Background

Smile is a world leading ecommerce rewards company, focused on empowering small and medium sized online retailers with simple, easy to use reward programs designed to improve customer retention. I worked as a Marketing Specialist, where I implemented an inbound marketing strategy to improve top of funnel leads for the sales team to reach out to. I also spent time doing design work, writing technical documentation and building web tools to help calculate loyalty metrics

Product marketing through blog posts

The majority of the customer-facing work I did was through the creation of ebooks and blog articles, ranging on a variety of topics in ecommerce and retention, writing one or two articles per week. If you want to read through some of the pieces, check out my author profile here: https://blog.smile.io/author/matt-fish/

In addition to these posts, I also managed the companies Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook presences, and optimized all the posts for SEO purposes through proper usage of alt text, a focus on commonly used keywords based on Google Trends research, and writing captivating content descriptions.

Creating technical documentation

One of the major projects I spearheaded was creating technical documentation for app integrations. I worked closely with our partnerships team and our counterparts at the other companies to create clear documentation on how to set up their accounts to work seamlessly with multiple apps. During the four month term, I managed the launch of 5  integrations: Loox, Gorgias, Re:Amaze, Stamped, and Conversio. Through technical documentation and press releases, I assisted our customers with connecting their rewards programs to their marketing communications, to their post-purchase flows, and to their customer reviews.

I beta-tested the integrations and ensured that there were no bugs or user interface errors with the integrations, and communicated with the engineering teams when issues were identified. I also performed edge case testing to ensure that the applications would not cause fraudulent rewards activity, such as the ability to spam product reviews in order to garner thousands of loyalty points. I then created step-by-step documents to lead customers through the process of connecting the two applications, and how to set up campaigns. You can read some of the technical documentation in Smile's Help Desk (The documentation is under a different author name due to a limited number of author accounts on the documentation software, so just pretend my name is Maggie)

Building a loyalty metric calculator

One common pain point that our sales team had when dealing with prospective customers was the question of "How much impact will a loyalty program have on my business?"

To offload this question from the sales team, I endeavoured to build a simple tool that took into account historical sales, retention and average cart boosts from past merchant surveys we had done, and gave new customers a potential ballpark of how much their business would improve on a monthly basis. It took inputs such as their customer churn rate, their average cart, and their total revenue figures, and output both the incremental improvements that they were likely to see from the loyalty program, as well as a dollar amount of how much value a properly implemented loyalty program could have on their business.

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