Sometimes it’s hard to tell how we enjoy helping our clients the most— the email content, the design, the development, the audience journey or the metrics and KPI’s of an email campaign. It’s a bonus when you get the tell the story of how it all comes together and even better when you get to share that story as a guest blogger!

Klipfolio, our visual dashboarding software, invited us to tell the intriguing story of how A&W is using a visual dashboard to make realistic and smart decisions about their email marketing program. Although A&W Restaurants will turn 100 in 2019, the history of their email program since 2013 unfolds on a visual dashboard that is shared internally with stakeholders as well as externally with their internal customer—their franchise owners.

via Klipfolio

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.

A visual image can tell a greater tale than looking at a variety of spreadsheets or paragraphs of text. In the case of email marketing, using a dashboard is a good way to notice trends of key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as subscriber growth, engagement and conversion. Whether it’s growth or decline, pulling your data into a visual can save time in digging for answers or finding a quick solution.

Pulling the data into a dashboard can be automated or done manually.  Klipfolio, like many dashboard software providers, has a multitude of integration capabilities like the two shown below for Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics. Using SFTP, we’re able to import an automated report from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. However there are times when a manual import of a data source must take place to complete the story. Refreshing the dashboard depends on the integration of the data source. Each dashboard is interactive, allowing you to hover over for greater detail, drill down or access the raw data source for more insight. Sharing with your fellow team members is easy with a link or PDF or image downloads.

The downfall of a dashboard is that you risk becoming complacent. If you get used to the history, then you may not explore the full story. A dashboard is more than a reporting tool to monitor performance. By adding valuable KPI’s from a single data source or multiple sources, you can build the visualization Klips needed to build a stronger and better email marketing program.

To answer questions or explore dashboard capabilities for your email marketing program, please reach out to Lisa@rootedelm.com.