Web Application Engineer
UX Design
Email Design & Development
(2012-2017)
When I first walked into Groupon, the company was shifting from technology start-up to a publicly traded IPO company. I immediately dove into the 15-hour, all-nighter, let's-make-the-next-big-thing engineering mindset. I was hired as a Software Engineer for the email platform, migrating away from the third-party service used for creating and sending emails, to our own internal platform. At this time, Groupon was sending close to 6 million emails a day, and we were a small team of 8. The emails were originally built out in hardcoded HTML/CSS and Ampscript. Migrating internally, I developed a new code base with standardized templates in HTML and shareable CSS files (unheard of!) with the addition of the Freemarker language for dynamic content and imaging.
Marketing
Weekly responsibilities included gathering data and analysis on open rates and click-thru to discover trends and devise creative solutions for increased ROI. With our initial win-back Starbucks deals, we constantly developed new one-off campaigns to spark customer intrigue, with revenue success of over $1 million.
Creating the customer lifecycle I learned of the different types of campaigns used in email marketing and spearheaded many email strategies to maximize sales. Campaign types include drip campaign, promotional campaigns, transactional, account management, and more, all using it’s own personal strategy owned by my team.
I was involved with a small internal team to develop audience personas and develop a new email campaign system. With a new algorithm developing personalized email content per user, we constructed a Pinterest-like email template, with transferable deal cards programmed using the same algorithm and passed to the template in JSON format. This project was my favorite, allowing me to play a role in marketing, design, and engineering to create one of the organizations most successful projects. Within three months of our launch we saw a 62% increase in customer engagement, and an overall increase of $200,000 sales per week.
Development
Beyond HTML/CSS and Freemarker, all templates required individualized JSON data for porting personalized, dynamic data per email. Our system triggered the correct email template by calling the correct files via a .yml file. All of this was housed in a Github repository tested and deployed weekly. A/B testing occurred by manipulating multiple audiences in our MVC framework, testing different template layouts, subjectlines, and time of day. Additionally, this entire process was developed again when we internationalized our system. I spent two weeks in our Dublin office and three months in our Seattle office working with different teams and locations to onboard our system and cultivate the universal email brand.
Design
The constant iteration over the email templates through a migration created a confusing and unmanageable brand. Through two large project initiatives, the email platform received massive facelifts and a streamlined iteration system. Through UX testing, A/B testing, send and open analysis, and some basic common sense, we manipulated the email to best communicate with our customers. Similarly, we incorporated this same workflow to designing our internal tools for creating and sending emails, with the Bootstrap framework and Angular JS. Our global marketing team sent 10 million emails daily with our own internal software, monitoring opt-ins and click-through, manipulating data and deal types sent to users, A/B testing, and collecting data.
When we rebuilt our internal push notification tool, it was initially developed in Ember JS before transitioning to Angular JS. The development of this combined multiple systems with multiple teams- Engineering, Marketing, Product. Five years at Groupon means a lot was created, developed, destroyed, and experienced. To sum up all the work would take multiple webpages, which is boring. So, other important buzz words to note- Mongo DB and JSON schema for data compilation and email template rendering per individual email; lead the email template branding redesign with email-specific CSS library and styleguide; MVC Java framework for batch sending; send debugging and data compilation using Hadoop; multiple API integration for real-time user data; internationalization; rapid prototyping from Sketch to HTML; and even a little Python.
If you've seen or received an email from Groupon from 2012-2017, I designed it, developed it, sent it, tested it, broke it, fixed it, or all the above.