Case Study: Informed Innovations

The Challenge

While Informed Delivery consistently achieves strong email open rates, click-through rates (CTR) for individual campaigns varied significantly. The disparity was largely driven by the content and visual quality of the advertisements themselves. Key challenges included:

• Creative Limitations Among Business Users:
  • Many small businesses lack in-house design expertise.
  • As a result, they often submit ride-along images that are merely resized versions of larger, non-optimized designs.
  • These ineffective visuals fail to capture user attention, leading to lower engagement rates.
• Barrier to High-Quality Ad Design:
  • Meeting the platform’s format requirements can be difficult for users with limited technical or creative resources.
  • Ensuring brand alignment and visual appeal within strict constraints proved challenging for many advertisers.
• Need for a Centralized Solution:
  • The client identified the need for a single, user-friendly portal to:
    • Promote new and emerging campaign features.
    • Provide tools and templates to assist businesses with limited design capacity.
    • Support digital mail and package notification campaigns with accessible, on-message creative assets.
• User Variety and Accessibility:
  • The portal needed to accommodate:
    • A wide range of users with varying levels of technical proficiency.
    • Compliance with accessibility requirements to ensure usability for all audiences.
• Integration Complexity:
  • Required seamless development and integration of multiple applications to support campaign creation, testing, and tracking.

The Solution

OPTiMO employed a collaborative Agile-Scrum methodology to manage the development of the Informed Innovations website and its four supporting applications:

• Informed Greetings (IG): Enabled consumers to personalize digital messages to accompany physical mail. It featured phased alpha and beta launches and scalable architecture with fallback capabilities to ensure uninterrupted service
• Informed Coupons (IC): Allowed business users to create digital coupons for mobile wallets, supporting both iOS and Android. The application simplified campaign creation and extended functionality across digital and physical marketing channels
• Informed Images (II): Delivered a searchable image library of compliant, research-backed visuals to improve engagement for business mailers
• Informed Referrals (IR): A holiday referral campaign that reached 38 million households and generated 148,000 new user sign-ups in a single month

To ensure quality and compliance, OPTiMO integrated:

• • Microsoft DevOps for CI/CD and Agile tracking
  • Webhooks and automated alerts for API monitoring and operational resilience

• Accessibility testing tools to deliver fully 508-compliant solutions
• A cloud-native microservices architecture for modularity and scalability

Throughout development, feedback loops with both consumer testers and business users drove feature enhancements and improved usability.

The Impact

The Informed Innovations initiative met or exceeded all client expectations—delivered on time, within budget, and launched ahead of schedule. Key outcomes include:

• 238% increase in digital campaign usage compared to the prior year
• Seamless promotion of tools during NPF through interactive QR codes and physical demonstration pods
• Expansion of features such as batch greeting support ahead of the holiday season in response to beta feedback
• Deployment of a standalone version of Informed Images due to popular demand from business users
• Continued growth of the platform and user engagement, reinforcing the client’s innovation leadership in the digital mail space