signing up for an account but has not made a purchase. Data showed once a customer has the app they are more likely to repeat, so we lead this information and followed with benefits of booking with Expedia.
Day Two Email
The welcome email two focused on booking hotels. We knew if a customer does book, it is typically a flight, since this email is not “smart” we needed to assume that they booked a flight and we needed to feature hotel deals along with social proof as a benefit of booking with Expedia.
Day Three Email
The welcome email three invited the customer into the best travel sources. We linked them to our blog in hopes of inspiring their next trip.
“I can think of no one with more dedication and vision than Stephanie. She is a great mentor and leader within UX. Stephanie always respected others' opinions and championed the deep diving into relative problem spaces. Because of Stephanie’s ability to seek the answers needed to the questions that would help us strengthen North Star vision projects, and her determination to make sure that communication with all partners and leadership were always aligned during the creative process.”
— Nicola Williams, Senior Designer Expedia