Microsoft Azure Content Strategy

Situation

Consulting in-house on the Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise team, I directed copy and strategy for all relationship marketing (RM) outreach for their Azure product. Our focus was peeling developers from massive competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS). While it was easy to get free trial sign ups, we needed prospective developers to engage with the product and convert at higher rates. We also needed to win back inactive users before they churned.

‍

Approach

With support from the Azure team and stakeholders like product marketing managers, I gathered data about performance on email series, free trial users, and student users. From those initial findings, I built simple surveys to test what would make users more likely to stick around, or try out various resources within Azure. I also built copy tests in UserTesting, checking perspective headline performance to identify topics that would have an impact. With new email campaign flows and in-app content strategies identified, I rebuilt a large part of the Azure RM library, including emails, landing pages, and in-product push notifications and compared results.

‍

Results

Our campaigns saw overall success across the board, including:

10% increase in open rates over the first month

‍

15% increase in product engagement during the trial period

‍

35% decrease in paid customer churn rate after receiving new win-back email series