CASE STUDY
From the Worst Channel to the Best
The Transformation
The Problem
Despite sending over 24.3 million emails per year, this member association leader was struggling with major list churn with their non-members and lack of engagement with their members. The organization had over 8 business units competing for an email spot and this resulted in a single recipient receiving up to 17 emails in a month all with different messages. They needed to find a way to: a) unify the email across the organization by creating a member journey and b) get their recipients engaged with their email.
The Solution
The solution was to send less email to increase engagement. Our team tackled this by first bringing all business units together and developing goals for their use of email. From there, we created a future state that mapped out a member journey from acquisition to their post-member experience.
First we identified key segments and assigned what emails were 100% necessary for those groups to receive. Next, we took the other emails being sent and added some based off trigger-actions and some were moved to an opt-in. We built the basic lifecycle programs - New Member Welcome series, Pre-Member Conversion, Re-Engagement, and Winback series that would activate upon reaching a certain lifecycle stage. We then incorporated the sales team's individual outreach by unifying the MarTech stack. From there, we moved into testing, running a 6-week testing protocol that offered up learnings as to what subject line formulas, template types, and content both non-members and members engaged with.
The Results
By using out staggered implementation approach, we were able to start seeing results in about 6 weeks. Email metrics began to increase, unsubscribes reduced.
By the end of our 8-month engagement, we had seen major success sending only 14.4 million emails (vs 24.3 million).
-Open Rate doubled to above industry best - 43%
-CTR improved 139% - 7.9%
-CTOR increased by 68%
Our conversion programs increased from 2.1% to 7.2%, well above industry best. In addition the average days to convert reduced from 90 days to 60 days.
The outcome was successfully reducing email with driven purpose, all while unifying the organization to become more customer-centric. In this success we cleared the clutter for the member, adding in more automation to deliver the right content at the right time.
Company Insights
Industry
Member Association with both B2B and B2C segments
Starting Email Stats
-24.3 Million Emails Sent/Year
-22% Average Open Rate
-1.04% Average CTR
The 78% of unopened email revealed that a) too many misaligned emails were being sent and b) content/strategy issues at play
Length of Engagement
8 Months
Size of Company
-Total Employees: ~150
-Total on Marketing Team: 3 employees
-Number of Business Units: 8 + sales
Result Highlights
