Ask Zillow Anything Series
Designing website, email and social campaign integration for our 8-part video series
Problem: With this virtual video series, we aimed to address the problem of – buyers can have many questions during any stage of their home buying journey about the home buying process and not know where to start looking for answers, which can leave them feeling lost and unsupported.
Business opportunity: As the host of this series, Zillow can help answer questions for these buyers and act as a thought leader building brand trust, while also introducing Zillow solutions to help them when they’re ready to buy.
Business solution: We created an 8-part educational video series tackles a key customer pain point during the home buying process, bringing in both internal and external experts to simplify complex financial concepts that prospective buyers and current homeowners face.
Key questions:
We had a video production team creating content, but how were we going to drive traffic to the series on launch day?
How were we going to measure that traffic and interest?
How were we going to sync three different teams at Zillow to work together synchronously with shared goals?
My role:
Created flowcharts
Impact: Helped cross-functional teams work better together by enabling them to assess where they fit in and how to collaborate together.
Designed website wireframes
Impact: Allowed for quick approval by the web dev team on site build functionality and quick visualization and approval by key marketing stakeholders for content.
Designed the brand style guide
Impact: The style guide was shared internally and externally to vendors and was the cornerstone that helped multiple teams march in the same direction.
Challenges & compromises: One of the obstacles in designing the website was how to incorporate a gated form to help gauge audience interest in the series for the business end. I created this mockup in Figma to demonstrate navigation around the website and demonstrate when the gated form would pop up. We wanted to ask the customers questions to gain better insight around their interest in the series to help potentially inform content later for social media cut downs. However, we ultimately scrapped the whole gated form in hopes of eliminating all barriers to entry for audience numbers and to create a more streamlined experience.
Another challenge we faced as each episode premiered were low open rates and low CTR. But because one episode aired per month, we used each episode’s results as an opportunity to iterate on the email designs for the following episode, working closely with the email team to A/B test, hone email list segmentation, and monitor email performance. As a result, we drove up our open rates and CTR:
Episode 3 open rate 37.64% | CTR 0.4%
Episode 4 open rate 38.12% | CTR 1.61%
Episode 5 open rate 45.1% | CTR 1.03%
Episode 6 open rate 62.89% | CTR 4.22%.
Success: Some of the ways I hoped to measure success of the website, email and social campaign integration were:
Accurate links in email and social that would bring customers to the episode web page they were most interested in
High attendance and engagement on launch day
Positive post-event survey results
Results: Overall attendance was low throughout the series, and funding within the business cut our 8-part series short, turning it into a 6-part series. Our team was also working pretty scrappily, and we didn’t quite nail down the marketing content experience for our audience until later episodes after building upon previous episode learnings (example: see above email numbers). But we did increase overall episode session views from episodes 4–6 (measured over a one month period of time):
Episode 4 session views: 8,269
Episode 5 session views: 2,347
Episode 6 session views: 9,954
That being said, the videos were were well-produced, and we received positive reactions from the small audience we reached based on survey results. The videos have been re-used and cut-down for Zillow social outside of the Ask Zillow Anything campaign.
Website workflow – including email and social
Brand guidelines and design
I created all the brand guidelines based off existing Ask Zillow Anything illustrations that another team created for a separate social media campaign. I added colors, fonts, and applied a design system for the illustrations to this campaign (see right).
Below are some thumbnails of this design system I created using color and illustration to tie back to each episode’s theme and messaging.
Landing page graphics and wireframes I designed for the episode pages
My email template designs with graphics (designed by Julia Marshall) dropped in.
Emails
I designed the email layouts for our Lifecycle team to build in Pardot, and for other designers on my team to use and reference in creating the email graphics. As we scaled up this campaign and in addition to managing other projects, I took on more of an art director role once the branding was developed for this project.