Rebuilding the Lifecycle Experience From the Ground Up

I was brought onboard at Monster during a turnaround phase in 2018. When I got there, I immediately loved my team. There were some veterans from the early days with deep specific knowledge, some folks that knew what was wrong, and some that just wanted to push out cool work. I felt nervous to be in a new, larger group, but also felt at home (and I'm still good friends with a lot of my Monster colleagues today).

Our team was a new concept internally - a marketing focused on managing the customer experience from a marketing perspective. Something beyond those job alert emails (which by the way are a hugely important product line item for staffing companies). A group of cheerleaders and partners for the job seeker, deep in the trenches of a digital and impersonal job market. We started from scratch. 

What we knew at the time:

We had job alerts, and a version of it for leads (rather than account holders....don't ask). We knew that we should be welcoming users to our list and providing preferences up front, but we weren't. We knew that we should be trying to get those leads to create an account, but we weren't. We knew we wanted the comms to feel human in an increasingly dehumanizing world of work and job searching. We knew that we had 20+ years of data tucked away in various databases, that there was SO MUCH potential, and that we just had to make sense of it (thank you Data Science team).

What we didn't know:

We didn't know what we were losing by not having a winback campaign set up, but knew that recurring business was cheaper than going out and getting new business. We didn't know how not having input into monster.com would hurt us, but had a 3rd party software workaround to help us build dynamic, choose-your-own-adventure landing experiences. And honestly, we didn't know how our email service provider at the time could be any worse.

So we got to work

We mapped out our journeys, kept the lights on with ongoing campaigns and newsletters while we onboarded Salesforce Marketing Cloud & a digital consultancy to bring our database admins, marketers, data scientists, and Marketing Ops/Strategists together and launch our SFMC instance. I worked on Salesforce campaign journeys, got work localized across our 15-ish global markets, Marketing Ops worked on build, and we started to chip away at our plan. 

By the end of my tenure, we were embedded into every aspect of the business, with real revenue-driving campaigns and experiences. I'm still really proud of my work at Monster, and miss the team regularly. Luckily a lot of us are still in touch & have crossed paths professionally again.