A smartphone on a green surface shows an email from LinkedIn about an event.

Designing a metric growth playbook

Driving metric impact with a platform-level redesign

MY ROLE

Strategy
Visual Design
Interaction Design
UX 

Strategy
Visual Design
Interaction Design
UX 

RESULTS

Increased weekly active users by 1.6%
Sessions by 0.4%
Decreased unsubscriptions by 4%

PLATFORMS

Web

Identifying areas of opportunity

With thousands of live emails, I looked at emails that had the highest volume but also had below-average click-through-rates.

Principles

TRUSTWORTHY

Preserves members' trust and privacy.

RELEVANT

Highly personalized to directly help members achieve their most important jobs-to-done.

ACTIONABLE

Has a specific, clear next step for the member to accomplish their job.

PURPOSEFUL

Considers and reflects where the member is in their professional journey.

Problem

An audit revealed that our emails did not meet the principles in the following ways and that email owners lacked the tools and resources to drive performance in emails:

TRUSTWORTHY

Inconsistently-styled emails can deteriorate member trust

RELEVANT

Content lacks the “so what?”

ACTIONABLE

Vague CTAs that were not very direct

PURPOSEFUL

It’s unclear what a member’s next steps should be

Transforming emails

We piggy-backed on the migration of the email code to make platform-level improvements to the UX, visual design, and interaction design. Our principles guided me in making the following changes:

TRUSTWORTHY

Style all emails in a consistent way by implementing our current design system.

RELEVANCY

Increasing relevancy of content by adding social proof.

ACTIONABLE

Clarify CTA copy to inspire action

PURPOSEFUL

Guide members to their next best action to make emails more purposeful.

Two screens side-by-side, one labeled before and another labeled after.
Emails – Detail – Search Appearance

Results

The email platform changes saw impressive metric wins including:

  • Increase in weekly active users by 1.6%
  • Increase in sessions by 0.4%
  • Decrease in unsubscriptions by 4%

Scaling Performance

My next step was to create a scalable system for all teams to replicate success in their own emails. I systematically raised the quality bar by partnering with the Design Systems team to create a playbook that consolidated learnings and documented email-specific design patterns. I also guided teams directly through a dedicated Slack channel and office hours. I also ensured quality by leveraging an existing review process to ensure that the principles were met and to make any suggestions from the playbook that would increase their click-through-rate.