How our plugins are used in the wild is one of the most valuable insights we can get from our customers. Learn French With Alexa is a hugely popular French language learning site with over 1.5 million YouTube followers. In this article, John Baxter of LuckyTurn Media, a U.K. based web development agency, explains how they leveraged email subscription capabilities using the Campaign plugin to help grow their client’s company and user-base.
What benefit is it to LFWA to have an email marketing system? #
Mailing lists are a vital asset to a digital-only business. The ability to communicate product updates to their existing customers, lapsed customers, or to remind a group of people known to have an interest in them about their products can result in significant profits at minimal marketing cost when compared to other marketing channels.
Very specific to a subscription-based business, members can be informed of improvements to their paid subscription to reduce the desire to lapse, encourage lapsed subscribers to take out a new subscription and keep others aware of the brand, with all of this in control of the marketing team.
For their in-house marketing team, being able to quickly deliver great looking, brand-aligned designed emails to the right people at the right time helps them deliver real significant value to the business, fast.
How does the system help with brand adherence? #
We have given a non-technical team the ability to create marketing emails without feeling creatively restricted but still within the confines of the brand-aligned components we designed and built for them.
Consistent spacing, branding (logos, colours, etc.), calls to action, slots for images and most importantly, the ability to pull in live content from their CMS. The team can communicate with their customers with ease whilst knowing that the end result will look consistent every time.
One of the issues we noticed with the client when they were still using Mailchimp was that they were having trouble keeping a consistent look and feel with their emails and were worried about the rising costs of their email marketing system as they took on more and more subscribers. Campaign helped us easily fix both of these problems.
Custom development #
We have created a dedicated Craft CMS module to interact with the Campaign Plugin to enable really powerful interactions between the website and other third-party systems.
For example, one existing third-party system they use is OptinMonster. They use OptinMonster to create data capture forms with various options and settings, which they run on their website as well as on other platforms.
With Campaign’s API, this is a breeze to connect the two. We are able to talk to the OptinMonster API for the sign-ups and insert those new subscribers into Campaign and then trigger automated email campaigns.
Using our module, we also subscribe users to and from Campaign mailing lists depending on what their status is with their subscription. If someone lets their subscription lapse, we may subscribe them to a specific mailing list so that they start to get super targeted emails to entice them into re-subscribing. Also, if someone is a new subscriber, we can ensure that every interaction with the purchase process is smooth and personal. The marketing team can modify these themselves – they don’t need to engage the development team to make modifications to these emails which again give the marketing team the ability to implement ideas fast.
What are the most important features for them? #
- Automated sendouts are easily the most important feature. They use them to great effect when people sign up to various newsletters or the product subscription itself to start “Drip” campaigns. Drip campaigns are emails that are sent out in a staggered setup over weeks, taking new customers through their product journey from the beginning and making sure they feel supported post purchase.
- Segmentation is also a very powerful feature. Being able to send follow-up emails to people who haven’t clicked a link in the previous campaign, for example, is incredibly powerful, along with conditional rules that we can define ourselves via our module to have very specific criteria around how we target our subscribers.
- For a marketing team, understanding how effective their campaigns are is of vital importance, so the reporting is heavily used to feedback on opens, clicks, unsubscribes and bounce rates.
- Being able to use the Craft Matrix field to act as a content builder for emails is game-changing for them. It allows them to rapidly build their emails with the Live Preview feature, knowing that what they see in the CMS is exactly what the end user will see with the carefully crafted HTML we delivered for them.
Conclusion #
A tightly integrated email platform in their CMS that lets the “Learn French With Alexa” team really deliver value to their subscribers and the business overall was a game-changing feature.
We have plans to leverage the power of Campaign further this year for them and are using this as a case study for other clients who are really impressed with the possibilities it promises.