Marketing music campaign for Rain Retail Software
Graphic design and front-end development
My Role
UI/UX design, Front-end development, and Graphic design
Platform(s)
Web and print
Timeline
November 2019 - July 2020
TL;DR
Responsibilities
Designer across all campaign touchpoints. Created the visual system. Designed and developed the microsite and email campaign. Art directed print and trade show materials.
Results
A visually unified campaign across six-plus channels, running from November 2019 through July 2020, grounded in real conversations with music shop owners.
Highlights
I set the visual direction early and built it to scale. The same style that lived on a Facebook ad held up on a NAMM billboard without modification.
The Problem
Music shop owners are running two businesses at once. Their storefront and their online store operate in silos, meaning every product update, sale, or rental has to be managed twice. That's time, money, and mental energy spent on overhead instead of selling instruments.
Rain Retail needed a campaign that could walk into NAMM and make that problem feel solved before a vendor ever signed up.
Process & Key decisions
I was brought on as the designer for this campaign, responsible for a visual language that had to live everywhere, from a magazine page to a trade show backdrop to someone's inbox, and still read as one thing. The earliest decision mattered most: I built the system around the trade show floor rather than the inbox, since NAMM was the moment Rain Retail most needed the campaign to land, which meant every other channel had to scale down from a billboard rather than scale up from an email template. That decision shaped the type sizes, the contrast levels, and the amount of copy any single piece could carry, long before the first email or magazine ad got built.
Microsite
Built from scratch to do one job: convert. The layout and visual direction came from me, structured around the pain points we heard during on-site visits with real shop owners.
The live version has now been removed, however, you can click below to view the most recent mockup of the page.
View Microsite
Email Campaign
A three-part MailChimp series, each focused on a single value prop. Integrations.
Online Rent-to-Own. Switching is Easy. I designed and developed all three. Spacing them out gave each
message room to land instead of competing with itself.
Magazine Ads
A three-month run in MMR and Music and Sound Retailer, intentionally timed to overlap with the email campaign. I designed the ads to mirror the email series visually so that both channels reinforced each other.
Design System & Components
Building scalability from day one was critical. I established a system in Figma paired with coded React components to ensure consistency between the editor, shopping, and management flows.
The style I set at the start held through every channel without needing to be renegotiated.
Final Experience
Before any deliverable went into production, I established the visual system the whole campaign would run on. Typography, color, layout rules, tone in imagery. Getting that right early meant every new asset, whether it was a postcard or a billboard, could be produced faster and still feel cohesive. The style I set at the start held through every channel without needing to be renegotiated.
Impact & Findings
Increased qualified leads
The microsite drove a 34% increase in pre-show inquiries compared to the previous year, giving the sales team warmer conversations on the floor.
Email engagement
The three-part series averaged a 27% open rate across all sends, well above the industry average for B2B software at the time.
Brand recognition
Vendors who had seen both the magazine ads and email campaign were significantly more likely to book a demo, pointing to the value of a consistent, multi-channel visual presence.