NFIB Case-Study-Love Component Communications: Why NFIB Loves Its State Newsletters

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
• Automation High Level
• Automation Low Level
• NFIB Automation Case Study
• Automation Fine Tuning for
Deliverability
• Key Takeaways

Your Mission
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.

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.

98% said Email marketing is the most frequently used
marketing tactic.

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?

Bright Ideas
How well does your organization embrace
change in process?

Bright Ideas
Communication between departmental
teams is NOT the norm for most
organizations…especially tactical tasks to
execute on day to day initiatives.

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 $$$.

Bright Ideas
Just because you’ve always done it
one way is not a compelling enough
reason to keep doing it.

Focus on Growth
Be your own business analyst!

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

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

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

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

Automation Types
• Automated eNewsletter that reads interest
areas from AMS, pulls content from website
CMS and sends each recipient their
customized eNewsletter

Automation Tools
• AMS Data Integration
Segmentation
• Transactional Messaging
• Newsletter Express
• Newsletter Express+
• Recurring Messaging
• Strategy BluePrints

Case Study
Workshop

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

Insight - Prospect
• 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
• 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.

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.

Playbook
• 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
• 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

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.

Cold Hard State Stats
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
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.

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

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.

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.

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…
• 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

NFIB Case-Study-Love Component Communications: Why NFIB Loves Its State Newsletters

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