Today's post is a special one- I had the amazing opportunity to interview the Vice President of Marketing, Kate McGee, at delivery.com! I had a great time getting to know Kate so I wanted to share this insightful editorial interview with my followers! In this interview, Kate discusses all about her background, day to day and of course all about delivery.com's new amazing app!
N: What is your background? What is it like to be the VP of Marketing at delivery.com?
K: I joined delivery.com as VP of Marketing in December 2014, which was a very pivotal time for the company. We had recently relaunched our website and were in midst of revamping our mobile experience. (Speaking of which, we just released our new iOS app last week!) So the focus for 2015 was acquiring new customers, retaining them with a strong user experience, and educating them about our multi-category business model. I had previously worked at Amazon-owned Wag.com, which is part of the Quidsi family of websites, so I had a lot of experience in cross-category conversion tactics, as well as a strong backbone in acquisition and retention marketing for consumer-facing e-commerce businesses.
N: How does delivery.com define its culture?
K: We definitely have a “work-hard/play-hard” culture. Our team of 75 is driven, focused and dedicated to not only building a great user experience for customers and merchants, but also ensuring that we do so in a fun and engaging way, each and every day.
N: What makes delivery.com unique from other delivery services such as Seamless, GrubHub, Caviar, and Postmates? Why do you think delivery.com can beat the competition?
K: Delivery.com is the only marketplace platform that’s tackling multiple categories of local commerce, including food, alcohol, groceries, and laundry. And we’ve built a product that allows us to keep expanding and adding verticals. We believe that people want to take care of as many local errands as possible in one trusted and convenient place, rather than switching between a ton of different apps. As a one-stop shop for local ordering, we aim to save people real-world time along with precious real estate on their phones.
N: What influenced the design of the application?
K: Our main objective in our mobile app redesign was to build an experience that mirrored how people actually shop in restaurants, in liquor stores, at the dry cleaner, etc., and what criteria they value most in making purchasing decisions. For example, people want lots of options when they’re deciding what’s for dinner, but many options across hundreds of restaurants can also be overwhelming; so we built in a new recommendation engine to help our users find great restaurants and get specific dish suggestions.
In shopping for alcohol, however, people are usually more concerned with the name on the bottle than with the name of the liquor store. So we designed a “product-first” experience, where users can first decide what item they want to order — a bottle of merlot, a six-pack of beer, etc. — and we then help the user by matching them with the best local merchant that can deliver the order.
Similarly, laundry comes with its own unique order flow: users first tell us what they need, like “20 lbs of wash-and-fold” or “three shirts and a dress dry cleaned”, and then we generate a list of cleaners that can fulfill their order, sorted by price, distance, rating, etc. This way the user can decide their own priorities in picking a cleaner. From end to end, we aim to provide the right balance between helping to make customers’ choices easier, while also giving them flexibility of choice.
N: What are the plans for expanding to other cities around the world- especially in collegiate areas where college students need these types of services?
K: We are currently focusing on deepening our presence in our existing major metro areas as well as building our merchant bases in select secondary markets, specifically college markets where we can leverage our liquor category to lead us in branding and user acquisition.
