Customer acquisition is a costly challenge for subscription products. Members of a singles matching service tend to cancel when they meet a medium- or long-term prospect.

At eHarmony, I managed Product Design for new projects focused on customer lifecycle extension and revenue diversification. I led a team in designing and building apps and websites in varying verticals: subscription products, lead-generation editorial, ad-supported content, academic outreach, marketing, even an exploratory venture into an eHarmony social network.

eHarmony Marriage

eHarmony Marriage was a subscription program for married and engaged couples looking for customized insight into their relationship and structured guidance on how to improve it.

By the time I joined eHarmony, a rough-but-functional Marriage product had been built out and a somewhat chaotic array of paid-search sales paths were in place.

THE CHALLENGE

• Grow organic lead generation
• Increase sales conversion %
• Improve user experience
• Expand the product feature set
• Create a unique brand/visual identity

MY ROLE

I worked closely with the VP of product, marketing lead, director of content, and data analysts to:

Create and execute a strategy for organic/SEO and paid leads.

• Design and build out editorial-driven SEO sites and sales landing pages.
• Conduct extensive A/B/multivariate testing on our conversion funnel by iterating visual creative, messaging approach and language, video vs. static, and other factors.
• Streamline the user experience of a choppy lead-to-membership pipeline, using heuristic evaluation, user testing, and data analysis.

Redesign the Marriage product with a focus on usability and brand experience.

• Plan, ideate, wireframe, prototype, design, and test new features.
• Schedule and partner with engineering on development, with my team providing near-final HTML/CSS to programmers for integration into back- and front-end frameworks.
• Support marketing with graphic and HTML assets for email, banner, and search campaigns.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

All of our metrics went up on both a raw and percentage basis: more visits, higher registration rates, higher relationship questionnaire completions, more users choosing to buy, fewer refund requests, and lower churn.

eHarmony Marriage was proof positive that the company could diversify beyond singles matching. Unfortunately, the product never grew into the kind of success necessary to justify renewed investment.

But one big, unexpected thing happened: we drove so much organic traffic with our editorial/content-based sites that executives asked us to shift toward an advertising revenue play.

eHarmony Publishing

When the decision was made to expand the company's editorial and community footprint, I was asked to lead product design and creative direction for the new department. We were tasked with assembling a portfolio of sites centering on relationships, dating, and family life. Some would be designed and built from scratch within eHarmony. Others would be acquired, redesigned, and expanded.

THE CHALLENGE

• Oversee product design and creative direction for portfolio that grew to 9 sites.
• Spec, design, and build ad-supported sites with potential for paid features.
• Generate traffic with minimal spend, relying on SEO, email, and social.
• Convert traffic into leads for the singles matching service.
• Grow audience to a level where sales had high volume, premium packages to sell directly to advertisers.
• Expand ad inventory to takeovers, featured sponsors, marketing tie-ins, video.

MY ROLE

I partnered with the directors of product, content, engineering, ad sales, and business development on strategy, resources, and timelines.

I oversaw product design, creative direction, and HTML/CSS deliverables for all 9 sites, managing staff designers and freelancers to keep the machine fed.

Our largest advertisers were movie studios, who purchased site skins and sponsored sweepstakes. To best serve these demanding, high-profile accounts, I interfaced directly with stakeholders on the studio side, building strong working relationships that brought repeat ad buys.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Over the next two years, we blew away every monthly KPI goal, hitting about 3x expectations a year in. Project highlights:

eHarmony Advice was our first foray into ad-supported publishing. The site offered a broad range of content on dating and relationships, as well as a thriving user community with message boards, affinity groups, and user social profiles and connections.

We moved fast. With initial design ready and approved in two weeks, the site launched in under two months. We had just a few dozen articles and a message board, but traffic got a jump start thanks to referrals from the eHarmony matching site and its various email channels. The leap in activity led to rapid growth of search traffic, and we were off to the races.

The Single Mom's Guide to Dating was a success in generating content/SEO leads for the singles matching service. The idea was to present single mothers with a slightly different face to eHarmony, engaging first via content and community and eventually driving toward registration.

eHarmony Parenting focused on lively, but research-based, resources for parents. Content spanned the gamut from pregnancy and newborns, to toddlers and teens. Live Q&A’s with family and parenting experts were a core effort.

eHarmony Labs was a platform for eHarmony’s psychologists and staff researchers to share their work with the world. This wasn’t meant to be a huge traffic magnet, but more of a “halo” site meant to establish the scientific bona fides of the matching service, Nonetheless, we designed and built mini-app quizzes that tended to go mini-viral here and there.

Project Wedding, an early-stage startup building city-based vendor directories and community around wedding planning, was our first outside acquisition. We added wedding registry features and conducted a full redesign. The vendor directories were sprawling, not well organized, and had an odd interface. I ran a UX audit of the directories, including interviews with new and established users. The redesigned directories saw immediate increases in traffic and account creation.

Just Mommies was a thriving community for mothers. We redesigned the entire site, expanding the editorial and features side into another very successful driver of organic traffic. The discussion boards need the new branding and quality of life improvements, so I looped in several of the site’s community leaders into the redesign process. In addition to gaining direct insight into user needs, these leaders were valuable in winning community support for the new design, which launched to universally positive response.