“Easy Automations”

Feature release campaign for Keap

I led a customer campaign to launch Keap’s newest game-changing feature: Easy Automations. For nearly 20 years, Keap’s customers were mostly “power users” who built complex campaigns in the Advanced Builder (or paid a partner to do so). Now, Keap was fully launching a more intuitive way for ‘non-techies’ to build critical automations by following a “When/Then” format.

Goals

• Grab attention from customers in emails & in-app

• Convey value of Easy Automations to current customers and partners

• Test new campaign visuals against current customers to ‘stretch’ the brand—how much weird is too weird?

My role

• Creative Director and leadership over rollout video, product visuals, nurtures, and rollout.

• Acted as Voiceover in video

In collaboration with: Customer Marketing, Product team, and Product Marketing team, animation in-house by Brandon Clute.

Project approach

I started with an hour-long pitch session with our in-house Creatives. We got divergent and came up with over a dozen concepts to show the value of our new Easy Automations.

At first, our strongest ideas featured two power users trying to one-up each other with their complex campaigns. Then a ‘narrator’ comes in to point out how silly they were being when they could do the same work with less effort through Easy Automations.

We ended up changing course…

The feature’s capabilities at launch wouldn’t reflect super complex automations. I didn’t want to over-promise to our customer base. Instead, we needed to:

• Focus the message on the benefits of this new feature

• Grab attention immediately—the thumbnail would be in emails and in-app Pendo notifications

What’s with the crazy style?

A few reasons actually!

1. Easy Automations launched late into the COVID-19 pandemic. Keap had over saturated customers with imagery of our reps. Another video of people talking would have been white noise. We needed to catch the attention of our customers in emails and in-app right away.

2. We wanted to ‘stretch the brand’ and use our customer base as a testing ground for more playful visuals. Customers tend to be more ‘forgiving’ with new concepts, which allows us to test concepts and get unvarnished feedback from our users.

3. My Senior Designer Team Lead, Brandon Clute, wanted to continue growing in his animation skills. This was an excellent opportunity to stretch his skillsets. This ended up being the longest animation he’d ever completed, and one of his most well-received projects with positive comments coming in from customers and Keapers about the “cute computer”, high energy, and fun look of the video.

In the end, this customer release went over positively. Based on the positive sentiments, we’re interested in re-using the visuals for our external launch.