The internal customer is sometimes overlooked, but in reality should be our most important asset in providing the positive experience our external customer expects. Keeping your employees in the loop, understanding what they need to be successful in their job and listening to their feedback gives you a wealth of insight to build a strong culture, informed employees and happy internal and external customers.

Form an Internal Communications Strategy

Many years ago I worked for Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Michigan. My job was to promote new design technology (IBM CATIA) to the designers and engineers for the Body and White division. The company recognized that by investing in their internal customer they would save time, improve efficiency, reduce errors and build a superior product. Using qualitative and quantitative primary research—mainly listening behind the scenes to evaluate data of current product usage and talking to the internal customer directly—an internal communication strategy was formed. Using traditional marketing mediums and communication channels—unique branding, video, intranet, email, lunch and learns, trinkets and contests—we were able to see the movement of new functionality usage within a short amount of time and even bring a little excitement to the design floor.

Build a Strong Culture

Another opportunity to see the impact of keeping your internal customer informed and engaged was when I worked with the Bluegrass Hospitality Group in Lexington, Kentucky to develop and launch their loyalty program. A huge aspect of our tremendous growth and success was because we spent so much time listening to our internal customer to figure out what they needed to do their job, provide the right training through their internal Culture of Excellence to provide exceptional customer service and meet the requirements to register new BHG Rewards members at the same time. 

Elise Menold, former Marketing Director, recalls “there was a group of team members that would collaborate and write funny/short skits that we would then film and edit and piece together into a little show that resembled the SNL weekend update skits. We introduced loyalty program updates, specials, new rules/protocols, seasonal information, uniform guidelines, everything.” The videos were distributed through their internal email newsletter using Salesforce Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget at the time).

Achieve Long-Term Results

A&W Restaurants will be celebrating their 100th anniversary in 2019. Liz Bazner and Spencer Barrett, their digital marketing team, distribute the NewsBearer bi-weekly, their internal email newsletter, keeping their internal audience, franchise owners and employees informed of upcoming events, operational changes and anything else ‘delicious.’ They publish a blog titled Franchise News directed to their internal audience and they connect in person with franchise owners on a regular basis. Impressively, four days a year each employee at the A&W Restaurant Support Center has to tie on an apron, swap their dress shoes for something slip-resistant and pull a shift in one of our restaurants. We know that as a franchisee-owned brand, it’s vital for everyone in our organization to understand what it’s like to work day-to-day in an A&W.*

A&W is reaching new levels of growth with store openings across the US as well as longevity of franchise ownership. Again – they will be 100 years old!

*source: https://awfranchising.com/research/what-makes-our-restaurant-franchise-different/

Close the Gaps

Lexington Podiatry, a small company with 23 employees, uses an ongoing customer experience survey created in SurveyGizmo and triggered after each patient appointment by their email marketing platform, CampaignMonitor.

Originally the survey was a way to organically and ethically collect Google Reviews; now it is the force that drives their strong internal culture and propels their customer service efforts.

The collected survey data is transformed into a visual dashboard using Klipfolio (below) to monitor the service received while in the waiting room and the treatment room by both physicians and office staff. Elise Hinchman, Marketing Director, uses this dashboard to communicate strengths, weaknesses, growth, trends, and opportunities for the administrative staff every Tuesday during their internal meeting. Being able to monitor patient feedback consistently, over time, validates necessary changes to be executed that are best for the customer. The LexPod squad makes taking care of feet fun for both the internal customer and the external customer!

Email Marketing Makes Things Happen

In all of these examples, email has been the consistent channel used to improve the customer experience. Take advantage of your ESP capabilities and communicate on a regular basis to your internal customer. Send surveys for feedback about what they are seeing and hearing from customers, share company news, employee-related stories, marketing trends, successes and even failures. The content you share will keep them present with your company culture, long-term efforts and lead to independence in answering customer questions and provide exceptional service when you need it most.

Recommended Read

The size of your company should not matter in how you take care of your external customer, but your internal customer—your team member, employee, volunteer, and even freelance vendor, does. An excellent book to read is, “The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander” by Pete Blaber.

Pete is a former Delta Force Commander but also a former corporate director at Amgen. The comparison of his experience in the military searching for known terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, to leading a team of sales managers at Amgen is fascinating. In essence, it does not matter what your task is; To progress, it’s essential to listen to and support those in the trenches every day.

As a marketer, you know that you can’t just throw up some amazing graphics and expect people to understand your message. You need words. But which words? How many words? In what order? The answer can be found by asking a professional content writer.

I’m a content writer, but what does that really mean?

To start, it means I have a background specifically focused on honing the craft of writing well. My education and degree are in writing. My experience includes years of writing creative messages in every form–essays, billboards, radio and television commercials, print advertisements, blogs, brochures, websites, magazines, email marketing….and on and on.

It means that I approach every potential message with the goal to first learn everything I can about the subject matter. Sometimes the subject is root beer floats, sometimes it’s neurosurgery and sometimes it’s an inspiring young person who’s changing the world. After I learn everything I can about the subject, I turn it around and around in my brain and then it comes pouring back out through my fingertips, hopefully in a way that is more engaging and more understandable to the reader.

Sometimes the process is effortless–the creativity pours out on the page and the headline or email or blog post seems to write itself. And sometimes it’s more painful. My colleagues and I have mapped out the goals of the message, but the right words elude me. Or I have the right words but they aren’t coming together cohesively. That’s when I have to exercise my writing muscle; or follow my own advice to walk away and return to the process later, more refreshed. Either way, easy or difficult, in the end, the only thing that matters is creating a message that resonates.

My typical writing spot—weather permitting

But everyone writes….right?

What’s the value in hiring a professional content writer if I can just write it myself?

Every time you google something, every time you read an email from a company, every time you see a billboard on your drive home, someone put those words together on purpose. Of course, you can write your own content–we certainly encourage it and that’s why we continue to share writing tips on our blog. But when you hire a content writer, you are hiring an expert at putting words together “on purpose.”

Here are 3 more reasons it pays to hire a professional:

Experience: A professional content writer has years of experience in bringing together the right words, in the right way, to ensure a message is on target. Plus, we are also unusually creative!

It saves time: Whether you need to focus on other aspects of a project, or simply need to get something finished quickly in a crunch, an experienced content writer can execute creative, on-target messaging quickly.

Background: A content writer is immersed in content all day, every day. We read blogs about developing the best content and we have our finger on the pulse of what other companies and industries are putting out there, content-wise. So when you hire a professional content writer, you not only get writing expertise, you get all the hours and hours of background knowledge on content marketing that the average professional does not have time–or let’s face it, the desire– to track.

ABOUT CHRISTINA

Christina Noll is a content marketing specialist with 20 years experience telling stories about brands, products, companies—and most importantly, people—through creative and engaging email marketing, content marketing and strategic content planning. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In his thought-provoking book,“The Checklist Manifesto,” Atul Gawande walks through vivid examples of how both the airline industry and the medical field radically reduced errors and improved safety issues by using a simple checklist. Since reading his book, every time I board a plane I envision the pilot and co-pilot working their way down that checklist to ensure that everyone on my flight makes it to our destination. Atul Gawande convinced me, and countless others, that every industry, every person, and every project would benefit from a checklist.

COLLABORATE

Typically multiple people are involved with the email planning, design, copywriting, development, testing and approval of an email campaign. Most often, these same people have several emails and supporting landing pages progressing at the same time. Trying to keep everyone aligned can be daunting! It makes sense to work from a centralized list — giving each member the ability to check off their completed task, leading to a streamlined process, stronger collaboration, and most importantly a reduction in errors and improvement in quality overall.

START HERE

To give you a solid foundation to build on, we took our experience and knowledge with email marketing and content marketing to create an Email Marketing Checklist. The first five steps involve organization, collaboration and a lot of listening. All of this is needed to get to know your audience better to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time — the purpose of email marketing. As you build your checklist or tailor the one we’ve drafted for you, allow the members of your team to have a voice in what needs to happen. Obtaining input will break down barriers, find missing tasks and set timing accordingly.

CUSTOMIZE

The second five encompass the action of composing, building and testing each email campaign. Litmus, our partner with email rendering and analytics, has made it easy to check off and approve each of these actions with their Custom Checklist feature. For example, the image below shows the custom checklist we utilize for our monthly newsletter “From your Email Horticulturists.” You’ll notice that a few of the last five tasks from the Email Marketing Checklist are applied here. We’re able to mark each task as complete, as well as see who completed which task.

Because of the checklist process, we’re learning more about our audience as a team. We’ve stayed on track with our email campaigns, content, measurement and ongoing education for continuous improvement. Our clients are benefiting from the expanded communication and collaboration.

You can do the same. Get started on your checklist.

Recently RootedELM sent a survey to our subscribers asking them a few questions. Each respondent received a $10 gift card for their time and sharing their information. The scenario walks through how to identify the subscribers that did not complete the survey to be able to follow up with a second email invitation to participate.

SCENARIO 2: UNENGAGED FOR MULTIPLE SENDS

Inactive subscribers skew your tracking results and cause harm to your deliverability relationship with inbox providers. If over a period and multiple sends, your subscriber has not opened or clicked within an email (or based on your defined criteria), it’s best for you to take action, by asking your subscriber to take action, with some form of a reengagement campaign series. For example, A&W Restaurants uses an annual survey and incentive to re-engage.

“Subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time represent a shrinking revenue opportunity and growing risk to your deliverability.”

– Chad White, Email Marketing Rules – Third Edition

When to send a re-engagement campaign depends on how frequent you send and your customer purchase lifecycle. Investing in a re-engagement program however, leads to answers. Whether you send an inquiry to ask questions about interest or an email campaign to test a new idea out on — you receive insight to improve upon. You learn more about what type of content is working, where you can enhance and where you’re missing the boat.

How close do you monitor your subscriber lists? Are you trying to re-engage your disengaged? RootedELM has developed multiple campaigns of this type and available to explore and discuss ideas with you for your program.

RESOURCES TO HELP YOU FLOURISH:

Campaign Monitor: Send More Relevant Emails with Additional Rules for Segments

Litmus: 3 Steps to Successful Subscriber Reengagement 

Welcome your subscribers again and again.

As marketers, we strive to meet our goals as well as achieve the highest engagement and conversion rates we can. On average, a welcome campaign produces 10% greater results than another type of email campaign.

Newly opted in subscribers are excited to hear from us and it’s our job to provide the information they are seeking. Extending that hospitality across multiple email campaigns bestows good customer experience and opens up two-way communication.

Why not reap the rewards a little longer? Use this infographic as a guide for your onboarding email campaigns to boost engagement even more. Our skilled team is available to answer questions, provide feedback and assist along the way.

One of the most common practices of email marketers is to neglect taking the time to re-engage their audience. A misconception that typically stems from upper management is that quantity of subscribers is better than the quality of subscribers. The assumption is: the more email addresses a email campaign is sent to, the greater the opportunity for our audience to convert. Actually, quite the opposite is true. With quality, engaged email addresses, you’ll find your conversion metrics to be greater and you’ll stay away from spam traps and the dreaded junk mailbox.

So When Should You Re-engage?

It’s Just Time.

Hanging on to unengaged subscribers just muddies up your metrics and most importantly your relationship with ISP’s (the email inbox) like Gmail. Try to ignite engagement with an exceptional offer, or a reminder of a previous purchase or experience like the Shutterfly example I talked about in a recent post. This is also a good opportunity to ask for feedback to understand why the subscriber has lost interest. Asking questions often leads to a theme or trend that you may be missing.

A&W Restaurants conducts an annual re-engagement campaign sending a survey about their Mug Club experience to those that have not opened or clicked a single Mug Club email in six months. Those that choose not to respond after receiving two email campaigns in a 14 day period, are unsubscribed. Those that do respond get a nice limited-time offer and entered into a drawing to be chosen as one of three subscribers to receive $50 in Bear Bucks. The insight obtained leads to improvement with their Mug Club program.

You’ve Changed Your Send Cadence.

Think about your own inbox and how you would react if you suddenly started to receive an influx of email from a company. Most likely you would become annoyed and either unsubscribe or ignore the emails entirely. Be courteous: announce an upcoming change to your cadence or content and give your subscriber the opportunity to opt-in or opt-out by visiting the preference center.

Hyde Park Jewelers would send a campaign the first of November each year to inform of an upcoming increase in holiday sends and provide an option for subscribers to update their preferences. This option allowed for deeper segmentation into categories called Fashionista, Watch Enthusiast or Special Events that were self-identified and eliminated a subscriber receiving every piece of email the company sent.

You Have a Regulation or Privacy Update.

If your industry or company requires notification to your subscribers regarding a change in regulation, membership, policy, etc. then take this opportunity to check in with all subscribers to see if your content is on target or where can you improve. A use case would be a quarterly or yearly statement within the financial industry. Direct them to their email preference center to confirm or make adjustments. This reiterates that you are attentive to their interest and leads to a good experience for your subscriber.

You’ve Changed Email Service Providers.

Start clean and build a good sender reputation with your new email service provider. ISP’s look at positive behaviors by your subscribers to determine if your message is worthy enough to make it into the inbox or should go directly to the junk mail box. They look at whether your subscribers open, delete, save your emails in a folder, or save your sender email address to their address book, etc.

Recently we transitioned Lexington Podiatry from one email service provider to another that fit their needs better. Prior to the transition, the marketing team cleaned house. If a subscriber had not interacted with them during the previous six months, they were not imported. This not only saved on the expense of each subscriber, it also told the ISP’s that the people they were sending to wanted to receive their monthly newsletters, appointment reminders, birthday messages and follow-up surveys through the positive interaction by the subscriber.

You Need Answers.

It is important to keep a clean list and re-engage for the reasons mentioned above, but also just to know your audience better. Their interaction leads to knowledge to create not only stronger email campaigns, but also content and programs across your entire marketing mix.

Incorporating lifecycle email messaging will build a strong foundation and —  because these campaigns are the most relevant — keep your subscribers engaged. Start with your welcome campaign and turn it into a welcome series for efficient and informative on-boarding. Build trust with your new subscriber by sharing information about your company, culture, social channels and relevant products, etc. Ask questions to obtain insight leading to additional lifecycle campaigns such as happy birthday, happy anniversary or interested product updates and use accessible data to send appointment reminders, customer service surveys or win-back campaigns. All of these lifecycle campaigns, even a re-engagement campaign, can be automated with most email service providers depending on your functionality and data available.

Sometimes the answer to one person’s question can help the next person and so on. Consider this a FAQ of email marketing. We’ll post actual questions from our customers, along with the expert solutions so you can tuck them away in case you run into the same issue later.

Issue: Font changing in email when it’s sent
ESP:  Campaign Monitor

Ok, so apparently for some of the templates in Campaign Monitor they’ve hardcoded fallback fonts to be changed from the settings section. So since the hardcoded fallback was serif for when Merriweather was chosen, changing to Helvetica in the text block wasn’t changing the font-stack except for adding Helvetica to the front of the code.

I fixed it by going to the settings for the template and changed the Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 and Normal Text to Helvetica and it changed the font stacks accordingly. I’ve also alerted Campaign Monitor to the issue with this template (and potentially others as well).

First, provide the relevant information. Example: “Bird by bird, or step by step, intentional email design = better design.”

Add a strong call to action: Example: “See how a template helps:”

Next, include your link to additional information, such as a blog post, article, or web page. Example: “https://rootedelm.com/blog/intentional-email-design”

Tip: use the url shortener in your social media management tool (Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.) to shorten the link and save on valuable character length

Then, add a hashtag to help your audience find and share your post. Example: “#emailmktgdesign”

Finally, add an image.  We use a friendly app called Canva to create the social media images for RootedELM.

Your finished product should look something like this:

Even if your social media message contains all the necessary elements, it might still get lost in the fray. But ensuring it contains the above elements, along with re-posting to achieve frequency, can help ensure your message is heard.

RESOURCES:

• MarketingProfs: Which Types of Facebook Posts Get the Most Likes, Comments, and Shares? [Infographic]

• Content Marketing Institute: 58 Social Media Tips for Content Marketing

RELATED CONTENT:

There’s an App for That

In the email marketing world, there is nothing greater than when an email campaign hits the sweet spot. As a consumer of Lilly Pulitzer clothing, I am aware that they hold a massive final sale in July. What I wasn’t aware of is they do the same thing in January! Thanks to a perfectly executed email campaign, now I do. Over three days I received eight unifying emails as part of the same “After Party Sale” campaign which caused me to spend a small fortune. Because Lilly only goes on sale twice a year, when you have two teenage girls that love their Lilly…you stock up!

The first email came in the night before the “After Party Sale” (below left). Somehow I missed it but the second email (below right) with the subject line: Just released sale styles have landed! sure caught my attention.  I did just what the email said to do: “Freak Out!” After a brief wait in the online line for my turn to shop –  I was glued to lillypulitzer.com for the next hour (well maybe a little more), but luckily it was toward the end of the day! I sent my oldest daughter a text to call me immediately when she was free. She was in her study hour and wanted to know what was so urgent; My reply was “the Lilly sale is going on now!”  She had the same response I did and headed to the Lilly website, sending me her favorite choices. Needless to say, her friends just rolled their eyes at her when she told them what was going on. By now, my shopping cart was full of beautiful dresses for upcoming formals, spring break and graduation and I had to make a decision fast on what I was going to purchase. I had already lost out on two perfect dresses as they were selling fast!  Now do you understand the havoc?  Back to email marketing.

After feeling success with combing the Lilly website, I made my purchase. My girls were excited and so was I because this time, I was able to purchase a few items for myself. The excitement was contagious, and during a project call, I informed Christina Noll of the sale and she also jumped right on the website and was able to purchase a few items as well. I went to tweet my findings and discovered others were in a frenzy just like myself. An entire community of Lilly aficionados were on a mission to get these great deals! This led to me following @LillyPulitzer now on Twitter and Facebook, so I could be even more a part of this community.  I even found a resale community on Facebook to sell our gently used items now.

But here’s where the story gets juicier. That evening just before nine, I received the email below (on the left) with the subject line: What?! New styles added to SALE, which caused me to go back and make another purchase! Twelve hours later another email came with the subject line: Just dropped: new to SALE with even more sale items added to the website. Then the countdown began two hours later with: Don’t miss out! Sale ends soon.

Lilly had done it right. Each of the emails had animation, rotating photos of the new items that had been added (shown below) to peak my interest even more. The voice and tone used in the copy matched just what I was saying to myself in my head. My attention span was in their hands for two days now. I had emailed, tweeted and posted the sale to my friends and colleagues. I had spread the word and so had others. The campaign was a huge success.

The next morning Lilly sent one last email just in case I wasn’t done shopping. This was sent just before 11 am with the subject line: Don’t miss out! Sale ends soon…And finally the following evening, I received this animated Thank You email with photos of other shoppers showing their excitement.  This had the best subject line yet to sum up the experience: What. A. Wild. Ride.

When my purchases did arrive in the Lilly signature pink palm packages, I opened to find a note saying “You Have the Best Taste. You Ordered….”

I received my final email asking to review one of my purchases. This is a campaign that is all too often missed by companies, but probably one of the most important and easy ways to obtain feedback directly from your customer. Well done Lilly Pulitzer! I’ll see you in July.

In Anne Lamott’s bestselling book Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life she recounts a story of how her brother, aged ten at the time, struggled to complete a report on birds he had put off until the last minute. Her father consoled him by explaining that the task would only get done by taking it, “Bird by bird.”

Sometimes, when we look at our list of emails that need to go out, it can feel overwhelming. But we, too, need to remember to take it “Bird by bird,” or one step at a time. When you design your email intentionally, without rushing, you produce a better email–one that is ultimately engaging to your audience and renders correctly for viewing on all types of devices.

One way to facilitate the process is by creating a template, such as the one used by Hyde Park Jewelers in the three examples below. This template started from a custom HTML email campaign that tracked good results, and the digital marketing team liked the layout. Jason Meeker, Strategic Partner for RootedELM, took his custom design and converted it into a Campaign Monitor template. Jason continues to work with the Hyde Park Jeweler’s internal designer each week on coding and design recommendations. Since then, Hyde Park Jewelers has been able to save time on design and editing because their designer uses the layout specs to create the design assets and messaging.

Once your template is in place, take each email you create and put it through the checklist:

• • Determine the CTA: why are you sending the email and what action do you want your viewer to take?

• • Customize your template: each email should be unique with a variation of assets and content.

• • Test for rendering: just because your email looks good on your screen doesn’t mean it will look good in your customer’s inbox.

• • Test links: double check they work the way they should and link to the right URL.

• • Conduct an A/B split test: subject line, time of day or asset placement  – which version received the most engagement? Send to your remaining audience.

• • Monitor results: is the template still producing the results you need? Tweak before your next scheduled send.

Some of the best creative comes out during the holidays. In the spirit of the season, our team has pulled together a few emails we’ve admired over the past few weeks.

Below – Nordstrom Rack: The “Love, Nordstrom” campaign theme reminds me of warm feelings of a friendly Christmas Card. Each of their email campaigns have been colorful, eye-catching with clear call to action buttons. The theme is extended throughout the website for a cohesive online shopping experience.

Below – JCrew: When I opened this one morning it immediately drew me in because it made me feel like I was getting an exclusive scoop on a deal. The enticing graphic design featuring the bold bird kept this email simple, yet effective in conveying the message.

Below – Target: As a content writer, I’m drawn to any kind of clever play on words in the subject line.  This one from Target caught my eye, and even though I was not in the market for family pajamas, convinced me to click open. Subject Line: Our 50% off pajama sale ends in one sleep.

Below –  MOO: Moo is one of our favorite brands to follow. The content in this email is oh so original and let’s say spicy! The email design is clean, crisp and functional.

Well….that’s a wrap! Which one was your favorite? Our eyes will stay peeled for even more exceptional campaigns. Please send us any good, or even bad campaigns, that cross your inbox.

Happy Holidays!