Stacked Marketer

Stacked Marketer is one of the most successful marketing newsletters. Emanual Cinca’s brainchild scaled from a small newsletter to a full fledged media company with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Like any success story, Staked Marketer’s path to where it stands today was full of challenges that had to be overcome the right way.

This is a story of one challenge in particular – when they found themselves limited by their tech stack and tools. Read on to explore how things turned around for them once Refact helped consolidate and streamline their editorial workflows, refreshing the brand and overall design along the way.

Stacked Marketer is a remarkable media company with a massive audience that keeps growing. Besides the Stacked Marketer newsletter, they also offer other products, including Tactics, Psychology of Marketing and the paid community product, Stacked Marketer Pro.

Over the past year, our partnership has evolved from small technical services into a robust, comprehensive collaboration. Stacked Marketer’s team first approached us for consulting on isolated technical issues, and they were so happy with the results that they gradually increased our role in their design and development. Finally, we worked together to give their branding and design a complete makeover, and improve their website. We are proud of our part in Stacked Marketer’s successful growth. This case study goes over our more significant contributions.

Let’s rewind to over a year ago. Stacked Marketer was already rolling out its flagship newsletter along with Tactics and Psychology of Marketing. However, these newsletters had no visual connection. They didn’t have a cohesive look that signaled they were from the same company, making them unrecognizable to the audience.

They were seeing more people unsubscribing from the newsletters simply because they couldn’t tell these newsletters were from the same team. It is always nice to have solid brand identity recognizable across brands, but for Stacked Marketer, this was a must-have. Without understanding why they were receiving them, more subscribers were likely to opt-out.

At the center of our collaboration with Stacked Marketer is the redesign of all their graphic assets. We redesigned their branding and logo. We also revamped and redesigned their website into a high-impact, engaging, and reader-friendly experience. Our efforts have brought new life to Stacked Marketer’s visual identity across all channels and assets. We also redesigned their premium offering, Stacked Marketer Pro, with its own visual identity.

To make sure all visuals continue to align with Stacked Marketer’s new brand identity, we put together a brand new brand book. This brand style guide lays out everything that makes Stacked Marketer stand out graphically, including its iconography and typography. Everything has been perfected to speak the same design language.

This is about more than a new look – it’s about setting a lasting standard for how they communicate visually, ensuring consistency across all channels and methods they use to reach out to their audience.

To create a new and improved website, we used the WordPress-native Gutenberg blocks for their flexibility and ease of use. You can learn more about that in this article. A significant part of the new UI/UX efforts were focused on creating a new homepage.

We recreated the Stacked Marketer website’s home page to enhance the user experience for our visitors. Our goal was to provide a seamless and captivating reading experience right from the outset. With these tweaks, the home page now serves as a helpful guide to help Stacked Marketer’s audience navigate the site with ease, enabling them to quickly and efficiently find the information they need.

Stacked Marketer was built around a simple concept: provide marketers with valuable information, knowledge, and resources. The newsletters they sent out handled a part of that. Making their mission a reality, though, meant a different product, one that could bring together resources and members into a community of learning.

Stacked Marketer Pro was initially planned as a place where the members could access their community and the resources offered by the newsletter’s team. To make the whole product come together and work as an efficient unit, Refact’s product managers consulted Emanuel and his team. That is how the Learning Hub was created and replaced the original home page of SMP.

The Learning Hub brings all resources into one easy-to-navigate interface. The Learning Hub would allow members to access all content from a single location, making it easier to read and navigate.

Stacked Marketer had to deal with the limitations of out-of-the-box technology and limited features. Once they partnered with Refact they now work with the right tools for their team so they can publish their best work more efficiently than ever.   Since the updates were deployed, Stacked Marketer has grown steadily gaining new subscribers every month.