Campaign Alerts
Providing real-time campaign insight and alerting to marketers through a Slack workflow or webhook.
Overview
Campaign Performance Alerts was designed to provide marketers with proactive insights into their campaign performance. Before this feature, marketers had to manually check campaign metrics to identify anomalies, which led to delayed responses to underperforming campaigns. Launched in April 2024, this feature allows users to set alerts for key campaign metrics and receive notifications via webhooks, enabling seamless integrations with Slack and other tools.
Timeline
Total: 10 mos
Design: Jun 2023 - Oct 2023
Development: Aug 2023 - Feb 2023 (release de-prioritized)
Released: April 2024
The challenge
While designing this feature, I proposed expanding the project scope to improve the overall notification center experience, unifying notifications and alerts into a more seamless and user-friendly system that could centralize performance insights and campaign health monitoring. However, due to timeline constraints, we focused on performance alerts specifically.
The primary goal was to notify users about campaign performance issues when they were not actively in Iterable. To achieve this, we prioritized a webhook approach, which could easily integrate into Slack workflows rather than requiring a direct integration. This made the feature flexible for users to route alerts to their preferred platforms.
My role
I was the sole designer on this project. I owned:
The alerts page layout
Configuration logic for setting up alerts
Displaying alerts across the product (e.g., surfacing alerts when campaign open rates exceeded thresholds)
Collaborating with engineers to prototype an alpha version without a UI—leveraging webhooks to push alerts into a Slack workflow
Ran unmoderated usability tests in Maze.design for key workflows, conducted qualitative user interviews for concept testing
Determined the information architecture and scope of alerts within the platform—knowing that the feature would likely scale to other resources like Journeys performance monitoring or aggregate messaging insights
The process
Research & Discovery: I conducted customer interviews to understand the existing pain points in campaign monitoring. Competitor analysis showed that Braze and Blueshift had similar features, reinforcing the need for this functionality. I even tested with our own internal marketing team, which uses Iterable to send out their own marketing communications.
Prototyping & Validation: I worked with engineers to create a webhook-based alpha version, allowing me to test the alerts API data in a Slack workflow even before the UI was built.
UI Design & Development: I designed the alerts page, focusing on usability and configurability. I ensured that marketers could easily set up alerts without technical dependencies.
Iteration & Refinement: Based on internal testing and early feedback, I returned to the drawing board after the initial configuration page designs were complete to evaluate how these alerts would be illustrated in the product.
Initial concepts to evaluate the pros and cons of each approach—these concepts were used alongside an research survey to evaluate concept tests and help inform direction.
Identifying key flows of the feature, and trying to determine the knowns and unknowns for each step in the flow.
Explorations
Early explorations included a native notification center within Iterable. However, due to feasibility concerns and limited user demand at the time, we deprioritized this approach in favor of a more flexible webhook solution that aligned better with user workflows.
However, given the technical constraints and the priority of external alerting, we opted for webhooks as the initial MVP. Design considerations included:
Balancing configurability with simplicity—ensuring alerts were easy to set up while providing flexibility for different campaign types. At first, we explored an iteration where alerts are configured more like a query, but we opted in being more opinionated and defining the key metrics marketers are most likely to monitor within each channel.
Surfacing alerts in relevant contexts, such as the campaign index and reporting views.
Exploring ways to set this on a campaign-by-campaign basis, but the overhead wasn't realistic for larger marketing teams sending hundreds of campaigns a day.
We knew that there was going to be some degree of technical understanding to set up the external webhook, but wanted it to feel simple and welcoming to marketers unfamiliar with that domain.
I also iterated on ways that this might appear in the product if an alert was triggered. One approach was creating a dedicated section in the Insights view, but ultimately scrapped in favor of a more accessible option.
One of the final explorations to communicate alerts for a campaign within the product. This slideover approach meant that the alerts panel could be opened on an index, inside of a campaign, or inside of the insights view.
Solution
Campaign Performance Alerts enables users to configure alerts based on:
Specific campaign metrics (open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, etc.)
Custom thresholds
Delivery via webhook for Slack workflows or external integration
This allows users to track key performance indicators in real time without logging into the platform, reducing manual monitoring efforts and enabling faster responses to campaign anomalies.
Alerts can be configured globally in the project settings with sensible defaults configured already, the marketer simply needs to enable and adjust their thresholds. These global defaults can be applied and modified with a simple toggle in the campaign settings.
Alerts for a particular item are showcased in this slideover, helping the marketer understand things they could do to proceed. In the future, this section is ripe for LLM suggestions.
We added very explicit instructions to the webhook configuration modal, so that marketers uncomfortable with the technical configuration could walk through the flow step-by-step.
An example of what an alert looks like in Slack.
Results & Impact
Adoption metrics post-launch:
Feature enabled: Grew from 439 users in April 2024 to 987 by July 2024.
Feature disabled: Decreased over time, indicating positive retention.
Alert engagement: Over 277 alerts triggered per month by July 2024.
Enterprise customers, including Redfin and Priceline, leveraged this feature to improve their monitoring, allowing sales teams to demonstrate real-time campaign oversight and proactive issue detection—key selling points that helped close deals where alerting was a critical requirement.
Reflections & Future Ideas
Enhancing the Notification Center: Revisiting the original vision of consolidating alerts and notifications into a centralized experience.
Expanded Alert Types: Introducing campaign health alerts beyond performance metrics.
AI-Powered Insights: Surfacing predictive analytics and suggested optimizations based on alert trends.
Campaign Performance Alerts has been a significant step toward proactive campaign management, reducing the manual effort required to monitor campaign health and improving marketers' ability to react in real time.
Looking ahead, user feedback suggests opportunities for refining alert customization and integrating AI-driven insights to enhance anomaly detection and response efficiency.
