Web Experience Lead - Development, Brand Marketing, & Media at onX
Website Optimization • Design + Development • Email Marketing • User Acquisition • Social Media • Copywriting & Content • Media & creative
Original, Creative, Marketer, Brand Strategist: Scott Mathson
Overview
- Web Experience Lead for onX, an outdoor mapping SaaS startup. Projects: product and brand marketing campaigns, go-to-market strategy, website design and front-end development, product and brand marketing campaigns, website optimization, front-end development, branding and strategy, performance marketing, media buys, on through to email marketing, copywriting and editing, and more.
- Led and coordinated teams and contractors working on marketing, brand, and growth initiatives - planning and overseeing Brand Marketing team's portions of the campaigns. Reported on metrics, project statuses, and stood behind decisions taken. Planned and produced their broader digital strategy, and created individual visual and content assets.
- Presented guidelines and developed processes and standards (documentation) that new and current teammates and contractors could reference, regarding naming conventions, workflow, UTM schemas, etc. Ensured consistency in the brand standards, tone, and messaging across multiple channels. Collaborated on media buying, asset development, and review.
- Collaboration across teams and planning, managing, and overseeing a variety of web, email, and eCommerce projects, working hand-in-hand with developers, software engineers, executives, UI/UX designers, agencies and contractors, and more.
The previous, legacy version of the onXmaps (Hunting GPS Maps) website that I started working on when joining the team in early 2016 was a custom Magento instance. The previous web developer and I collaboratively maintained this website, hand-coding each article, landing page, and creating one-off templates. We regularily ran scheduled maintenance modes to launch new commerce hardgood (gear/swag/GPS chips) and membership (SaaS/subscription/apps) products, update product variables, perform system updates, and other tasks.
During onX's major rebrand and redesign, coordinating work between agencies and individuals, I led the team through strategic audit phases - defining core messaging and then implementing it across channels. Alongside article audits - cutting out and then transitioning pieces through to a new web experience. As well as commerce and subscription product re-organization, consistency in marketing, sales, and support messaging and calls-to-actions, and implementing other brand consistencies.
The site was managed within the brand marketing team that I worked on and I became one of the sole admins of the site, distilling fragmented sites and products into one, fluid experience, while leading teams, and communicating, reporting, and collaborating on initiatives across every part of the organization.
Arguably the most important part redesign project was the internal workflow focus which aimed to further-empower copywriters, designers, and other teammates to more easily iterate on the website. Throughout this I conducted 1-on-1 training, wrote documentation, and provided support, while ensuring that I was not a bottleneck, not getting in the way of anyone's workflow.
Creating a consistent experience at each touchpoint meant tuning our instruments to ensure we consistently formed harmonious chords. Alongside hiring new members, I deeply focused on developing this documentation for teammates and vendors to reference. This ensured that processes would scale and again, further-empowered everyone, to do their best, most synchronized work, without pause and without question.
Gone were the days of hand-coding every single blog article we published or every targeted ad's sales-focused landing page. Indeed, this was all for the better.
Main technologies/tools
- Craft CMS (PHP), Zendesk, Jekyll (HTML/CSS/JS), Magento
- Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google Tag Manager, SEMrush, and more
- Amplitude, Kochava, MailChimp, and Leanplum
- Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, MarvelApp, InVision, and more
- Atlassian Suite - Confluence and JIRA
Redefining the onX brand
Partnering with Portland-based agencies, we dissected the brand, exploring its history, customers, and vision. We then began to put the pieces together, re-positioning the entire brand. This was a monumental, massively-rewarding undertaking. From where things started to where onX stands today is a complete 180. The brand is in the best position possible to develop tools for others to literally know where they stand.
This brand's music now consistently resonates with customers, across multiple channels. Web, Brand, and Marketing efforts directly attributed to multiple-digit percentage increases, alongside other, positive impacts on varying areas of the business.
Email marketing campaigns
- I served as every department's go-to email dev, designer, editor, and red button presser (I sent the campaigns).
- Led development, iteration, and testing of all onX marketing emails as well as worked with product and support teams on transactional emails, onboarding flows, support, dunning (payment failure/expired cc), and other emails.
- Collaborated on writing and editing each email's text content - subject lines (with A/B testing), calls-to-action, and collaborated across departments on all layout/design/visual assets for each campaign.
- Continuously optimized email marketing channels - from list segmenting and cleaning, platform migrations, experimentation and testing, and email deliverability/domain health optimization.
- Played an integral part in creating a large-scale B2C email marketing and customer communication system at onX.
- Each campaign sent to millions of subscribers with industry-leading open, click, and trial-to-paid conversion rates.
Examples of a couple post-redesign/rebrand email marketing campaigns (2017):
— Welcome to the new onX...
— Post-trial discount opportunity...
Other milestone projects
Launch of onX Hunt (product launch, Q3 2017*)
Launch of new website for onXmaps (product launch, Q3 2017*)
*Both projects a culmination of a huge amount of company-wide work done over Q4 of '16 and Q1, 2, and 3 of '17.