Implementing an ESP for digital products - Part 2: Implementation
A 3-part guide with downloadable templates, playbooks, and tools.
Selecting and implementing a new ESP for your company is a massive undertaking. It’s often costly, time-consuming, and involves many different teams so is high visibility.
How do you get it right?
Read part 1 here:
On to implementation!
Two guiding rules throughout this entire process:
The more planning you can do up front, the better results you’ll achieve.
QA way more than you think you need to. Check all your data points multiple times.
Your tool implementation should be grounded in your understanding of your product and user experience. Create a map of your user journey and product experience.
Find your favorite virtual whiteboard tool and take screenshots of your product flow. Create a visualization of user flows.
Take screenshots of your existing emails, and other messages (SMS, push notifications, etc.). Separate messages that are connected to specific points in your lifecycle, transactional messages, sales campaigns, and regular newsletters.
Connect your lifecycle messaging with your product experience by layering your marketing in a row parallel to your user flow. If you’re missing some messages, create placeholders with a virtual sticky note that’s labeled.
The next step will be adding a data layer to your diagram, but this is easier to put into a spreadsheet first and then transfer to your diagram.
Want to make a copy of this entire template? Whimsical is free to get started, so you can access the template here.
Decide on the name structure for your attributes and events. A consistent naming scheme will allow for better work.
Start with your user_ID. This needs to be a unique identifier that will never change.
Next, plan your user attributes. Attributes should be descriptions of the user that are often static.
Age
Gender
Name
Location
Product Type
Likes/dislikes
Experience/skills level
And more…
Now map your user events. These are actions your users take or something that happens to them. Viewing a screen, clicking a button, or purchasing a product.
Do you have existing events you use for other marketing or product tools? Start with these events and add what you’ll need to do your job. Remove the ones you don’t need.
Reference the user flows you created in your virtual whiteboard to make sure you’re not missing anything.
Think about what properties these events should have. These could be things like product type, user type, language, or price. Figure out how you can reduce the number of individual events you have by using properties. If you have 5 onboarding screens, use one event for “onboarding_screen” and then specify the screen with an event property “screen_name”
Build out more tracking events than you need right now to anticipate future needs. It’s easier to implement everything in one go.
Not sure where to start? This spreadsheet has a template you can use with example events and attributes. Filling out all the details will help your thinking and make sure you don’t miss anything.
Label your user flows in your whiteboard with the events and the data being sent. This will be very helpful to have for the future.
Questions and tips for better implementation planning:
Do you need your data available in real-time?
Can your product be used across multiple device types?
Where is your data coming from? What are the different sources across the org?
Create as much documentation as your can through the process
Does your engineering team have the resources they need?
Plan the first campaigns you’ll launch and prioritize “quick wins” to build organizational momentum
What data needs to be exported from the tool and integrated into other platforms?
What’s the data retention limit for your company and your automation platform?
QA your data again and make sure it’s still right. Check against the source data and against other tools that have similar data.
Importing old email templates into a new tool? Test that they’re all still rendering correctly. Use Litmus or EmailonAcid.
That’s it for implementation!
Plan, plan, and plan some more to have a successful implementation.
Let me know in the comments what you find the most valuable! Stay tuned for part 3.