Personalized Emails at Staffbase

Helping internal communicators deliver targeted messages at scale

About Staffbase

Staffbase is an internal communications SaaS platform that helps enterprise organizations connect with their employees through email, custom mobile apps, intranet and virtually any communication channel. Trusted by global enterprises, it enables leaders to share news, resources, and updates in ways that are targeted, engaging, and measurable.

The Problem

At Staffbase enterprise customers faced a huge challenge sending personalized, relevant emails to employees without creating manual overhead or compliance risks. Internal communicators were stuck either sending individual emails - which was impossible at scale - or creating multiple emails with content blocks that varied by every region, role, or department. This resulted in inefficiency, information overload, and frequent errors.

My teams led the design of personalization within Staffbase Email to transform this pain point into an opportunity: enabling communicators to personalize messages at scale while meeting enterprise standards for privacy and compliance.

Users: Internal communicators needed a way to personalize messages (names, links, content blocks) without tedious manual work.

Enterprise customers: Privacy and compliance restrictions meant most employees couldn’t access the contact directory, blocking the roadmap’s initial assumptions.

Business: Personalization was critical to upselling customers from Pro to Enterprise, but the team lacked a clear strategy and user insights.

Early customer feedback collected from sales and customer success calls.

Problem statement: “How might we help internal communicators send personalized emails without putting employee data at risk and respecting privacy and compliance?”

The Opportunity

We designed a CSV-driven personalization workflow within the email designer:

• Upload a CSV to create custom personalization fields

• Fields were tied only to a specific email and private to the uploader

• Data was deleted after send, meeting high compliance and privacy standards
  

This approach balanced flexibility (custom fields for location, role, content blocks) with enterprise safeguards, making personalization scalable and trusted.

My Role: Product Design leadership and primary customer contact

• Led research initiatives to uncover customer workflows and compliance needs

• Facilitated cross-team workshops to align four developer teams on a shared direction & vision

• Designed the CSV-based personalization experience with privacy-first data handling

• Built customer trust by guiding research and mentoring designers though transparent design reviews and feedback loops

Process

1. Research & Insights

• Synthesized customer feature requests and sales call data

• Interviewed enterprise communicators to map workflows and evaluate initially proposed experience
  

Key findings:

• First-name personalization was the most common need

• Custom text in email bodies was the biggest pain point

• CSV upload was expected and widely used

• Role-based access and privacy were non-negotiable
  

  

  Key insights from customer interviews

2. Problem Definition: Framing the Opportunity

• Roadmap assumptions (contact directory) excluded enterprise users

• Enterprise renewals at risk if not solved

• Success metric: upgrade Pro → Enterprise customers while retaining existing accounts

  

  Flow Diagram illustrating the user and system interactions, along with identifying team ownership of each part of the customer journey.

3. Prototyping & Building Alignment

• Facilitated cross-team workshops to map use cases, risks, and dependencies

• Defined MVP standards for usability, compliance, and adoption

• Shared long-term personalization vision with stakeholders and customers
  

  

  Early concepts were evaluated with customers.

4. Designing the Experience

The core flow and experience consisted of three main feature pieces for the MVP

• CSV upload flow integrated into the email designer

• Custom fields and distribution list created per email, deleted after send

• Data preview directly from distribution list, with resource-level permissions

GIF of the prototype that was tested with high value customers.

Results & Impact

• 2 customers upgraded from Pro to Enterprise - one before the feature was even released!

• Largest customer renewed with a 3-year contract, worth $500,000

• Weekly usage of personalization across enterprise accounts

• 4 prospect conversations re-opened after first marketing push

• Triggered conversations about sunsetting high maintenance Outlook add-ons

Personal Learnings & Takeaways

This project demonstrated how design can transform organizational misalignment into enterprise growth:

• User-centric: Reduced manual overhead while respecting compliance constraints

• Business-positive: Directly contributed to upsells and renewals

• Future-proof: Established a scalable vision for personalization beyond names and basic fields
  

For me, the biggest takeaways were:

• Feature requests are only the surface — uncovering workflows reveals real needs

• Enterprise requirements like compliance and role-based permissions must be considered from the start

• Building buy-in early across customers and internal teams is as critical as the design itself