People Connect is the parent company to Intelius (leader in People Search) and Classmates.
Today, we’re going to focus on Classmates. Yes, we’re still out there, despite the coming and going of many other social networks. We have over 350,000 yearbooks and 70M members. When we first started Mark Z was only 11 years old -- we continue to be relevant by providing rich and engaging content – targeted at members at a very specific demographic.
I’d like to ask for a little audience participation. If you have had/been to a 10 year reunion, raise your hand? Keep your hand up for 20 year? 30year? 40 year? 50?
I bring this up to point out – our demographic is people at their 30, 40, 50, 60+ years since graduation. And we’ve had to deeply integrate this into all of our strategies, from the things we talk about to the way we communicate. These demographics change the shape of our email program.
Need a fun party trick? See what your friends from now looked like when they were in high school. Or better yet, find your parents, aunts, uncles or even grandparents!
So a little bit about us & our program.
As stated earlier, we have 21+ years of digitized yearbooks, enabling our members to reminisce and reconnect with the people who knew them way back when.
We’re also one of the only sources that requires you to register with the name you were in high school – allowing for easier reconnection.
However, we had a big challenge dealing with that much data.
We don’t want to over inundate our members but we also want to ensure we consistently all our members.
To set the stage, this is what our program used to look like. Each colored square was one onsite action which had a complicated relationship with their associated emails.
Each one of these colored squares represents an onsite / piece of UGC that drives an associated email, or set of emails. The more UGC, the more emails. The more emails, the more UGC, when the flywheel gets going, it can be an incredible thing to witness.
In order to try and get as much content out the door each day we’d run through our campaign in priority order. Starting with the WHAT. Then addressing the who.
We’d apply maxes to the who. This self regulation was the key to maintain even daily sends 365 days a year and proactively address potential deliverability risks.
Here is an example of one of our campaigns:
Today, Jen joins the Seattle High School Class of 2000
Tomorrow, we’d like to tell THE Class of ‘00 that Jen joined yesterday!
However, if someone in the Class of 00 already received an email today, they would be thrown out.
Tomorrow, when this campaign would run, Jen joining now happened 2 days ago, and the people who missed yesterday, wouldn’t qualify today. Many of our campaigns look for activity in particular time periods.
Overlapping content
Overlapping send strategies
Every day content & people were left on the floor with no easy way to pick back up again.
So we began to ask ourselves….
Overview of Pegasus – STARTS WITH THE WHO, NOT THE WHAT.
The name: technology asked me what I wanted if I could have anything, I said a unicorn. That name was already taken – so then I asked for a Pegasus. And from there it took off.
Now, we start WITH THE WHO.
Then we find the best and most relevant piece of content FOR THAT person TODAY. Everything else remains in their queue.
Tracked segment performance for 2+ Years prior to launch.
Don’t manage for the long tail | avoid complex segmentation.
Then, we layer on the frequency for each segment (which is different than the campaign frequency/
We populate our segments every morning, prior to running our campaigns. So the who, and what segment people live in, changes every single day.
Now, this may seem crazy that we will continue to email people that haven’t visited in over 2 years. But. If you think about what we do and who we are there, is something that happens EVERY 5 years. To everyone who went to high school. Any guesses?
Yes! High School Reunions. Furthermore, we’ve found that for our demographic (40 yr reunion and up) we find that in the year leading up to their reunion year, the nostalgia and trips down memory lane start happening more frequently
Enabling 2 things:
Catches our hard bounces and keeps lists cleaner
Also makes sure that we contact everyone at least 2x in the year before their reunion year and 2x during their reunion year.
For MIQ based emails we look at two key factors – onsite events & fan out.
Content lines up to wait their turn at the watering hole.
Notifications: Based on 1 Item
Summaries: Collections of related items
Reminders: Follow up communications / reinforcing previous communications / strengthening messages
THIS is when we get into the Customer led design. For our demographic.
16+ font
Catchy subject links
Calls to action: imagine how your 13 year old nephew talks to your 80 year old gramma.
Notifications: Based on 1 Item
Summaries: Collections of related items
Reminders: Follow up communications / reinforcing previous communications / strengthening messages
WHO AND WHAT _ FANOUT
The questions you might ask yourself.
Change emailable to touch points.
Graphically give examples of some of these – to help drive the point home.
Picked a deadline and worked back from there. And what can we accomplish.
Don’t do it all: With Classmates, we Beta’d with only 60% of our old program and built from there
Start simple: we took the most basic version of all our content for the Beta launch
You will screw it up: We launched with EXCELLENT CTRS – so we knew we got our segments right. However, total daily traffic was way to low.
To address that, we moved quickly – and once we had enough data, used our new levers to get on the road to recovery.
Questions to seed with:
What about transactional emails?
How is it actually going?