One Contact Page, Three Users: The Editorial Outreach Project
Industry Dive journalists receive a lot of emails — from confidential tips to PR pitches to news about an industry event. Until recently, many of these messages originated from a simple contact form on our publication websites. Because these contact forms were created years ago, when the company was much smaller, they were not designed to filter and route specific types of messages to specific internal staff members. All messages submitted to a publication website were delivered to all the journalists working on that publication. This communication process was highly inefficient and resulted in cluttered inboxes and missed emails.
Overall goal
More efficiently route reader and client communication to relevant Dive staff members or help users locate a self-serve solution — like DiveWire, our press release wire service, that can meet their needs
Our three users and their goals
When we started this project, we assumed we were working with one type of user, our editors. But, through additional research, we found that there were, in fact, two additional users we needed to consider.
- Editors: Our editors want to eliminate the clutter in their inboxes to quickly access the most relevant outreach they need to stay on top of the important news in their industry.
- Press Professionals: PR Professionals need to get their company news out in an impactful way as quickly as possible. They need to know that their news has been received, even if our editors chose not to cover it.
- Readers: Our readers need to know they are being heard when they send their outreach. Readers need to know how best to contact our editors to deliver specific types of information — e.g. feedback, comments, tips and more.
Research and user flow
We spoke to three editors, and the overarching issue was this: the editors were overwhelmed — it was impossible to get through all the misdirected emails just to access the ones that were worth covering. Deputy Editor Liza Casabona mentioned that she tries to forward emails to other departments when she can, but it’s difficult to do so regularly. A large amount of communication was falling through the cracks.
Finding a way to better serve PR professionals also presented an opportunity for the DiveWire product team. DiveWire is Industry Dive’s press release wire service that allows PR professionals to post their company news to all of our 26 publications. The DiveWire team felt that by bringing awareness to our press release service on the contact page of the publication websites, PR-related outreach could be converted into revenue.
To understand exactly how users were accessing our outreach funnels, we outlined the most common user flows. We discovered a few issues:
- A highly visible submission form on the website footer sent emails to all editors of that publication
- On the editorial team page, each editor’s work email was front and center, making direct access to editor inboxes a bit too easy
- After a user sent an email to the team, the user did not receive any form of a receipt confirmation message. Because the communication loop was left unresolved, many users sent duplicate emails.
- PR professionals were not aware of our paid press release service, DiveWire, which allows them to get company news out to our readers, regardless of whether or not the editorial team chooses to cover it.
Our research helped us identify six different outreach funnels that lead users to the same editorial team page. The main points of entry for most users were articles and the footer, which lead non-editorial outreach (advertising and press) to editors instead of the appropriate audience.
Our new goals
Redesigning only the editor’s page was not going to reduce the number of irrelevant emails in our editors’ inboxes. We needed to redesign multiple pages to properly direct users to the correct funnels for their outreach.
Redesigned components
- The Editor’s Page — Create new outreach funnels including a CTA for the DiveWire press product. Add links at the top of the page for users to quickly scan the relevant outreach funnels before reaching the editor’s contact information
- The Editor’s Bio Page — Place additional navigation to direct traffic to the DiveWire product and add a link for submitting a tip
- Contact Us Page — Create clear funnels by adding reference links at the top of the page and additional menu options in the form dropdown to direct user questions and ensure they reach the appropriate team.
- Site Footer — Visually group-related links to drive the three different audiences to what they need.
- Email Auto-Response — Create an email auto-reply that gives users a confirmation that their outreach was received. This creates a better user experience and hopefully decreases the number of emails re-sent due to a lack of response.
- Submit a Tip Page — Bonus. This page wasn’t in the original scope of this project, but it had no instructions on how to use this page. We took the opportunity to add explanatory copy to this page. This supports the overarching initiative to help direct users with the project directives for their outreach.
After several weeks of working on creating mocks with multiple options for each touchpoint, we found solutions that satisfied our stakeholders. This was a tough project, where the scope wasn’t as straightforward as we anticipated. A one-page problem turned into a six-page solution.
The challenge (and fun) of product design is balancing creating a positive experience for users while keeping your business objectives and goals in mind. Using the fundamental steps of the UX design process, we were able to help our editorial team increase their efficiency by identifying important outreach. We will measure the success going forward using Google Analytics to make sure our users are really using the proper funnels. We are also in the beginning stages of determining the revenue impact these changes have made on the DiveWire product.
