Hannah Arnett

Starting off, I knew that I would need to understand what the campaign is doing already, and identify where it could improve. I looked at Student Loan Hero’s subject lines and preheaders to understand the company’s marketing appeal. I also looked at what its competitors are doing. I used companies like Niche and Fastweb to conduct a competitive review.

While brainstorming, I reflected on my own experiences receiving scholarship emails. As a tuition-paying college student, I am well versed with emails sent from companies like Student Loan Hero. Personalized subject lines tend to attract my attention more, especially if it mentions my school. Some of Student Loan Hero’s competitors did this. The giveaway campaign’s old subject lines and preheaders were not personalized, or sometimes just with the users’ first names. From this, my main objective was to create some unique, personalized subject lines and preheaders. I knew that we could use Shopify Liquid to accomplish this.

Here are a few subject lines and preheaders that I came up with:

After receiving feedback from my coworker and a few others leading this giveaway campaign, we made a few edits together. The next step for me was to test the subject lines and preheaders using Blueshift and Litmus to confirm that the users' personal data were displaying properly when emails were sent. My subject lines and preheaders were then added to the mix of emails sent out to users.

Results

I proved to my team that I am eager to learn, open to feedback, and willing to contribute more than just my scope of work. This was also my first experience collaborating with other professionals on a project, so this experience allowed me to further develop my collaboration, communication, critical thinking, marketing, and competitor research and analysis skills.

The first step in creating these emails was to design one email template to be used for all 35 "evergreen" emails to maintain consistency. I wanted the design to be minimalistic and simple so we can draw all of the customer's attention to the article information. The end-goal of this design is to persuade the customer to click the call-to-action button and explore the article further. To do this, I focused heavily on the quality of the copy rather than the design.

Each email copy changes depending on the article the email describes. This was a great marketing exercise because I wanted each email copy to reassure customers that LendingTree is dedicated to helping them achieve their personal goals, while also being simple and to-the-point. When selecting the key highlights of each article, I would mostly use the major headings of the article, and sometimes any extra details that I felt best summed up the critical ideas.

Once the email template design was approved by the senior director of the email team, I developed each email one-by-one, ensuring that all emails were responsive to desktop, tablet, and mobile screens. I also had to design the template to be compatible for dark mode styling. A critical last step was testing each email in Litmus to confirm that the email displayed correctly in various browsers like Apple Mail, Outlook, and Gmail.

Results

This project was significant in my internship experience because I was given a lot of wiggle room to make my own design and development decisions. I was able to personally test my skills to identify my strengths and weaknesses. This experience allowed me to further develop my critical thinking, marketing, and email development skills in an independent setting.

Creating an Impact

In the start, LendingTree was under pressure to deliver the first email mockup to company stakeholders quickly. The creative team was still finalizing the email design so there wasn’t a Zeplin file for me to start developing the mockup in Blueshift. Because we relied on Zeplin to tell us critical styling details like fonts, sizes, margins, and colors, it can be difficult to develop an email and still follow the design accurately without the Zeplin file. We had to get the email mockup delivered as soon as possible, so I decided not to waste any more time waiting and started the email development anyways by following a PNG file of the design. The process was slow and required paying attention to the smallest of details, but I followed my design instincts to help determine the styling of the email. Although it wasn’t completely accurate, it was very close to the real measures, and my efforts made a great impact on the team because we could deliver the mockup on time.

Tons of Data

The email template required pulling in tons of data through external fetches using Shopify Liquid on Blueshift. Using customer data from external fetches, I was adding dynamic information like credit card or personal loan names, offer highlights, and the customers’ pre-qualified credit limits and APRs. For each card or personal loan, and for each pre-qualified customer, the email content would change. There were also strict legal requirements to adhere to as well like font sizes and borders in the offer disclaimers. As a result, developing this template quickly became complex and required a great amount of in-depth testing and troubleshooting.

Cross-Team Collaboration

This was a huge project for LendingTree which required multiple teams working together. The technical team handled the data being pulled into the templates, and the creative team handled how the data would appear on the templates. We ran into a few situations where the two teams faced communication barriers. Because I was at the forefront of developing the templates, I had to communicate between the technical and creative teams using strategic language that is understandable to each team. My programming background in languages like Python and JavaScript, combined with my design background, really helped me understand both sides of the conversation.

For example, the creative team struggled to explain to the technical team how they wanted the offer highlights data to be pulled into the email template, and I was the only email developer who could understand the confusion from both sides and consequently find a solution.