Building Grammarly Insights: Part I
Sharing what it took to get our flagship email product off the ground.
In 2018, I had the pleasure of repping Grammarly and speaking about our Flagship Weekly Email Program—called Grammarly Insights—at Litmus Live in Boston & then again in San Francisco.
Grammarly Insights was 4 years young and it had just gone through a complete foundational overhaul, which I referred to internally as our 2.0. You can see the bones of it in the screenshot above. It was a huge launch for us where we added badges, personal records, and additional features.
But I wasn’t coming to Litmus Live to talk about the cool features or coding & data pipeline complexity of our personalized weekly report.
Here's what I focused on:
Why Grammarly Insights exists & why it’s our ‘Flagship’ program
Defining what Flagship Email Products are, in general
Why only focusing on customer journeys and traditional campaigns w/o building a flagship recurring program could be a lost opportunity
Lessons learned building (and evolving) Grammarly Insights
I covered a lot of ground in 25 minutes and kept it high level.
So—since most of my Scaling CRM readers were not present for the event and because Litmus does not keep a public archive of the talks—I want to share the main bits from my talk as well as some context on the impact it has driven over the years.
For this first post, I’ll share why we built Grammarly Insights and will give my definition of a Flagship Email Program.
Why Grammarly Insights Exists
Establishing a Clear & Compelling Opportunity
Putting together a packaged, recurring concept takes a lot of work. You are essentially moving forward on a hypothesis that you feel very strongly about and going through all the pain of design, coding, and deployments before you can prove out product-market fit.
Plus, you typically need to get it out in the wild as a test or formal rollout for a while before you can come to any reasonable conclusions.
This means your hypothesis has to be compelling and credible. Most importantly, the vision for the program needs legs (i.e. can scale).
All in all, a weekly recurring program is a huge commitment if you expect it to stick. For example, we’ve now had this weekly program live since the Spring of 2015. That’s ~ 416 sends and rounds of QA. And we have 3 macro versions of this thing and lots of segmentation scenarios. It’s a HUGE commitment.
…Getting back to the point here, the opportunity or problem statement needs to be meaningful.
So, what drove the initial hypothesis to build this program?
In the earlier years of Grammarly, the most common reaction with peers and family members when I talked about our product was something like “Oh, cool! I know someone at work/home/etc. who could really use that!”
In other words, many people (adults especially) were not self-selecting as needing any help whatsoever with their writing accuracy or communication skills. This phenomenon has always fascinated me. Even the most competent of journalists publish mistakes regularly, and the most credible authors use editors and know that the writing experience is iterative.
So, what was the crystalized hypothesis statement?
Why do mainstream professionals and older generations sometimes fail to see the true beauty that Grammarly fills for our fast-paced and hyper-social world?
That's where the Grammarly Insights plan of attack came in. That is, trying to go after the following opportunity…
We started to develop Grammarly Insights 1.0 in late 2014 & had recently observed Fitbit enter the zeitgeist and felt Grammarly could offer another 'Aha moment' in the quantifiable movement aimed at the mainstream.
If counting steps was a practical game-changer then we thought why not your writing activity? Nearly all of us type and communicate across devices every single day and that drives both direct and indirect impact. For example, an email thread that goes on too long because some point was misunderstood or a clickbait headline that wasn't qualifying an experience. Communication flaws, and not just grammar mistakes, affect us all every single day.
So, the first order of business was to build a weekly pipeline into our ESP and organize our customer's writing activity on a 1:1 basis. We chose to showcase metrics like accuracy, productivity, and top mistakes to them in a friendly and compelling format.
The second order was partially up to the customers, and that was to realize for themselves just how necessary Grammarly and proper communication is in their life. Grammarly could become the proverbial ‘red pen' and writing tutor or communication coach for people once they had moved on from academic life, but offer in a positive and encouraging package.
Long story short, the internal and external launch went well and the rest, as they say, is history.
I will share lessons learned managing Grammarly Insights over the years in my next post.
My Definition of a Flagship Email Product
Most anyone can create a contextual, recurring program for their users.
As mentioned, we consider Grammarly Insights our Flagship Email Program. In casual terms, this means it’s our crown jewel or backbone for Lifecycle management. Or you could say it’s our product-focused, engagement and retention drumbeat.
Okay, you could say a lot of things.
But I want to be clear about what I don’t mean by a Flagship program. This is not a synonym for a personalized digest, stats-heavy email. A Flagship email could be an editorial email like ‘The Skimm’, for example.
The below definition and breakdown is exactly what I mean by a Flagship program.
Branded: This means your concept should be packaged in an obvious naming convention that is just for that particular piece of communication. This will then likely show up on your friendly from name and potentially your header each week, at a minimum. You may also have a dedicated logo.
Repeats: There needs to be a regular, recurring cadence such as weekly or monthly. Irregular could also work, but needs to bubble up to the goals and possibly even be played up in the branding. An example is using something like ‘Intermittent’ in the actual brand name.
Evolves: This is more of a strong suggestion than a mandate. But ideally, your execution and approach changes over time. This could mean you have a macro code and layout base and occasionally add features and content or run experiments. But it definitely means that you inspect the overall bones and foundation from time to time to make some major improvements.
Actionable: Actionable to me doesn’t literally mean the # or effectiveness of your CTA links. Email can be leveraged as a landing page and not just a gateway to something that needs to have a direct response impact right away. I just mean, your audience ideally needs to gain value from each drop that reinforces the relationship with your product or brand. You need to try and accrue some positive brand or product karma.
Killer App: Okay, part of this was so I could have cool acronym. But also it was to reinforce the point that email can be a product experience in and of itself (see landing page vs. gateway point above) and for something to be your Flagship Program, it needs to be special.
That’s it for today’s post. Next week, I’ll share more on the impact of this program and many of the lessons learned along the way.