Growth Promotional Process
As Senior Designer on T&N’s growth team, I owned the end-to-end workflow for major promotions, standardizing asset templates, establishing a collaborative ideation framework in Mural, and partnering with channel leads (Facebook, Google, affiliates, and organic social) to align creative with each channel’s nuances.
Initial Planning
Marketing Brief Kickoff & Research - The kickoff is where we are informed of the sale offer, dates, competitive analysis, world events and other details pertaining to the sales period. We came into the the Labor Day kickoff knowing the odds were stacked against us due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Creating a campaign that would resonate with our customers and stand out from the competition was going to be a challenge. As for our sale, we decided to offer a 10% site wide discount from 08/18-09/07. Working with channel owners, we reviewed past performance, competitor campaigns, and holiday insights, pinpointing top creative attributes—like in-situ photography for affiliates and direct messaging.
Brainstorm and theme selection - In two rounds of Mural workshops, I led the team into the process of narrowing down overarching themes for the promotion. This led us into the “Summertime in the Bedroom” staycation theme—an oasis-in-your-home concept inspired by life under quarantine (first session). The second workshop session centered on brainstorming art directions to help communicate the theme. Here is where the creative direction is locked and special requests from channel owners are prioritized. Promo testing methods are often times determined at this point.
We then prioritized special requests from channel owners and defined our testing approach: we’d shoot two versions of every asset (lifestyle with talent vs. in-situ without) in the same setting to compare ad and e-comm performance under the staycation narrative.
Concepting & Photoshoot
With the theme locked, I drafted a creative brief—including messaging, shot list, props, and talent directions—and remotely art-directed the photoshoot via video with our photography team. My detailed shot list ensured every asset—from e-comm banners to retail ads—was captured according to our vision
Photoshoot - Art directors and photographers reference the creative brief and shot list throughout the shoot to gather all photography assets needed for production. Due to the covid circumstances, I was forced to stay remote and art direct and monitor over video. This is where the shot list I created with the photographers really came in handy. The shot list had detailed actions and illustrations to depict how the photography would be used in various media. These assets are used across the Tuft & Needle site, retail locations ads, videos, and other marketing materials.
Asset Production, QA & Launch
All asset requests listed in the marketing brief i.e ecommerce additions, Ads, emails, videos, content etc. are produced. Qualitative tests are performed and assets altered if necessary at this time. Due to the tight 4 week turn around, our qualitative ad test, although prepared, would carry less weight for this promotion. We instead leaned on historical data and quantitative research for this promotion and allowed the planned qualitative test to inform future creative with similar attributes instead. Final assets passed rigorous QA before being scheduled across channels.
Outcomes and Results
Homepage Hero Testing -
During the start of the sale, we reviewed the data and concluded that there wasn't a major difference with the homepage variations. The full bleed lifestyle variation (aka original) performed slightly better which fell in line with previous tests with similar variants. Overall we found that the full bleed original variant had a 92% probability of performing the best. The left "slash" template fell behind at 8%.
Performance:
The Labor Day promotion delivered the highest single-day revenue of the year—nearly doubling YoY performance—and the second highest day in the company history. It also achieved the highest paid social Impression to Link Click Rate - 0.34% compared to previous 3 promotions within Q3.
