OBJECTIVE

The marketing team made a goal for Cyber Monday to increase gift card sales by offering a promotion during the winter holidays. We wanted to send a flash sale email alerting Scribd users of this discount, which would guide them to a landing page. We would need to find the right stock photos for the email and the page since we did not have budget for a photo shoot, and all assets needed to be designed and coded by Cyber Monday, December 1. The timeline was two weeks, among other work.

PROCESS

I designed a special Cyber Monday email, landing page, and banner ads for the occasion. We worked with our editors to curate the best of the holiday-themed reads to feature on the landing page. We gave an overview of all of the quality books and audiobooks Scribd had to offer, and show gift options available for anyone to purchase as a gift or for themselves. I scoured hundreds of bad stock photography for a good one that could be used flexibly across mediums (ads, landing page, and email).

SOLUTION

THE RESULTS

Scribd saw a massive increase in gift card sales on Monday and through the holidays. It accounted for the most individual revenue in one day in 2014, selling over twice the amount of gift cards than the entire month of December one year prior. In December of 2013, Scribd sold 488 gift cards over the whole month. On December 1, 2014, Scribd sold 1,007 gift cards. We netted $72,959, showing that the email spiked revenue 3.8 times our average earnings.

Methodology/Specifics:

For this email, the criteria was:
- Users that have never been subscribers
- Users that are opted into our emails
- Users that have previously opened/clicked an email

That totaled 8,291,415 emails with:
- A 99.2% deliverability rate
- A 18.3% open rate
- A 1.3% clickthrough rate

Although this flash sale had great results, we learned a few things. The Marketing team could have done a better job of communicating all of the details when we ran this promotion by the Customer Service team. We talked to them about the scope of the project, but it's always good to have everyone on the same page for scenarios that arise, such as seamlessly discounting to a free trial user, etc.