Challenge: Servicing (rather than selling) by adding consistent value

Overview:

As more industry leaders embrace permission marketing, the days of the direct sell are on the decline. Abrupt call-to-actions such as “BUY NOW” appear shallow and desperate. Instead, you have to ADD VALUE to gain customer trust FIRST, THEN introduce an intelligent way for the customer to take the next step.

We focused on weekly email broadcasts to regularly engage with customers and hook them into a larger conversation. By emailing once per week, users came to expect, and looked forward to, their weekly update, which was normally a prescriptive recommendation based on their personality advantages. Popular blog posts included topics such as: 7 ways to fascinate in a meeting, and how to make a lasting first impression.

Weekly email blasts drove more traffic to the website, and increased overall digital revenue up to 60% year over year.

 Project Scope:

— Create weekly content calendar by curating existing and new content

— Place logical call-to-actions within blog posts to provide an opportunity for the user to continue on their user journey

— Analyze key performance indicators such as email opens and click throughs, social shares, comments, and most importantly, sales, to gauge success.

Results and findings:

— Increased website traffic increased digital revenue through personality assessment and additional training purchases

— Timing is everything. We saw highest open rates on Thursday afternoons, which would continue to increase through Friday morning.

— Split testing is key. By A/B testing subject lines and call-to-actions with smaller audiences the day before the big send (usually on a Wednesday), we gained insight into user behavior, and could tweak the content as necessary.

— Each week, we would review the performance metrics to isolate what we did well, and what we could do better the next time, so we were continuously improvin