Goals and Objectives
- Identify the engaged segment of the list.
- Improve our open rates and engagement to an acceptable level.
- Identify areas where the lists could organically capture new top-of-the-funnel eyeballs.
- Identify what other email products could be launched to generate new-to-us engagement.
Client’s Industry Context
Before my intervention, the company sent all its emails from a Mailchimp account. Just before I started, the company move emails into Klaviyo for its more advanced segmenting and A/B testing capabilities. Even so, its emails were visually clunky and overloaded with copy and images, enveloped by a brand that had become tired and old-fashioned (no updates in almost 50 years). Open rates hovered consistently in the 15-25% range, with click rates stuck in the 1-2% range.
Specific Challenge
The client was extremely concerned about the declining engagement rate, the fact that the email lists were not growing organically, and how hard it was to differentiate between the engaged and unengaged users. The email campaign strategy remained very traditional, and they hadn’t performed any testing to identify areas of opportunity or improvement.
Since the client’s engagement rates were so low – consistently delivering click rates below 1% – it was impossible to present email as a potential advertising opportunity for clients.
Strategy and Execution
Audience Research and Segmentation: The first, and most urgent area of the work was fixing the existing lists. There were about 60K names but further review and analysis revealed that the email lists were outdated, members weren’t actively engaged with their email preferences and – most importantly – some of the largest organizations had relegated us to their spam folders.
First, we scrubbed the lists with neverbounce to verify the emails we had and get rid of any that we identified as spam traps, organizational style emails (hello@, info@, etc) or emails that were no longer valid or accurate.
By the time I became involved, the editorial team had already identified an area of expansion outside the paywall: a news vertical. Therefore, we decided that news emails would be the logical next step for growth. In addition to this work, we quickly established new email sending segments of “engaged” vs “unengaged” recipients, who we defined as anyone who hadn’t opened an email in a specific period of time.
Email Format Innovation: Using the vibrant rebrand led by external teams, we built an entirely new set of email templates and started testing the existing layout (header image, headline, copy blurb, and button) vs. new layouts to determine the optimal design for engagement. Across all verticals for the company, and through cautious and extensive A/B testing, we determined that stripped down emails featuring only minimal branding – with a linked headline – delivered the best engagement. No images or custom summary blurbs needed. This freed up time spent creating emails, and allowed the editorial staff to re-focus their efforts.
Email Workflow Innovation: The team previously requested and tracked emails via, well, email. We moved all that activity to a centralized spreadsheet with multiple tabs where the content for upcoming emails, and ads for each, get added and linked. We also implemented a UTM strategy that allowed us to quickly identify which email traffic is flowing into the site via the Google Looker Studio Dashboard. These workflow improvements provided the entire team visibility into upcoming and sent email activity. It also tracked advertiser reports, UTM codes, and other necessary moving parts of a successful email program.
Implementation: To implement our News emails, we launched two weekly email sends. The first was “The Weekly Mind Reader,” an editorial roundup of the most important research of the week, that included an overview of the most important news stories of the week with a list of other important headlines. Since the column gets published Friday morning, we established a Friday morning send to coincide with publication.
The second email follows the format “5 Things You Should Know This Week,”a digest sent on Sunday at noon local time to help energize recipients and prepare them to start the work week.
To kickstart the email list, we spent the first month sending News emails to the full list of contacts. We also added “Front of Mind News” as one of the options you can subscribe to when you register for psychiatrist.com use and also implemented an “exit intent” popup on the site that specifically feeds into the News list. The entirety of the list growth seen in the last two years has been the product of organic traffic. Not a single dollar has been spent on paid traffic to these list signups.
In addition, the program has allowed us to further segment our audiences into:
- Interest areas: The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders or News emails.
- Engagement status: Engaged and actively interacting with our email vs unengaged
- Advertising engagement status: Who is interacting with advertisements placed in emails.
These segmentation methods mean we can very precisely target emails to their right audience, but can also target email campaigns to the unengaged/inactive portions of the audience to try to re-engage them into an active segment.