40 minute presentation by Nooshin Latour (@nooshin) & Anirvan Chatterjee (@anirvan) at the UC Computing Services Conference (UCCSC 2014). Evolution of UCSF Profiles research networking system, early promotion at launch, growth/SEO, and engagement with targeted personalized data emails. Full description here: https://uccsc.ucsf.edu/node/101
Press Release Distribution Evolving with Digital Trends.pdf
How to Harness the Power of Google Analytics, Email Marketing & Vanity to Increase User Engagement
1. Clinical and Translational
Science Institute / CTSI
at the University of California, San Francisco
“Mirror, Mirror, Who’s
Looking at My UCSF Profiles Page?”
Nooshin Latour, MA & Anirvan Chatterjee
UCCSC 2014, San Francisco
7. What is UCSF Profiles?
• Every UCSF researcher has a profile
• Every profiles automatically includes
publications and research topics
• Researchers can log in to add a photo,
bio, awards, etc.
8. What is UCSF Profiles?
• Users can search UCSF Profiles to find an
expert on a topic, enabling collaboration
• Profiles data is publicly available via APIs,
and used in 30 UCSF apps & websites
9. What is UCSF Profiles?
• Lots of traffic from on and off campus
– 2,800 visits per day
– 1 million visits per year
– 75% of traffic from search engines
• We actively mine web analytics data to
provide insights into site usage
12. How do you launch a brand new
campus-wide resource?
Photo by Diane Yee, used under CC, https://flic.kr/p/e48bHL
13. Tactics
1. News article on UCSF.edu
2. Executive Vice Chancellor emails ~8000 people
3. Send postcard to the 2500 people profiled
– Free iPad contest for users who update their profiles
4. Get major campus websites to link to the site
– e.g. UCSF.edu, Library, School of Medicine
5. In-person outreach at faculty event
27. Key Strategies
1. Measure: Establish benchmarks
2. Partnerships: Easier to work together
3. Automation: Tech trumps manual labor
4. Vanity: Tap into user motivations
32. Email open rates for these
campaigns, vs. industry averages
• UCSF Profiles News Email: 41%
• UCSF Profiles UCTV Email: 39%
• Our department newsletter: 26%
• Nonprofit industry avg.: 25%
• Education industry avg.: 23%
• Social networking avg.: 22%
• Software / web app avg.: 22%
34. Automated onboarding email
1.User added to Profiles
2.Daily process checks new user logs
3.New users get a customized welcome email,
delivered via Mandrill email service provider
37. A/B tested subject lines
“Reminder: Mary, take a few minutes
to update your UCSF Profiles page”
vs.
“Mary, here are three ways to
enhance your UCSF Profiles page”
42. Customization rates
As of November 2013, before this round of
emails:
• 18% had added a bio and photo
• 20% had added only a photo
• 3% had only added a bio
• 59% had added neither
43. Ask users to fill out their Profiles
• We sent a customized email
to 3,072 Profiles page owners
• Emails were customized by segments:
1. missing photo (3%)
2. missing bio (20%)
3. missing photo and bio (59%)
44. Users gets a custom pitch
• Specific call to action (e.g. “add photo”)
• Share average pageviews to motivate
users
45.
46. Results
• “Add bio” email 12% made edits
• “Add photo” email 11% made edits
• “Add both” email 10% made edits
51. So we can answer…
Am I being viewed by:
1. Colleagues at UCSF?
2. Colleagues at other universities?
3. Pharmaceutical companies?
4. Foundations?
5. The National Institute of Health?
52.
53. A/B testing subject lines
• NAME, your 2013 UCSF Profiles page report is ready
• NAME, your 2013 UCSF Profiles report is ready
• NAME, your 2013 UCSF Profiles stats are ready
• NAME, your UCSF Profiles stats are ready
• NAME, your UCSF Profiles pageviews in 2013
• NAME, your UCSF Profiles pageviews
Winner!
54. Email results
• Sent to 2,713 Profile owners
• Zero unsubscribes!
• Open rate: 46%
• Click rate: 14%
55. Survey user feedback
• 236 recipients (8.7%) completed survey
• 100% of them said knowing who looks at
their Profile page is useful/interesting
56. Survey user feedback
• “I want to learn exactly who (which pharma,
institution, company, govt agency) viewed my
profile”
• “How many people are clicking on my
publications?”
• “Are my pageviews high or low, compared
with others?”
• “Always happy to see my name up in lights!”
57. Survey user feedback
• “I like my Profiles page. I think it's a great
landing site for collaborators and students
who want to do research with me.”
• “I've been putting off updating my page - this
is very motivating”
• “This was a pleasant surprise. I didn't even
know this information was being collected. I
certainly didn't know others were interested.”
58. Did emails help
change users’ behavior?
YES!
385 net users (6% of total)
updated their Profiles
for the first time
59. Key lessons
1. Measure: Establish benchmarks
2. Partnerships: Easier to work together
3. Automation: Tech trumps manual labor
4. Vanity: Tap into user motivations
From various targeted Profiles campaigns to increase engagement, we learned that using data to create a personal message is powerful
and motivates people to take action, engage (CTA = call-to-action);
UCSF Profiles networking system web product, We wanted to increase number of manually edited profiles and the method was to reach out in personalized manner, to specific groups of people.
Communicator / techie duo
On a campus so spread out like UCSF – researchers might get stuck on a problem and not know that someone else working on the same problem even exists. So a tool like UCSF profiles helps researchers find and potentially collaborate together.
Every section, feature is filled out
Today we’re breaking out the evolution of the product into 3 parts
Problem:
How do you understand and increase usage?
Tactics
Measurement via Google Analytics
Search engine optimization, because our users mostly use Google
Get links from wide variety of campus partners
Syndicate results to campus websites
Pretty URLs
how do you increase profile owner awareness and engagement?
Profiles is getting popular getting tons of traffic - it’s an online gateway
We didn’t want to rest on our laurels! Compared to other institutions with similar research profile networks -
we are leading in adoption & engagement, but we wanted to improve, do more,
I’m not even receiving all the departmental and other institutional communications the average researcher or faculty member gets. So here’s this community we are deemed to served, provide resources and funding to, and are message is mixed with all this other communication. How can we better reach these researchers? Academics? - lessons on how to cut through it through many tests
Mature stage, Profiles pretty developed by now. Expanded it from 3000 - 6000 profiles.
Due to campus familiarity - at a point other entities could evangelize for us - co-branded partnership campaigns
Building new partnerships with content partners adding data to Profiles, e.g. UCTV
Opportunity to inform profile owners that we’re embedding videos on their profiles
University of California Television (UCTV) is a broadcast outlet featuring programming from throughout the University of California
Method:
Mailchimp, mail merge, Concise - cross promoting content
Repeated same partnership co-branded email with UCSF’s University relations –
UR - News and Communications arm of UCSF, they know us and were excited to partner, evangelize with us
Open - opened email (soft number since many clients can read emails on devices without opening it)
Clicks - clicked on link in email
1000 people leave and join UCSF Profiles – like a directory that just exists, new people don’t actually know they have a Profile page! There’s no way we’d have the bandwidth to send emails in batches to welcome people - looked into an automated solution.
Based on success of first test with personalized emails, want to reach every Profiles user to increase awareness and engagement EARLY ON
Trigger via new user logs, deliver through Mandrill (New user -> Mail visual)
Give a stat from Google Analytics Custom email informing new users that they have a Profiles page with an average number of pageviews, Best email marketing practices: A/B test body copy, Clear, concise copy and call-to-action
Helpful tips to fill out areas that are important, CTA
Taking out reminder improved opens by 10%!
Talk about tone, copy, best email marketing. Friendly to the point – not so formal and bureaucratic
Highest click through rates – new excited user, drops off over time which is expected.
Everyone knows that they have a Profile
So we nailed onboarding for new users - what about everybody else that we didn’t capture? How do we get them to make the most important edits to their pages?
Some fields are auto filled out, others need to be added by users, GOOD profiles are filled out, Uncustomized Look Empty
Again, we’re funded to help researchers learn about each other and potentially collaborate so filled out profiles are better for everybody
semi-personalized data Use Google Analytics data to be able to explain why they should add fields; provided semi-personalized pageviews stats (4 segments)Correlation with certain elements being filled out and higher pages views. **Health Science institution so we suspected that our users care about meaningful data and perhaps this info. would motivate them
Customized call-to-action to get users to add the details they haven’t added
HTML mail merge with Mailchimp (Filled out profiles - richer tool for all! )
Use Google Analytics data to be able to explain why they should add fields; provided pageviews stats (4 segments)
Over 10% of users made an edit from each segment!
ultimate vanity data to drive engagement
We’ve been nagging users to update their profiles, but not showing the value.
Data from Google Analytics can show users that the groups they care most about are using UCSF Profiles
UCSF
ISPs – Comcast (home); Verizon (phone)
We got this data via Google Analytics, which tells us which entities are looking at which pages; so we only emailed people with 20 or more views, from at least 2 categories
Solicit user feedback through Qualtrics survey
Again, deliver as HTML mail merge through Mailchimp; Single sign in
Over 6 rounds, Shortest subject line (last two you see) performed on average 10% better!!
Vanity / Personal Data Works!!100% (200) Profiles owners responded “Yes”!
Just wanted reiterate our key tactics which became key lessons: Partners - Cross promote each other’s content
Mail merge is easier than reaching out to users one by one & Fully automated emails just run by themselves!
Vanity - Use personalization & data to better communicate to your users; **Our gut told us that researcher like to hear about themselves and what could help them professionally and it turned out to be true
Product managers, developers, community navigator, leadership buy-in