How we improved email campaign reporting

One of the things I love about working at LexBlog is that, as a small company, there are fewer roadblocks when it comes to making small, but important changes to our product than there would be at a large corporation.

I’ve seen many cases where product updates that would take months and require jumping through hoops take days here. One recent example is how we vastly improved how we report email subscriber statistics in the back end of blogs.

All LexBlog product blogs have the option to view email campaign statistics, seeing how many subscribers opened emails promoting new blog posts and how many subscribers clicked on the links inside the email. We also provide a full list of current and former subscribers to blogs.

Until recently, those lists were separate and—while useful—didn’t interact that much. We couldn’t see which subscriber opened or clicked through on which individual email.

After some quick discussion with Scott Fennell, our Director of Technology, we were able to get this feature up and running super quick.

One thing our President Greg Storey emphasizes is starting with the “why” of what a customer needs. When Scott proposed focusing on email opens, I tried to apply some Design Thinking principles to this new feature: What would serve the customer best?

While more subscribers would open emails than click through, the more relevant goal would be to see which subscribers opened emails. That would help clients target their more engaged readers, and be able to better target potential clients.

Because of this, we released an option to have lists of subscribers who clicked available—as well as who opened—and have it easy to access both.

This conversation was smooth, transparent and the feature didn’t get buried in a list of feature requests for months—it was barely proposed before it was up and running. It’s a perfect example of how we do our best to listen to our clients, and when we like what they suggest, jump into action.