Email revenue share
23.9%
Email contributed 23.9% of digital acquisition media revenue after segmentation and marketing automation were introduced. This is the channel share recorded during my time leading the marketing team.
Hab Shifa / Customer insight
Understand why people buy. Build the marketing around it.
At Hab Shifa, I connected customer research with the work of a distributed marketing team. The task was to turn an understanding of trust, buying behaviour and customer needs into better briefs, more relevant journeys and a clearer basis for deciding what to improve.
Explore the work
- Role
- Head of Digital Marketing, contract
- Period
- March 2020 to April 2021
- My contribution
- Customer insight, measurement, campaign direction, marketing automation and team leadership.
01 / The challenge
More activity was not the same as a joined-up customer journey.
Acquisition, content and email needed to work together. That required a clearer understanding of the customer and a reliable way to see what happened after a campaign attracted attention.
My initial channel review also found measurement problems: duplicated page views, inconsistent campaign tagging and a conversion setup that needed to distinguish an add-to-cart action from a purchase. Without that foundation, a promising channel could be a tracking problem in disguise.
Customer insight had to change what the team made, who it was for and how we judged the result.
02 / What I did
The insight needed a team
that could act on it.
Repair the basis for decisions
I reviewed the website and channel setup before treating reported performance as a guide to investment. I addressed ecommerce and site-search tracking so the team could distinguish customer actions and interpret channel performance.
Turn research into direction
Customer research and purchase behaviour informed the audiences, journeys and messages. I used that understanding to connect campaign ideas with content, acquisition and follow-up.
Create the capacity to deliver
I recruited and led a remote marketing team, coordinating specialists across locations and cultures. The capability plan connected copy, search, social, design, video and development under a shared marketing direction.
Keep strategy close to execution
The reason to bring capability in-house was greater control and understanding of the strategy. Specialist delivery still mattered; my role was to connect priorities, briefs and performance review across the team.
03 / The work in practice
From a customer signal
to a marketing decision.
Customer stories, reliable channel data and relevant follow-up each needed a different response. Explore how I connected the customer question to a campaign brief, measurement and the next decision.
The signal
People look to other customers for reassurance.
01 / Ask
What do customers need to hear before they feel ready to buy? Treat word of mouth as a research question, not proof that every testimonial will convert.
02 / Act
Use customer research to shape story-led content and briefs for copy, social and video. Connect the story to a relevant next step rather than making reach the sole objective.
03 / Check
Separate permission to take part in research from permission to publish a story. Check the wording and incentive disclosure; a personal experience is not evidence of a medical effect.
04 / So what?
Assess qualified visits and purchase behaviour alongside engagement. Keep the message relevant and the claims supportable.
04 / Results
Turn customer understanding
into a channel that earns.
From separate channels
A connected customer journey
I brought acquisition, customer stories and email follow-up under a shared understanding of the audience, with clearer briefs and measures for the team.
From direction to delivery
An in-house marketing team
I recruited and led specialists across countries and cultures, connecting research, copy, design, social, video and development with marketing priorities.
How customer stories shaped the campaign
Word of mouth was an important part of how customers discovered and trusted the product. I used that insight to develop customer-story content and connect it with acquisition and follow-up.
The aim was to help prospective customers hear an experience they could relate to, then give them a relevant next step. Engagement alone was not enough: the team also needed to understand the visits and purchases that followed.
A related challenge?
Start with the problem.
Make the next step useful.
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