|
|
| Nexthink's Email Template | |
|
|
|
| Nexthink has a library of about 950+ emails and sends out thousands of emails on a daily basis. These emails range from promotional invitations to internal notification emails. Nexthink's historical email practices were pretty good. Emails were responsive, looked nice, and achieved their purpose. However, there were a couple of significant shortcomings in Nexthink's email operation that needed to be evaluated, and in turn led to the selection of Marketo as Nexthink's next Marketo automation system. |
| Phase 1: Evaluation | |
|
|
|
| The biggest problems with Nexthink's email practices, up until this point, have centered around a couple of things including the email construction workflow, stylistic uniformity, forward compatibility, and translation.
Workflow
In order to make email accessible to those in marketing that didn't know how to code, simple emails first needed to be built in Mailchimp using the drag-and-drop builder that Autopilot lacked. Then, HTML from Mailchimp's drag and drop tool needed to be exported, imported into Autopilot, and parsed for bits of html that contained tokens. This obviously was not a scalable practice, and was somewhat annoying for anyone building emails. Translation Emails generated with Mailchimp and imported into Autopilot were static. No content could be dynamically layered to cater emails to different audiences based on something like language, job level, or any other segmentations. This was limiting.
Stylistic Uniformity Emails construction was previously controlled regionally, and as such, Nexthink emails varied stylistically and structurally. Forward Compatibility All emails built for nexthink, around 800 of them, were forward incompatible, meaning that as Nexthink moved forward with differing design paradigms these emails would not be easily modified in bulk. This is a huge issue, that in large part still exists today. |
| Phase 2: Constructing an Email Template | |
|
|
|
| After evaluating Nexthink's email practices Marketo was selected as Nexthink's future marketing automation / email delivery system. In anticipation of this, an email template was sourced externally from a site called Theme Forest. This template was called Kepler, and at a high level contained 40+ email components that satisfied the needs of the marketing department. However, this template consisted of static HTML that didn't work with Marketo's email builder (our new tool), it was stylistically very different, and needed to be modified pretty extensively. I parsed through the 4,000 lines of code, modifying the template to accommodate our new brand guidelines, added standard marketo template tags, and tokenized the email for standard usage within our marketing campaigns. In the end our email template looked like the below, and is available for use by anyone in the company. |
|
| Phase 3: Testing the Template | |
|
|
|
| After crafting the email template we need to test it using Litmus, make sure our email was optimized for our most popular devices, clients, and browsers. Below is a preview of the results. |
|
| After collecting 144k emails we were able to determine where to focus our attention development-wise. You can find the results of our viewership below. |
|
Some interesting notes from this analysis included that fact that:
|
| Phase 5: Pleasing Outlook | |
|
|
|
| Often times you will receive an email that displays poorly. Unfortunatetly it happens, and much of the time is is out of our control here in marketing. You should report it to us, but also keep in mind that that the culprit of this poor display is in many circumstance Microsoft Outlook. When receiving email Outlook:
|
| Conclusion | |
|
|
|
| Nexthink's new email template has increased the velocity with which marketing can produce uniform, tested, and forward compatible emails. |
| Special Thanks |
|
|
|
|
| Eduardo Thank you for helping evaluate each and every one of the 40+ email modules to ensure it fit brand. I know it wasn't fun! Chloe, Guillaume, Georgina Thank you for sitting in "the cave" for a week rolling out email template after email template in 3 different languages. |
|
|||||||||||||||||
