In 2024, facing rising non-renewal rates, our team investigated seven at-risk enterprise accounts. Through targeted customer interviews, we discovered a clear priority: organization-level audience management. This critical feature was developed by a team of seven engineers, our VP of Product, and myself.
Organization-level audience management allows admins to centrally control recipient lists across all newsletters. Previously in HQ, each newsletter required creating new audiences from scratch - even when using the same recipients or segments from existing newsletters. This meant users had to repeatedly import and segment the same recipient lists through directory syncs or CSV uploads, creating redundant work when managing multiple newsletters.
It was common to hear users discuss how much work and time it is to keep their audiences and semgnets updated in interviews:
“Another thing that is challenging is the email list, adding people and clearing it out, there’s always new email addresses.” - Ellyn
What does 'managing audiences' mean? This question guided research calls with regular users, resulting in a list of minimum requirements and additional features to explore. Audience management at the admin level, a standard feature offered by competitors like Poppulo and Workshop, emerged as an essential table-stakes feature. Following this discovery, my I surveyed current users to prioritize key functionalities.
A 4-question survey, with 39 filtered responses, revealed that users primarily manage audiences through directories (already supported by HQ) rather than HRIS systems. It also highlighted the importance of CSV uploads for data population. Using the top 5 most important functionalities, I began designing this feature.
This feature centers on creating a centralized database of all recipients. To guide design, I drew inspiration from database tools like Airtable and Attio and reviewed HQ's existing table components.
Once main primary user journeys were designed out, I embarked on creating prototypes to do usability testing with some of our users. I listed out the primary tasks for our users to do to ensure the designs were intuitive.
Org-level audience management launched with a beta initially with our customers that are on a beta list, as well the strategic accounts we identified earlier. We ended up saving six out of seven strategic accounts resulting in saving $1 million+ in accounting rate of return (ARR).
