Calm

Calm is a mindfulness and meditation app available on several platforms. Here’s a sampling of my everyday work.

Email operations: Black Friday 2023

  • Overall strategy and Financial projections handed-off to another Lifecycle Marketing team member
  • We expanded the strategy to include significantly more frequency. We expanded from 4 days of campaigns to 14 days of campaigns for 5 audiences.
  • 70 total campaigns sent to ~50M unique users.
  • Retained responsibility for technical operations.
  • Wrote a Google Sheets script to orchestrate

Email operations: Black Friday 2022

  • All the same responsibilities as Black Friday 2021
  • New responsibilities: worked with Data Science and Finance department to help develop the Q4 forecast and Q1 impacts of the Black Friday sale.

Email operations: Black Friday 2021

  • Coordinated Black Friday 2021 across multiple channels: email, social media, customer experience, user acquisition, and engineering
  • Monitored campaign and work with engineering to identify and put out technical fires.
  • Launched 60 targeted email campaigns over 5-day period to these major customer segments.
    • Never subscribed (US and INTL)
    • Churned subscribers (US and INTL)
    • Current subscribers (US and INTL)
    • Super-active users (US and INTL) – new segment*
    • Lifetime subscribers (US and INTL)
  • Coordinated translation process for 7 languages:
    • English
    • Spanish
    • Portuguese
    • French
    • German
    • Korean
    • Japanese (new to Black Friday in 2021)

*During analysis of our 2020 results I noticed that a pattern where most sales for our highest-ticket offer (Lifetime of Calm $169) sold to super-active users. Result was a 3x expected value per email sent when compared to a typical subscriber.

Email marketing operations: Black Friday 2020

  • Worked with Data Engineering team to clean subscription data ahead of send
  • Audience segmentation
  • Wrote SQL-Python script to update 20M+ user records in Iterable with targeting criteria
  • Worked with localization team to translate the email campaign into 5 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Korean.
  • Worked with team for Quality Assurance.
  • Trafficking and Scheduling for 33 separate campaigns during Black Friday week
  • Monitor metrics such as purchase conversion rate and email deliverability

Email marketing operations: Black Friday 2019

  • Coded HTML Email templates
  • Audience segmentation
  • Worked with localization team to translate the email campaign into 4 languages: English, Spanish, French, and German.
  • QA
  • scheduling
  • monitor metrics to make sure campaigns were running smooth
  • Ran an experiment with the hypothesis that if we sent a reminder email on Saturday morning we could make some extra money. Spoiler alert: we did.

Technical infrastructure using Iterable

Extensive use of Iterable Catalogs. Catalogs are essentially a persistent key-value store hosted by Iterable. Very useful!

  • I use Google Sheets to load different data sets into Catalogs
    • Daily Calm daily calendar
    • New/Top content
    • Post-session lessons and follow up
    • Localization and translation
    • Templated mail-builders

Google App Scripts

Google Apps Scripts has become an essential part of my toolkit since I don’t have engineering access to services. That’s OK because the limitations force me to think more creatively (and cheaply!). It’s also a good playground to prototype new internal tools that leverage the alread-familiar UI of Google Sheets.

  • Instapage webhooks
  • Sleep School email sales and onboarding
  • Sweatshirt waiting list
  • Coupon code search
  • Google App Scripts-enhaced Google Sheets can send emails

Python notebooks and Data warehouse

Our data engineering team is very busy. Sometimes I prefer to take matters into my own hand so I will write Python scripts in Jupyter to pull data from the data warehouse and push the data into Iterable.

Larger bets: working with engineering

For the really important projects I work cross-functionally with engineering and product. Engineering did all the hard work for these thing where I am the beneficiary of better data. I use this data to send better-targeted emails (personas) that have better content (recommendations) while being my proactive about having accurate data (airflow jobs update data regularly)

  • Push notifications
  • Silent notifications that pre-load advertising that will be visible at app launch.
  • Personalized content recommendations
  • Data warehouse-powered personas
  • High volume cron-jobs. Or airflow jobs (DAGs?)

An in-house email consulting agency!

Other business units often look to the Lifecycle team as the in-house experts on email. That’s great! We help other teams decide who to target, when to send, and build emails and workflows that meet their needs. We provide email strategy, design, and technical expertise to send large volume mass marketing messages, transactional messages, surveys, growth initiatives, and product marketing.