The Power of Simplicity
Often, marketing campaigns and programs are complex. Multi-touch campaigns. Dynamic content blocks. Branching journeys. The assumption is that more inputs/outputs produce better outcomes.
Instead, MyHeritage’s VP of Engagement and Monetization, Asaf Younger, took a laser focus. His most successful engagement program in years uses one email per week. One short video. One call to action. No branching journeys. No dynamic content blocks. No campaign within a campaign.
It also delivered some of the most meaningful engagement uplift the team has measured.
Asaf shows why simplicity, when done with discipline, scales.
The Challenge:
Too Many Features, Too Little Direction
MyHeritage is one of the richest genealogy platforms in the world. More than 60 million registered users. A database of 40 billion historical records. AI tools for coloring and enhancing old photos. DNA testing for both genealogy and health. Smart matching across user trees and historical records.
That richness is also a problem.
“Onboarding ends, and then silence,” Asaf says. “Users log in, they see all the options, they don’t know where to start. And when someone doesn’t know what to do next, they simply do nothing.”
At MyHeritage’s scale, even small improvements to post-onboarding engagement compound into thousands of additional active users every week. Asaf’s team needed a way to guide users from sign-up to active engagement, without overwhelming them with the massive catalog of features.
The answer was not to offer more. It was to offer one thing at a time.
The Insight:
Users Don’t Need More Features. They Need a Guide.
Asaf’s team realized that the right intervention was not a new feature. It was a tap on the shoulder. Have you tried this? Just try this one thing.
But crucially, not the same thing for every user. The right thing, for the right user, at the right time in their journey.
That insight became the foundation of Feature Spotlight.
The Solution:
A Personalized Eight-Email Series, Orchestrated Through Optimove
Feature Spotlight is a series of eight weekly emails sent to users in the post-onboarding window. Each email focuses on a single feature. Each contains a one-minute video that shows the feature in use. Each ends with one call to action: try it.
The series moves from fundamentals to advanced features in logical progression. How to grow your family tree. How to use smart matches. How to enhance old photos. How to interpret DNA results. How to search for historical newspapers.
Three principles make the series work.
Personalization that is substantive, not cosmetic. The first email in the series, How to grow your tree, is sent to different users in different forms. A user who has not started a tree gets a ‘kickstart your family tree’ message. A user who has started but not gone far gets a compliment for their progress and a nudge to add more. A user who has built a large tree gets the email suppressed entirely.
“Personalization is not cosmetics,” Asaf says. “It’s substantive. It’s about understanding where that person is in their journey right now.”
Optimove’s Target Group Discovery ensures that every user receives the single most relevant message for them. Not all eight emails go to all users. The right emails go to the right users at the right moment.
Short videos that show, not tell. Every email contains a one-minute branded video that demonstrates the feature in action. Long enough to teach something. Short enough that users actually watch through. The videos use MyHeritage’s brand palette, so they feel native to the product rather than generic marketing.
Asaf Younger: “We show users how to use the features. We don’t tell them what to do.”
Closed-loop landing pages, not third-party traffic. Early in the project, MyHeritage hosted the videos on YouTube, not on the MyHeritage site.
Open and click rates were strong. Users were watching the videos. But Asaf noticed a quiet problem: most users did not come back to MyHeritage to try the features.
The fix was to build a Feature Spotlight mini-site, hosted on MyHeritage’s own domain, where each video lived on its own page. Built with a no-code tool by the marketing team itself, the mini-site went live without R&D bottlenecks.
A more complex problem remained: how to take a user from an email to a video to actually try the feature inside MyHeritage, seamlessly, without a sign-in interruption. The team used Optimove’s Dynamic Attribute system to pass an authenticated token from the email to the landing page to MyHeritage. Asaf calls it “the secret handshake.” A user clicks the CTA on the landing page and lands inside the relevant feature, already authenticated, ready to act.
The result: an 11% increase in users returning to MyHeritage within 48 hours of clicking through.
The Results:
Engagement Uplift at Scale
Between January – April 2026, MyHeritage sent 25.6 million emails through Feature Spotlight. The numbers tell the story:
- 1.43% click rate across the series
- 0.15% unsubscribe rate, well below industry benchmarks
- 11% increase in users returning to MyHeritage within 48 hours of clicking
- Up to a 23.1% uplift in users’ Activity Score versus the control group
- 13 to 46% increase in active-user engagement across every email in the series
The Activity Score finding deserves particular attention. MyHeritage measures user engagement through a composite metric that weighs every meaningful action on the platform: tree-building, match interactions, photo edits, record searches. The Activity Score is passed to Optimove daily, which means Asaf’s team could measure Feature Spotlight against the metric that actually reflects what users do, not just against email opens or revenue alone.
The DNA email generated the most direct revenue, because it was sent only to users who had not yet purchased the DNA product. They watched the video, they were persuaded, and they bought it.
“We tend to think educational marketing is in conflict with generating revenue,” Asaf says. “On the contrary, every email in this series generated revenue. Educational marketing and direct sales are not opposed. They are the same thing, done patiently.”
Four Takeaways
Asaf reveals four lessons drawn directly from the work:
- Simplicity scales. The reality is simplicity scales. When the ask is simple, it is easy for users to act on it.
- Personalization doesn’t have to be complex. MyHeritage has AI and large language models. But essentially, personalization is about knowing where the user is on their journey and adapting your message to that. Marketers don’t need more than that.
- Control the funnel. Don’t send users to a place you cannot bring them back from.
- Measure what matters. It is tempting to only measure revenue and lifetime value. But by choosing the right KPI from the start, MyHeritage could see the series was working. The sales followed. The engagement was the proof.
The Bottom Line
What Asaf and his team built is not a campaign. It is a system. One email, one video, one CTA, sent once a week, personalized to where each user is in their journey, supported by Optimove’s orchestration, segmentation, and authentication.
“I didn’t have a huge budget. I didn’t have a huge team,” Asaf says. “I had a problem with a clear insight and the discipline to execute the solution we believed in.”
What MyHeritage delivered is what simplicity, at scale, with Optimove, looks like.
To learn more about how Optimove helps marketers personalize customer journeys and drive engagement at scale, request a demo.
