Creative Direction + Marketing Strategy + UX/UI Design
The Columbia Alumni Newsletter
The Columbia Alumni Newsletter is the only digital experience that reaches the entire Alumni network - over 240,000 members, world-wide.
I led a redesign of this newsletter to improve the engagement and experience for our alumni.
The original design (below) of newsletter had low engagement rates (open and clicks). To kick-off our project we conducted both qualitative (interviews) and quantitative research (email activity).
We used Salesforce Marketing Cloud to dive into the quantitative data - click activity and email activity (open rates, clicks, etc). These helped set goals for the projects and also areas that we should focus on improving.
I conducted a series of interviews, which we transcribed and cross-referenced with our data to identify common pain points and content categories that would be most interesting to our audience.
Our research also uncovered that the users did not feel connected to the brand and the content. The audience wanted a brief, focused, sophisticated experience that amplified the pride they had for their University and the community they were a part of.
Quick wireframe sketches helped us get stakeholder feedback and start to visualize the layout. We built the template in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and was able to launch the new design in 2.5 months.
We immediately noticed an increase in Unique Opens (+8%), Unique Clicks (+15%), Total Clicks (+13%)
A quick glimpse of the mobile version of the redesigned newsletter.
In addition to redesigning the newsletter, I created a first-ever Visual Style + User Guide to document the project, colors, fonts, and categories. This is meant to aid the team that was going to execute the newsletters moving forward.
