Client Context
A market-leading financial services company relied heavily on email marketing to educate and drive usage among its national base of lenders and technology partners. The organization was rolling out a series of process and technology enhancements and needed a better way of communicating with partners to sell this complex service offering.
The Business Challenge
The team understood that its traditional approach to email marketing with broad, push-based campaigns would not work, given differences in partner receptivity, infrastructure investment requirements, and internal stakeholder decision making. The organization recognized this as an opportunity to shift to a unified, journey-based email strategy, and needed a roadmap to support this change. Without pivoting to a more deliberative approach to explain and sell its customers on a change that required near-term investment for a long-term efficiency and revenue benefit, the organization risked untenable response rates and compliance.
Capabilities Applied
- Best Practices Benchmarking
- Co-creation Workshops
- Email Journey Mapping and Optimization
- Pilot Testing and Roadmap
Approach
We began with a comprehensive assessment of B2B email marketing best practices that then informed sessions with key internal stakeholders to align on business and audience goals. With the internal team ready to move forward, we worked with our direct clients to:
- Translate goals into a structured email journey customized to reflect different on-ramps of target audiences, including key messaging, personalization, calls to action, and anticipated audience responses at each step.
- Iterate with their stakeholders about the sequence, measurement, and testing plans before drafting the full email series, ultimately delivering a polished, best-practice-aligned set of emails alongside a finalized launch plan.
- Support pilot testing and provide frameworks for a repeatable process that the broader organization could adopt for future complex email marketing needs. That included a clear roadmap defining when a multi-step email journey approach is warranted and specific criteria for creative and data-driven execution.
Impact
The work delivered more than a campaign – it gave the organization a holistic, scalable framework for journey-based email marketing. By building a strategy around different audiences segmented by role, receptivity to change, and past behavior, the team was able to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and meet audiences where they were, thus meaningfully increasing stakeholder response rates and adoption.
We helped our client adopt a holistic, journey-based approach to email marketing that shifted the focus from isolated transactions to a continuous conversation that anticipates and fulfills customer needs. The journey-based approach ensures that every touchpoint—before, during, and after an email is opened—aligns with the customer’s targeted needs, which ultimately leads to higher response rates and engagement.”
—Jennifer Anthony, Partner
