Prospects enlists Upland Software’s Professional Services to critique the end-to-end email marketing elements and realise several key initiatives

Prospects use Upland Software Services to help realise some key initiatives
in the audience journey.

Objectives:

• Invest resource into reviewing the end-to-end email marketing activities.
• Understand the areas where performance is good and where it needs strengthening against Prospects’ own objectives and compared to other Adestra customers.
• Identify quick-wins and a longer term list of priorities to focus on.

Results:

• Prospects see how they compare to their competitors in the welcome email series.
• Prospects are able to test or make improvements to campaigns based on insight without worrying that day-to-day operations will be compromised.
• A clear understanding of areas to focus on improving as well as aspects already working well.

Deliver engaging emails at every step of the student journey.

The Challenge

The marketing and data insights team are a busy team focused on delivering campaigns to their varied audience of school leavers, undergraduates and graduates. The team use Upland Adestra to set up automated email campaigns, using dynamic content and the filtering functionality within Adestra to make intelligent data selections. Adestra’s open API is used for pushing content to the daily alerts campaign and the sector emails pull data from an XML feed on deployment. All of this meant that Prospects knew they were delivering relevant and timely emails. But the time needed to review, test and learn and gain real insights wasn’t possible due to some resource constraints. Prospects needed to find a way to optimise campaigns and ensure that the welcome programme was performing effectively to engage audiences at the start of their journey with them.

The Solution

Prospects invested in Upland Audience Engagement’s Professional Services to use for consultancy across email deliverability, email templates, training and email strategic services through use of a Platinum Services Plan. This allows quicker access to a team of subject matter experts without the need for lots of administration raising purchase orders or hiring extra resource themselves. It was the Email Strategic Consultants that were identified by their Customer Success Manager during a regular review that could help with the challenges around campaign optimisation.

Initially the consultant conducted a full audit of Prospects’ email marketing using Upland Adestra’s 8 Pillar framework to achieving first-person marketing. This identified a need for a focused review of Prospects’ welcome programme, which over time had grown in complexity, making it difficult to amend and it had not been reviewed for a considerable period. Because of its complexity, the welcome programme automation stream was difficult for new starters to the marketing team to understand.

After signing up to Prospects’ emails to experience the journey through the ‘customer lens’, the project to review the welcome emails included critiquing Prospects’ programme against both best practice and the competition, identifying areas of improvement and listing recommendations for Prospects to prioritise.

With a list of recommendations prioritised, Prospects can focus on the ones which will yield the best results first.

The Results

The audit confirmed that much of what Prospects were doing for the welcome series was working, but there were a number of recommendations that would help Prospects deliver a cleaner, more focused programme.

• Breaking the journey into fewer flows to allow for more opportunities to test and report on results independent of dynamic content
• Re vamping the look and feel and tone of voice to utilise more lifestyle imagery, content and assets in line with the audience profile.
• Personalising according to stated gender. More signposting and guidance for the audience for specific journeys relevant to them.
• Linking the results of Prospects’ Job Match quiz to email content suggestions.

What’s Next?

Prospects continue to leverage the value from the Platinum Services Plan for further consultancy work – enlisting the Upland Audience Engagement Creative Services team in the creation of a custom template to use across a variety of survey forms with Prospects able to make changes to logos and background colours. The Platinum Services Plan is also being used to enhance an integration between on-site email capture widgets and Adestra whereby emails can be tailored on the back of submissions because Prospects know who is already subscribed and who is a new sign up.

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