tl;dr

This initiative started from the insight that personalization and contextualization leads to better user engagement. We leveraged this finding to connect emails, push notifications and home feed design to multiply the engagement level in each of these channels and create a compounding effect on retention rates.

My role

As the lead designer, I worked cross functionally with 2 Product Managers, 10 Developers, and 1 Product Marketing Manager in the same Palo Alto office. I also worked closely with 6 iOS and Android Developers in our Tel Aviv office throughout this initiative. I was responsible for leading strategic brainstorming sessions, getting alignment across stakeholders, leading the designs, and was actively involved in setting the roadmap.

Results

In this initiative, we were able to improve the performance of each email and push notification by 20x and 300%, respectively. We also drastically improved time on site on the home-feed by 6% in the first release. However, true impact of the initiative is lot greater as each engagement channel compounds from synergy.

Project 1: Creating personalized Email, Push, and Home-feed

How we started…

For many consumer companies, email plays a critical role in bringing back users to the site, at a relatively low cost. However, we noticed on Houzz that email performance was significantly trailing the industry standard. To understand why, we started off with competitor research, and compared our emails. From this, we noticed that other emails were more personalized and had a clear context as to why the user was receiving them. From this finding, we derived the hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Users will want to receive personalized emails based on their browsing history.

We started testing the concept by coming up with a very simple MVP email. We sent an email called ’32 bathroom products for you’ to users who had browsed bathrooms. This turned out to be a big success. Click-Through Rate on the email was up 20x. Next, we applied the same concept to make other emails targeting the different services we offer, and we saw a similar result. We also iterated on each of the emails by testing different titles, CTAs, adding navigations, and adding a banner.

Finding Opportunities

From the email test, we learned that users want to receive personalized emails. I wanted to know if we could extrapolate learnings from emails to create a growth loop. I created a user flow and worked with an analyst to understand the engagement metrics for other touchpoints.

From this I learned that homepage, and push notification were both having engagement issues. Homefeed on the web was getting less than 10% interaction, while on the app users were seeing less than 6 cards per session on average. This was in addition to the fact that users were not scrolling much. With push notification, open rates were less than 1% on average which was very low.

When I conducted user studies on home feed, I learned that engagement was low because users didn’t find the recommended content relevant. With push notification, I noticed it was for the same reason as email. From these findings I derived a hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Personalized and categorized content on push notification and home-feed will drive engagement

Push Notification Testing & Results

For Push, we wanted to create a personalized landing page that we could direct users with personalized push notifications. So I designed a simple page that could be personalized and worked on the visual representation of each content type (products, photos, projects, pros). We first launched the personalized product page. This was successful and it lifted click rate by over 300%. We then expanded it to other types of content and saw similar results.

Home-feed testing & results…

For the home-feed, the primary focus of the design was around creating a flexible feed that can be dynamically changed based on users’ behavior on our platform. In this design, I applied the same learnings from emails and push notification to create a feed that highlights contextualization and personalization for users. This was successful and led to +6% Time on Site so far.

As a result of this initiative, not only did we improve the performance of email, push and home-feed recommendation, we also found a way to scale impact by applying the same concept across Houzz’s product offerings. On top of this, by having one strategy across all three channels, we were able to continuously recommend interesting content, and increase the frequency of each email and push sends. This further increased the impact.

Step 1: User is interested in kitchen ideas and explores kitchen inspiration during the first time experience

Step 2: User receives personalized kitchen emails and push-notifications that brings the user back to Houzz

Step 3: User receives a personalized kitchen push notifications that bring the user back to Houzz

Step 4: Home-feed is personalized and is more relevant to users than before, and the user discovers new content which triggers another set of emails and push-notification

Repeat!!

Project 2: Leveraging what we built to make additional impact…

Testing Local Content

During generative interview sessions with homeowners, we discovered that homeowners talk to neighbors for helpful tips around home remodeling. We also found that homeowners get a lot of inspiration and advice from their neighbors. So we asked ourselves, how could Houzz provide value for this type of user behavior? We knew Houzz:

• Has various types of content regarding home remodeling (photos, stories…etc)

• Knows users interests, and history on site

• Knows a lot of local professionals we can refer

• Knows users’ zip code

From this, we came to find a way we could help users: users are interested in local content. Houzz can provide interesting and relevant local content.

Hypothesis, Testing, and Results for the local content opportunity

Our hypothesis was that users will engage with localized content from Houzz. To test this we decided to leverage email as a way to understand if this hypothesis is true and also to understand what type of localized content users would like to see. We chose email because it didn’t take a lot of dev resources, allowing us to quickly test this hypothesis and iterate. If the test was successful, we could apply the same concept to push notification and home-feed to further re-engage users.

My PM, analyst and I brainstormed what type of content users would like to see, and we started this test by launching ‘Recent projects in your neighborhood’ emails. This email improved open rate by 26%. So, we came up with additional email types and have seen great results. As a result, we are applying these learnings to push notification and home-feed in the near future with the hope of seeing similar results.