Designing for a Niche Market — The Phorest Email Editor
Marketing is a core part of what Phorest do, our entire goal is to help our customers to get their clients back in more often, spending more and generating referrals. When you’re trying to get clients ‘back in’ it’s all about retention and staying in touch with your clients, so you’re always in their mind when they next want to book.
For the past few years, email marketing from Phorest has been a key part of that but through a lot of customer feedback we had a lot of improvements to make. We had a set of clients who would send campaigns every month (roughly a quarter of our client base) and then when we look at it by quarter, about half of our client base would send an email campaign. We knew we could do better here and through the feedback we got, we knew we had lots of things we needed to improve in the product itself while also some issues outside of the editor itself that made sending emails harder.
What we were really hearing is that our clients wanted a better email suite, but not just that, specifically a better email suite for hair and beauty salons.
In Phorest, we approach product development from the point of view of really understanding the problems people in our industry have before creating solutions to solve those issues. So with that in mind we broke it up into the problems to be fixed, then what we can do to solve them.
The Problems
So why weren’t people using the email suite more often? What was different in our industry than others?
We dig deep on lots of areas from quantitative discovery looking at the usage data of the tool as it is now to lots and lots of qualitative discovery by speaking with a lot of our customers about their issues, even at one point going to work in a salon to see how they put together an email campaign.
Our editor was clunky to use, we had used a proprietary format in the content which made it hard to do things like copy and paste or easy editing.
a high percentage of our industry is dyslexic, any solution needs to take that into account
Our customers were worried about writing really slick marketing content, a high percentage of our industry is dyslexic and the majority don’t come from a marketing background so copywriting isn’t always natural. Being strong on copy is something that would be assumed by most marketing tools, for us we have a wide range of skills from the strong marketers to those with no knowledge at all.
Sourcing good images was difficult when you don’t know where to look, great marketing campaigns are anchored on a great image. Once you’ve found a good high res image without a water mark then you’d download a few apps to allow you to mark it up with text or effects to look professional.
Tracking the return on investment on marketing was always a grey area, knowing how well a campaign does is hard. Sure you can get open and click rates in tools like Mailchimp but can you find out what cash ended up in the register? What is a good open rate for a salon owner?
The final issue, and probably the most prominent is that there’s a lack of ideas for marketing campaigns. Most salon owners are on their feet for really long shifts, trying to be creative squeezed into an hour when you finally get home doesn’t usually lead to amazing ideas.
Our approach to building product, is to start with the problem and really talk to your customers then you can find your solutions. To gather this we had our data analyst spend some time digging on behaviour for around a month solid we called salons every day to learn about how they worked and even went to work in a salon to help them create their monthly email campaign.
The Solution
So given the issues above, our next stage is to lay out the potential solutions and test them all through product discovery. I won’t go into detail on every step of that here but there’s a good example in this post on a previous feature.
Some of the solutions we built to specifically solve the issues listed above included rebuilding the editor in a HTML based UI that was much easier to use. Along with this new UI, we created a number of tools to help the user create amazing content. In Phorest we have a product principle called ‘do it for them’ which means where there’s cumbersome tasks we always take it on on the users behalf (something we do across the business). Heres some examples of this.
To solve the issues around content we partnered with Pro Writing Aid to provide spelling, grammar, dyslexic specific grammar and even readability checks. As the user types, a professional writing assistant offers corrections to improve the copy. The end result being professional readable content.
We then partnered with Unsplash so that we can now provide over 500,000 high resolution, license free and searchable images directly in the email editor. Once they pick an image they like they’re given an image editor so they can overlay text or edit the image. The image below took less than one minute to source, edit and add to the content.
For the lack of ideas, we knew generic templates wouldn’t work for our clients. Looking through general marketing tools the default is to create templates about deals and discounts which we know isn’t good for this industry. Luckily as we only deal with hair and beauty salons we know what campaigns tend to work so we had our marketing and success teams build bespoke campaigns made for our clients only and created an ‘inspiration flow’ that groups themes and ideas together with multiple templates for content.
Finally, for the return on investment as you can see in the hero image above. We built a new screen to display how the campaign performed. As Phorest runs the marketing suite and also the appointment book and the cash register, we have the unique ability to go beyond open and click rates. In fact we show the user the names of their customers who opened or clicked and then exactly how much money they spent when they arrived, even listing how they spent it and on what services. We also highlight any metrics like open or click rates against other similar salons.
the email marketing IS GENIUS!!!!!!!! I can’t WAIT to send our first email to see the stats!!!!
Good products fix real problems, our new email suite is live and so far we’ve had amazing feedback. Feedback like this is why we do what we do.
The Finished Article
The walk through below gives you a look at the fully finished article, which has since been nominated for a design award.
Conclusion
We’ve had some great success with this type of approach. When you know you’re building for a niche you don’t need to dilute your product by building something for everyone. The key is to find out what specific problems they have by actually talking as many people from that industry as you can, as often as you can.
Don’t be afraid to focus on a niche market. I’d love to hear any feedback or how you approach product in your company.
