Email Marketing Strategy

MRKT745 Internet Marketing

Individual Test #3: Email Marketing

Introduction

By the end of 2015, the marketing team at CommonBond was confident that one of their

priorities for early 2016 was to curate and share a cohesive brand story. There was no doubt

about it: the financial services landscape was, and would continue to be, a cluttered mass of

traditional banks and emerging financial technology players. While the CommonBond marketing

team was confident in their positioning and brand story, they knew they needed to communicate

it clearly and consistently across multiple marketing channels from their website, to content, to

affiliate websites, to email.

Email marketing was a critical vehicle for communicating the CommonBond brand story. The

team was aware of the fact that email messages are by far consumers’ preferred method of

receiving commercial messages from companies. CommonBond’s two primary target segments,

in-school MBAs seeking student loans and student loan refinancers seeking to find a lower

interest rate responded well to email with strong open and clickthrough rates. As CommonBond

sought to grow throughout 2016, the team was cognizant that the need to consistently

communicate via email as well as launch new products to different target markets would impact

their email marketing strategy.

The CommonBond Back Story

CommonBond was founded in November 2011 by David Klein, Michael Taormina, and Jessup

Shean, who met at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The idea for

the company was sparked by the founders’ frustration with the lack of affordable loan options to

fund their own graduate school education.

The trio put together a business plan and were accepted to the highly selective Wharton Venture

Initiation Program, which serves as a startup incubator for Wharton students who are pursuing

their entrepreneurial passions. The team piloted their business model at Wharton, lending to

Wharton MBA students and recent graduates.

Following their pilot in 2012, the team made great strides in expanding their product offerings,

enabling CommonBond to help a larger population of members. A quick summary is below:

• 2013: CommonBond expanded to 20 MBA programs across the country.

• 2014: CommonBond expanded its student loan refinancing and consolidation programs to

graduates of law, medical, and engineering programs.

• 2015: CommonBond expanded its student loan refinancing program to almost all

undergraduate and graduate schools in the United States.

Locking Down an Email Marketing Process and Strategy

The team spent a great deal of time at the end of 2015 and in the beginning of 2016 stepping up

their email marketing efforts by refreshing their email creation process and content strategy.

Process

Process was becoming increasingly important as CommonBond grew as a company, and email

grew as a priority communication vehicle. Process would enable the team to think through and

align on each email’s objective, target market, content, and layout. Borrowing from team

members’ past experience, they began to meet weekly to hash out critical components of

upcoming emails. Key details were documented in a shared document that was updated by

members throughout the week. As copy and layout evolved, all inputs were updated in a

“Content Request Form” document (Supplementary PDF). The document empowered the team

to push projects forward and gain alignment quickly.

Targeting the Right Customer

Fortunately, CommonBond had collected thousands of customer email addresses since the

company’s inception. They had been using those email addresses to target customers with

transactional and content emails alike but needed to review who they were contacting and how

frequently. The team had collected four separate email lists:

• Members: Members of the CommonBond community who had successfully taken out a

loan with the company.

• Pipeline: Applicants who were in the process of completing a CommonBond load

application, but who had not yet successfully booked a CommonBond loan.

• Events: CommonBond team members worked hard to curate in-office events that

welcomed members and nonmembers into their workspace for panels on career

switching, fireside chats on the financial technology (or fintech) industry, and happy

hours. These activities generated a separate events email list. The people on the events

list may benefit from receiving additional email communications from CommonBond.

• Friends & Family: Investors and quite literally, friends and family of the CommonBond

team comprise another list.

After surveying the lists, it seemed that content emails could be relevant to each of the different

segments. Just because an applicant hadn’t become a CommonBond member by completing their

application, there was no reason they wouldn’t find the financial planning or careers content the

team published via content emails useful. Similarly, members who hadn’t attended a previous

event may find value in learning about each event CommonBond had scheduled, as a future topic

may be compelling.

The team realized there was ample opportunity to target different customer segments with

similar types of information and ultimately reach more members and potential members with

their emails.

Defining Email Objectives

Identifying clear objectives for each target segment was a critical step in enabling the team to

determine what types of content should be sent via email. Looking across the various customer

segments (members, pipeline, events, and friends and family), it was clear that each segment had

different objectives that email could serve.

Thinking through this enabled the team to come to the following conclusions:

Segment Objective Relevant Emails

CommonBond

Members • Engage members with the

CommonBond Community

including events, contests, and

services

Newsletters

Event emails

Announcement emails

Pipeline • Share CommonBond value proposition to drive consideration

• Encourage pipeline to complete application

• Provide information on refinancing

Drip campaigns

Newsletters

Announcement emails

Event Attendees • Share CommonBond value proposition to drive consideration

• Engage attendees with CommonBond community

including events, contests, and

services

Newsletters

Event emails

Announcement emails

Friends & Family • Share updates on company milestones and growth

Announcement emails

Creating an Email Calendar for Content Emails

Creating an email calendar for content emails was critical. This enabled the team to proactively

identify who they were reaching, and when, throughout the month. The team set out to create a 3

month rolling email calendar that highlighted each of the different content and events emails they

sought to create. This way, they had plenty of time to clearly align on the objectives of each

email, the target population, and the send date. In addition, the 3 month lead time gave them

sufficient time to work through the content of each email using the Content Request Form

document while still allowing sufficient time for email design development and reviews.

Critical Challenges Going Forward

As February began, the team was feeling comfortable with the process on plan content emails in

advance. It was clear that the advanced planning had paid off: the emails the team had produced

since they had put their new process in place felt like some of the strongest in the company’s

history, with strong open and click through rates (see examples below).

2015 Year in Review Email: (Supplementary PDF)

Key Metrics

• Open Rates: 48.2%

• Click to Open Rates: 7.9%

• Unsubscribers: 0.6%

January 2016 Community Email: (Supplementary PDF)

Key Metrics

• Open Rates: 43.8%

• Click to Open Rates: 7.9%

• Unsubscribers: 2.1%

January 2016 Newsletter Email: (Supplementary PDF)

Key Metrics

• Open Rates: 33.4%

• Click to Open Rates: 15.6%

• Unsubscribers: 0.05%

As CommonBond approached 2016, a year with new product launches in store, the team knew

this could mean diversifying their email content to meet the needs of multiple target markets.

Would new products mean creating entirely new content emails that had a different focus than

the student loan emails the team currently created and launched? When new products were

launched, how should the team determine if they warranted a new email communications

strategy? If the team chose, at any point, to begin to differentiate content based on the interests of

the target customer, what data and technology would they need to do so?

As the marketing team celebrated their success in creating high-quality content emails, they

knew they couldn’t rest on their laurels for long. The fast pace of a growing company required

that they learn from their challenges and successes and plan for the future accordingly.