THE CHALLENGE
The Greater Seattle chapter of the YMCA is a large nonprofit organization with 13 local branches and an active email subscriber list of over 600,000. To house its email marketing operation, the organization adopted Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). Several of the Y’s program marketing managers used SFMC for email campaigns, but did so with little training on automation, and minimal process in place for implementation or internal coordination. Many emails were sent manually, were not scalable, and were prone to errors and overlap in scheduling. The Y also owned a massive data set that was extremely difficult to decipher. These logistics issues—and the inability to harness the full potential of SFMC—were holding back the organization from creating a strategic and dynamic email marketing effort.
THE SOLUTION
Julie Clarkson of Kinzie Marketing was brought in to help the organization better understand and leverage its data set, establish an email marketing implementation process, and help use SFMC to its full potential. This included:
- Training the Y’s email manager in all things SFMC, even the most complex aspects involving advanced personalization through AMPscript and SQL
- Transforming the email marketing program to become more scalable through automation
- Creating an email template library with different templates featuring multiple drag-and-drop modules for easy email production and perfect rendering across all devices and browsers
THE RESULTS
As a result of its marketing engagement with Julie Clarkson and Kinzie Marketing, the Y reported:
- A 900% increase in email-driven revenue for memberships and program registrations
- Improvement in overall email engagement metrics, including open rate and click thru rate
- A reduction of email production time by approximately two-thirds
- A paperwork completion rate of 85% among Day Camp registrants—up from 10% prior to the new system
- An increase in the rate of automated emails sent, from 50% to 93%
- An increase in the % of constituents who said they were satisfied with the Y’s email communications
- Improved data security and fewer errors in email implementation
Brittany Alexieff
Former Retention Marketing Manager / YMCA of Greater SeattleWorking with Julie was an incredibly positive experience. She creates personalized, thoughtful email experiences for audiences, and for the marketer, she’s focused on efficiency through automation, and scaling for success. She gave us a foundation for growth and opened our eyes to new possibilities.