How InboxArmy Improved Email Performance for the Email Experience Council /ANA
Introducing The Email Experience Council
Championing Email Marketing Education and Ethics
The Email Experience Council (EEC) brings email professionals together to learn about the latest email trends and techniques, advocate for innovative and ethical email practices and help members achieve more with their email programs.
Founded in 2006 by an independent group of email professionals, the organization is now the email arm of the Association of National Advertisers and claims a broad international membership.
Member Snapshot: EEC members include front-line and early-career marketers, senior marketers who have established solid reputations as thought leaders inside and beyond the EEC, agencies that serve their clients with email creative and strategic services and technology vendors serving the digital and email markets.
Naturally, a membership made up of email marketers expects the organization’s email communications to reflect the email industry’s highest standards – and that was the problem that brought the Email Experience Council to InboxArmy.
The Challenge
Email Execution That Reflected Poorly on the Organization
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Lisa and her staff inherited a collection of outdated email templates for member communications – often requiring her to hand-code large sections, a skill she had to pick up on the job with little training. -
The emails themselves often went out with broken links and mismatched type fonts and were hard to read on phones and many email clients. -
The emails generated negative feedback from EEC members as well. “It was not a great user experience for our subscribers,” Lisa recalled. -
Something had to be done, and fast: Member engagement with the EEC emails – again, the primary means of communication between the organization and its members – was falling fast, and deliverability problems were keeping many emails out of members’ inboxes.
Our base and membership are professionals in the email industry, so we wanted our email communications to reflect the utmost professionalism,” Lisa said. “This required us to find a partner with top-notch design skills and high deliverability standards.
The Solution
The Solution
InboxArmy, with its extensive portfolio, solid industry recommendations and EEC background
Lisa’s team began to search for an email partner to help the organization produce updated email communications that would set the standard for its membership. After reviewing a number of email agencies, the EEC chose InboxArmy after reviewing the agency’s long work history and receiving solid recommendations.
The Transformation Process
Take a few pages from its proven e-commerce email playbook, Inbox Army proposed a strategic plan focused on three key areas:
The InboxArmy design team “seamlessly took over” and replaced the old templates with a set of “clean, modern and user-friendly email templates,” Lisa said. “Over several years, they’ve worked to make our templates sleek and responsive.”
Since the beginning of the partnership in the EEC and InboxArmy have revamped the EEC’s entire email marketing program, which now includes these categories of emails:
1
Designing and Developing Sleek and Responsive Templates
2
Creating
Strategic Emails and Campaigns
3
Biweekly
Event Emails
4
Quarterly
Sponsored-emails
5
Special Alerts
and Seasonal Messages
InboxArmy’s team continues to refine and update the EEC’s email templates to give both staff and the membership the best email experience possible.
See a gallery of Email Experience Council emails featuring copy by EEC staff using templates designed by InboxArmy at the end of this case study.
The Results
Fewer headaches, more time for membership education, community-building and growth
After years of working together, Lisa has developed close working relationships with InboxArmy team members, including both agency leaders and individual team members.
Lisa and her staff now have the time they need to concentrate on running the EEC- everything from member engagement and services, organizing in-person and online events, building community and memberships and working with the EEC’s operating board, the 18-seat Member Advisory Committee.
I work closely with InboxArmy’s leadership and team members to meet our current and evolving needs,” Lisa said. She also praised the team’s fast turnaround time, even on last-minute projects.“The EEC staff loves our Newsletters!” she said.
The Benefits of Partnering With Inboxarmy
Leadership, engagement and close working relationships
“It starts with leadership,” Lisa said.
“Chris Donald is someone who thinks outside the box while being responsive, and he surrounds himself with responsible and smart people.”
“Every time I talk to him, I come away with at least one nugget of useful information or a tip.”
She also praised the InboxArmy team members she works with closely: “The team is professional, responsive, and fun to work with.”
Member engagement with EEC emails has also increased. Lisa and her team no longer have to field complaints from members about email fails like broken links and mobile-unfriendly messages.
“InboxArmy is responsive, professional, and rises to the challenge of meeting last-minute requests for sends and data. I fully endorse their services. They help our services and content shine.”
Campaign Gallery
Director, Email Experience Council
Client Testimonial
”Our base and membership are professionals in the email industry, so we wanted our email communications to reflect the utmost professionalism. This required us to find a partner with top-notch design skills and high deliverability standards. We selected InboxArmy after reviewing several companies in the space and sorting through solid recommendations and work history. “Over several years, they’ve worked to make our templates sleek and responsive. They ensure all of our email communication needs are met.“Their ability to take on urgent tasks and work collaboratively is noteworthy, as is their originality. They’ve improved many templates beyond simply implementing requirements.”
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“We looked at 16 different agencies, interviewed 8 of them and selected InboxArmy as number 1 pick.”
We hired InboxArmy to redesign Salesforce Marketing Cloud emails. The goal was to create a new master template that matched branding using industry best practices. After we signed the SOW, we had a couple discovery calls, submitted our brief and branding document. Once we were on the same page, InboxArmy did design in batches, we had 3 rounds of reviews and once all was finalized IA coded and implemented the templates for us in MC.
During discovery calls, members of IA were present (covering design and coding). After that we always communicated with our representative, Charlie. Being able to understand branding and our needs, design capabilities, coding pace, responsiveness and always willing to go step beyond for this project.
Felt like IA and we were on the same team.
