How a massive API project at Hallmark Labs proved a customer acquisition strategy.

Company: Hallmark Labs
Products: eCards Web, Feeln Web, Ink & Main Web
Project: Hallmark Life Single Sign On & Promotion

Opportunity

Hallmark Labs (then called Feeln) prioritized a tech-effort to consolidate development resources across their three business lines (eCards, Feeln* and Ink & Main**) to manage the three most critical and time consuming maintenance projects: account registration, profile management and entitlements, and payment. This entailed a new API in Ruby to connect to Feeln’s PHP backend and eCards’ and Ink & Main’s Ruby codebases. It also included an extensive database re-architecture and a migration of this important and sensitive user information. Such an effort!

Creating a single sign-on experience and consolidating payment methods for an older demographic can lead to a lot of confusion and fear of privacy infringement. How would one of our users respond to an “Account already exists” error when they signed up for the first time on any of the other products?

*Rebranded to Hallmark Movies Now
**Discontinued and will be re-launched late 2019

Solution

Wearing the User Hat

The first priority was to start educating our user base to hedge any concerns of the forthcoming updates. Working with email marketing and design, my strategy for the awareness campaign was to commence with intrigue to pique the users’ interest about 2 months prior to launch. Our messaging was akin to “improvements are coming to the digital Hallmark family.” We also introduced a co-branded experience where all the logos appeared unified across our marketing materials to signal that the brands fell under the Hallmark umbrella. (Luckily, one of the most trusted in America.) As the launch came closer, the emails became direct and introduced the changes, feature by feature. The primary goal of this content was to assuage any privacy concerns and be very clear on how the changes would affect the registration process and their accounts.

Wearing the Business Hat

One of the by-products of this large effort was the ease in which we could convert a given vertical’s user base to sign up for another one of the products. And what better way to encourage that with a deal! As it were, in-app education and changes had to happen on every product: awareness overlays appeared post-registration, updates to all profile management screens so that data details were aligned and consistently formatted, new password reset emails and pages, all new co-branded trigger emails... So at every point where the backend changes affected the user experience, we blazoned cross-promotion banners for the other products while dropping some product knowledge.

Result

Despite the high risk nature of migrating all this critical data and the importance of release timing across all three platforms (not done perfectly, I can tell you), within a couple of weeks of the first release we had product-wide implementation! Customer care tickets were far and few between and we learned that the eCard demographic was more likely to convert to Feeln than vice versa. (Who doesn’t want to watch a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie?)

The amount of impressions for this Hallmark Life cross-promotion campaign were magnitudes lower than our paid display or SEM for eCards or Feeln. However, the CTRs (ad effectiveness) for Feeln were 136% better than display and there were 122% higher conversions. eCards CTRs performed a whopping 625% better than display, but conversion was 50% worse.

Since the Feeln promotions performed so well on eCards, our primary follow up was increasing volume. Feeln members’ interest was significant for eCards, however the puttering conversion rate meant there was an expectation problem. Had I been at that role longer, my next step would have been to design a specific Feeln->eCard landing page or a branded registration funnel.

Takeaways

1. Get out ahead of your feature launches with your consumers to increase adoption and awareness. Various tactics include email marketing, in-app promotion, or a blog. InVision does a fantastic job at this.

2. Be sure to understand the motivations and hesitations of your audience when designing your awareness messaging and cross-promotions. Frequency and volume of that communication will depend on your users.

3. Cross-platform backend projects are no joke and require buy-in from multiple product owners and teams. Make sure customer care is very prepared. Expect delays and data integrity issues, and create launch contingency plans.

4. Make sure the messaging and user journey experience during cross-promotions match the headspace that your users are in to increase conversions.