R29 Engineering Intern: Sehr Ahmed

This summer Refinery29′s Product & Engineering team hosted three talented interns, who worked on different projects pertaining to (1) email acquisition improvements, (2) enhancements to our digital asset management system in our CMS, and (3) our affiliate marketing strategy through shopping products. Below, Sehr Ahmed, who worked on email acquisition, recaps her project.

This article was originally published on August 15th, 2016

During my summer as an engineering intern at Refinery29, I worked with the Growth Team on a project aimed at optimizing the email funnel. The “Email Funnel” is the conversion funnel for subscribers to our email lists. Our goal was to optimize this funnel as much as possible, by increasing the amount of users joining every month (acquisition), and decreasing the rate at which they unsubscribe (retention).

After cataloging R29’s own acquisition modules and doing some competitive analysis, we brainstormed acquisition and retention ideas to stop any leaks in the funnels.

We began by launching a mobile acquisition banner triggered by scroll depth that appears on the US, UK, and German mobile feed. After our initial launch of the banner, we made some styling tweaks and began using cookies to limit the frequency of banner appearances. Our first set or analytics indicated a greater acquisition rate for the banner than some of our other mobile acquisition modules.

After launching the mobile banner, we wanted to create a similar module for desktop. Like the mobile banner, the desktop popup is also triggered by scroll depth, appearing on scrollable articles on the US site. This module would allow users to sign up directly, without redirecting them to a separate sign up page.

As these tests are relatively new we’ll need more time to determine whether or not these acquisition modules are successful. With enough data we can then decide to either launch full implementations of these modules or test out other options. In the meantime, we hope to continue trying different email optimization tests to eliminate any gaps in our funnel and increase the overall user engagement for the Refinery29 newsletters.

– Sehr Ahmed, Refinery29 Engineering Intern: summer 2016