Daily Feed Email

The Team

Product Designer: Alyssa Welch
Product Manager: Sarah Nusekabel
Web Developer: Dana Katz, Brenda Jimenez

Client

Reverb, FM Team

Project URL

Opt-in to Daily Feed Emails here.

Overview

Reverb’s Feed, a chronological stream of listings matching a user’s saved searches, is one of the platform’s most engaging features. The Daily Feed Email extends this experience by delivering new matching listings directly to users’ inboxes.

However, despite showing listings tailored to user preferences, the email was seeing declining open rates, click-through rates, and downstream Feed engagement. Because the Feed is central to Reverb’s marketplace experience, this decline signaled a need to reevaluate how the email supported our users.

While the work was ultimately time-boxed, I am proud of the meaningful improvements we delivered and of the foundation we built for future optimization.

The Goal

Redesign the Daily Feed Email’s content and delivery strategy to better match user expectations, surface more relevant gear, and increase Feed engagement, ultimately improving monthly average users (MAUs).

Exploration and Discovery

Working closely with my product manager, I helped audit the existing Daily Feed Email experience, identifying both design and technical issues along with opportunities to better align the product with user expectations. Together, we developed a loose roadmap and iterated on improvements over several months before shifting focus to other company priorities.

Process

1. Refresh design

As part of a broader engineering effort to rebuild the Feed experience — impacting both on-site and email experiences — the Daily Feed Email also needed to be rebuilt within our core platform. This created an opportunity to modernize the email’s design alongside the technical rebuild.

I led design updates to bring the Daily Feed Email in line with both Reverb’s current brand standards and the visual patterns used across transactional emails and mobile web experiences. A key early decision involved defining how the email should be positioned: whether it should behave like a marketing email or a system-driven transactional message. Since the value of the email lies in the listings themselves rather than promotional content, the team ultimately positioned it as a transactional experience.

The redesign introduced a two-column layout that supported larger listing images — a known user preference — while better mirroring the mobile web Feed experience. The new layout also improved responsiveness and rendering consistency across devices and email clients.

2. Re-engage inactive feed users

To address declining engagement among Feed subscribers, we hypothesized that sending a fallback email when users had no new listings matching their saved searches could encourage them to re-engage with the Feed experience. At the time, 59% of Daily Feed Email subscribers had not received an email in the previous 30 days due to inactivity in their saved searches, creating a significant opportunity to reconnect users with relevant content.

To maintain engagement during these inactive periods, we introduced an email featuring recommended listings based on past user behavior, similar to the upcoming Discover Feed experience. Success was measured through click-through rates and re-engagement with the Feed.

To further encourage Feed activity, the email also highlighted trending searches, allowing users to save searches directly from the email via deep links that added them to their Feed. To provide context for recommendations, we included a row of recently viewed items, one of the inputs informing our recommendation algorithm. For users without recent browsing history, we instead surfaced educational messaging encouraging Watch and Save actions to help personalize their future Feed experience.

3. Clarify next steps and drive engagement

Building on earlier improvements, we continued optimizing the Daily Feed Email to better guide users toward action. We moved the primary call-to-action higher in the email to make the next step clearer and easier to access. To further encourage engagement, we tested including the number of new listings in both subject lines and email headlines, aiming to create urgency and motivate users to explore their Feed updates. Additional visual and copy refinements improved scannability, including restructuring section headers to separately highlight the number of new listings and the associated search term for greater clarity.

Final Designs

Over several months, our team transformed the Daily Feed Email experience through improvements including localized send times, subject line experimentation, design modernization, mobile-responsive formatting, and fallback content for users with limited search results.

These changes led to increased open and click-through rates, with users beginning to engage with multiple listings per email. The refreshed experience generated 3.1K new sessions and contributed roughly $12K in conversions. We also saw unsubscribe rates decline, along with fewer complaints reaching customer support.

I’m proud to have contributed to both the updated content and send strategy, as well as a design refresh that brought the email in line with Reverb’s brand system and reinforced trust through a more cohesive product experience.