Love Component Communications:

Why NFIB Loves Its State Newsletters

Your Presenter:

www.highroadsolution.com

Jenny Lassi has been affiliated with

HighRoad Solution for 8 years first as a

client and then as an employee. With

experience handling deployments and

deliverability for a wide range of clients

with optimized recipient engagement

top-of-mind, Jenny routinely trouble

shoots deliverability issues from ISP

level filtering to email client level

filtering (email Forensics as she refers

to them). She also consults with clients

on authentication, content, content

strategy, email preference center

management & other deliverability

optimization tactics.

Today’s Content

www.highroadsolution.com

• Automation High Level

• Automation Low Level

• NFIB Automation Case Study

• Automation Fine Tuning for

Deliverability

• Key Takeaways

Your Mission

www.highroadsolution.com

The mission statement for your

association/non-profit is your

mantra.

The mission of association

professionals is to offer

information/events that

supports the mission while

simultaneously increasing

membership and revenue.

www.highroadsolution.com

www.highroadsolution.com

In our State of Association Marketing Demand Metric

study, 81% of association professionals who

participated said Email is considered the most effective

tactic for association marketing.

www.highroadsolution.com

98% said Email marketing is the most frequently used

marketing tactic.

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The Email channel owners are Marketing Communications hands down.

Where is IT/Web Team? Crickets… crickets… should they be invited to the party?

Helk yes!

Bright Ideas

How can you fix something if you’re not

aware that anything is broke?

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Bright Ideas

How well does your organization embrace

change in process?

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Bright Ideas

Communication between departmental

teams is NOT the norm for most

organizations…especially tactical tasks to

execute on day to day initiatives.

www.highroadsolution.com

www.highroadsolution.com

www.highroadsolution.com

www.highroadsolution.com

www.highroadsolution.com

Bright Ideas

Your team may not realize there is another

approach to completing a marketing

communication’s task that accomplishes the

same thing in a fraction of the time saving

time, resources and $$$.

www.highroadsolution.com

Bright Ideas

Just because you’ve always done it

one way is not a compelling enough

reason to keep doing it.

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Focus on Growth

Be your own business analyst!

www.highroadsolution.com

Focus on Growth

• Identify opportunities to add value to

members/subscribers and your

relationship with them

• Focus on what you want to accomplish

first not on how you can use the

available tools

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Focus on Growth

• Growth is stifled by separatists who

don’t engage the entire team

• Create a growth committee of

organizational team members from

different departments if you don’t have

one already

www.highroadsolution.com

www.highroadsolution.com

Automation Types

• Prospect Member Join Campaigns

• New Member Welcome Campaigns

• Membership Renewal Campaigns

• Next Likely Purchase Campaigns

• Birthday Message Campaigns

• Work Anniversary or Membership

Anniversaries Reward Messages

www.highroadsolution.com

Automation Types

• Membership Renewal Touch-point Email

Series

• Post Renewal Member Appreciation Message

Email Series

• Association/Non-profit Recognition Messages

• Engagement Campaigns with Incentives

• Automated eNewsletter pulling content from

the website CMS

www.highroadsolution.com

Automation Types

• Automated eNewsletter that reads interest

areas from AMS, pulls content from website

CMS and sends each recipient their

customized eNewsletter

www.highroadsolution.com

Automation Tools

• AMS Data Integration

Segmentation

• Transactional Messaging

• Newsletter Express

• Newsletter Express+

• Recurring Messaging

• Strategy BluePrints

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Case Study

Workshop

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Time = Money!

• Standard amount of time to design a newsletter template = 5/hrs

• Standard amount of time it takes to code a responsive newsletter HTML template = 8-15/hrs

• Standard amount of time it can take to flow approved content into 1 HTML template and send = 2-10/hrs

• Multiply that time the number of versions needed for a full campaign roll-out = x 51

• Automation helped NFIB go from 115-hours per campaign roll-out down to about 2-hours

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Insight - Prospect

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• Pulls content from

website CMS from RSS

• Join button at the top

• Reaching out to

subscribers who signed

up on NFIB.com but don’t

have membership

Insight - State

www.highroadsolution.com

• Pulls content from website CMS from RSS

• Renew membership button at the top uses Dynamic Content tag to only display if the membership expires the same month

• Adds State Member Offers

• Adds NFIB in State Articles

Cha Cha Changes!

• NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business,

re-launched their Member & Prospect eNewsletter in July

2015 and is producing jaw-dropping results!

• Similar to NFIB’s previous Insight eNewsletter, local

articles are pulled from NFIB’s CMS into HighRoad

Solution’s Newsletter Express to generate the final coded

email.

• The redesigned eNewsletter is very graphical in nature

and streamlined for easy mobile and desktop viewing.

• These enhancements are showing nearly equal

engagement between desktop and mobile

clients—mobile is actually slightly better.

www.highroadsolution.com

Cha Cha Changes!

• The most exciting aspect of this re-launch it that it has generated over $8,500 in member renewals in the first deployment!

• Members with an expiration date 60-days in the future or 60 days in the past are presented with a dynamic content block promoting member renewal.

• This dynamic content block is strategically place between articles in the main content area. This organic placement gives very high visibility to this important member function.

www.highroadsolution.com

Playbook

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• Goes out to all Prospects and 24-

states who don't get state version

• Dynamic “Join” section if recipient

is not a current member

• Pulls up to 5 articles.

• Letter from Dan Danner (Up to 1)

• General Wild Card Content / Video

(Up to 5)

State Newsletters

www.highroadsolution.com

• Customized for 26 States

• Dynamic header image for each state

• Dynamic “Renew” message if recipient membership expires that month

• Contain up to 5 articles.

• Letter from State Director OR Dan Danner (Up to 1)

• State specific articles (2)

• General Wild Card Content / Video / State Content–Non-Imagination (2-3)

Tool – Newsletter Express

www.highroadsolution.com

Tool – Newsletter Express

www.highroadsolution.com

Money = Money!

• Automation frees up time to review email performance and address list hygiene/bounces.

• Automating suppression of non-engaged email subscribers reduces the chances of sending to recycled spam traps in your database and gets rid of list dead weight.

• Finding the right mix/tweaking means the highest possible delivery rates.

www.highroadsolution.com

Cold Hard State Stats

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Open Rate Increase: 10.27%

Delivery Rate Increase from 92.96% to 97.96%

Insight Send to All 50

States

New State Newsletter to 26 States

Prospect Stats

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Delivery Rate Increase from 97.10% to 97.54%

Insight

Prospect + 24 States

Fine Tuning the

Engine• NFIB saw open rate increase and delivery

increase by fine tuning an already automated solution.

• Both Insight and Playbook/State Newsletters were automated pulling content from the website.

• Automation gave them the ability to focus on analyzing performance and strategic implementation to improve performance.

www.highroadsolution.com

Deliverability

• Both Insight, Playbook & State newsletters suppressed non-engaged subscribers

• The new Playbook & State newsletters started to be slightly more restrictive with exclusions

• That means less bounces, less potential spam traps, less complaints and higher delivery

www.highroadsolution.com

What’s with the bounce?

1. Email address no longer exists (Hard Bounce)

2. Lack of Authentication

3. Blacklists

4. IP Reputation

5. Filter thresholds met then all other traffic deferred

6. Changes on recipient email server filter software

7. Recipient email server not available temporarily

Getting to the Root of the Bounce

1. Set up DKIM/Sender ID if you haven’t already

2. Make sure email address is correct in the system and your AMS/CRM

3. Review bounce code/reason from Bounce Logs

4. Reach out to abuse@ AND postmaster@whateverthedomainis.com to request to whitelist the IP address of your email platform account/HighRoad account and your domain ideally within 48-hours of the sent message

Invalid eMail Address Handling

1. 1-Hard Bounce

2. 3-Consecutive Soft Bounces of a

Particular Bounce Type

Getting to the Root of the Invalid

1. Isolate Temp/Perm Invalids

2. Subscriber Analysis

3. Bounce Log Review

4. Data Hygiene Analysis

5. Data Collection

Invalid Export Analysis

The bounce column indicates the present count of either soft or hard bounces the subscriber has experienced.

The invalid column indicates whether the subscriber is permanently invalid (2), temporarily invalid (1), or not invalid (0).

Invalid Forensics

1. Look up subscriber history to see the last message sent that bounced

2. Get to the root of the invalid by reviewing bounce code/reason from Bounce Logs from that specific send

Invalid Forensics

Run all platform invalids through an Email Validation Service to see which invalids are true invalids or which are valid email addresses that you’re unable to deliver to.

Email Validation Report

A quick report can be

run to determine if the

email addresses that

are invalid in your email

database are true

invalids because they

don’t exist or if there

might be other factors

at the root of the invalid.

Bucketize Results

True Invalids

Turn true invalids into an opportunity to reach out to constituents personally and strengthen your relationship

Invalid False Positives

Are you getting bounced, blocked and beat up?

Invalid False Positives

Start the conversation with the blocking domain:

Reach out to abuse@ AND postmaster@whateverthedomainis.com to request to whitelist the IP address of your email platform account/HighRoad account and your domain ideally within 48-hours of the sent message

How do you re-validate an invalid?

1. You can look up each subscriber 1 by 1 and revalidate from their Subscriber Profile

2. Delete invalid subscribers from the system and re-import (Note: you will lose Message History in this process for many platforms)

Once again…ONLY AFTER you get to the root of the issue should you un-flag the record as

invalid.

Re-Validate Single Record

BULK Re-Validate

1. Export File

2. Delete

3. Re-Import

Once Re-Validated…

Measure again.

How soon should you measure?

Was the root issue resolved?

If not, back to the drawing board!

60

Thank you for participating in the

Love Component Communications: Why

NFIB Loves Its State Newsletters

Webinar!

Note: Be sure to look for an email

featuring a recording of today’s webinar

and a copy of the presentation.

Key Takeaways…

www.highroadsolution.com

• Be your own business process analyst and

look for efficiencies in process regularly

• Collaborate with all departments that would

have a different approach to the same

improvement opportunity

• Define project requirements first then

identify tools that make it possible

• Automate. Everything. Period