Case Study: Email open rate increase
The McCormick Center, a non-profit, had a fairly large Mailchimp email list that needed to be re-evaluated as their open and click rate were fairly low compared to industry standards.
Through careful planning and the development of a marketing campaign, the open rate was increased immediately by 50% and the list saw an organic growth of 50% over the course of 6 months.
Deliverables: Email list management, email design, increased open rate
The Problem
Open rate was very low compared to the industry standard
The list hadn’t been cleaned in many years
The email templates were outdated and needed to match the center’s current branding To better understand why this was happening it was to take a look at previous emails and their analytics and understand what was working and what wasn’t.
Step one: Updating the sign-up form
Separate lists were created for different topics: resources, updates, events, all lists, that told the person signing up the frequency they would receive those emails.
The form was updated in general, making it more user-friendly and easier to update
Step two: Re-engagement campaign for inactive users
Created segments and tags to keep track of this group
Gave them an option to update their profile and choose which emails they’d want to see, or allow them to unsubscribe
Step three: Removing those who did not engage with the reengagement campaign
This allowed for more organic growth, and gave us a better understanding of where the list stood and allowed us to more accurately measure growth.
Step four: updating the email templates to match the branding and UX/UI best practices
Outcomes
Open rate was increased by 50% immediately, stayed consistent over 6 months with targeted emails increasing their open rate by 70-100%
Because list data had been updated and new subscribers were giving us better data, the ability to target messages with success increased
Organic list growth of 50% within a 6-month period
Email templates were updated match the organization’s current branding
Information in these emails are carefully thought out to reach the intended audience and are organized in a way in which the content is more easily digested
A new email schedule was created so that staff would be able to plan content accordingly