Success Story: Canadian Society of CPAs

Success Story:
The Chartered Professional Accountants of
Canada Integrated Newsletter

www.highroadsolution.com
Your Presenter:
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
• Chartered Professional Accountants of
Canada Automation Success Story
• 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 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

Success Story

“It’s like magic!”

High Level
• It all started
with a new
responsive
bilingual
website with
RSS feeds &
the desire to
send members
less email

Overview
• Previously CPA Canada sent a member
newsletter titled “CPA Today” manually
• In efforts to reduce the amount of emails
being sent to members, wanted an automated
solution combining content
• Requirements gathering began June 2014
and launched 1st edition January 2015
• To date, 5-newsletters worth of content was
combined for the new Member News
automated newsletter

CPA Today EN & FR
• CPA Today EN
• Open Rate: 28%+
• CPA Today FR
• Open Rate: 37%+

CPA Today EN & FR
1. Member News 3-4 article teasers
2. New Resources 3-4 article teasers
3. Upcoming Events
a. Webinars 1-3 event teasers
b. Courses 1-3 event teasers
c. Conferences 1-3 event teasers
4. Unification Update 2-3 Update teasers
5. CPA Magazine 2-3 article teasers
6. Main Feature 1 full article
7. Member News 3-4 full articles
8. New Resources 3-4 full articles
9. Upcoming Events
a. Webinars 1-3 full events with details
b. Courses 1-3 full events with details
c. Conferences 1-3 full events with details
10. Unification Update 2-3 full articles
11. CPA Magazine 2-3 full articles

The ROI of Automation
• 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 roll-out in both languages = x 2
• Full automation helped CPA Canada go from 10-
hours per campaign roll-out down to 0-hours

Magic Recipe

Ingredients
Website CMS RSS Feed
Really Simple Syndication

Ingredients
Responsive HTML Email Template
• Lead Story
• Audit & Assurance
• Finance
• Financial & Non-Financial Reporting
• Forensic & Investigative Accounting
• Management Accounting
• Strategy & Governance
• Taxation
• Leadership & Management
• Trends & Issues
• CPA Profession News
• CPA Certification Programs
• Ads
• Quote
• By the Numbers
• Upcoming Webinars
• Conferences & Courses
• Ads
• Highlight1
• Spotlight
• Ads

Ingredients
Taxonomy of Interests/Topics

Ingredients
Smarty Tag
Developed
Template

Content Centric
• Goal was to focus on
content published to
their website and let
automation handle the
delivery of the content
to the member based
on their content
taxonomy/preferences

Member News
• Member only email
• Members choose their
topics in their member
portal powered by Aptify
• Pulls content from
website CMS via RSS

Member News
• NX+ application checks the
AMS/Aptify for preferred
language
• The EN or FR template is
selected
• The NX+ application pulls
in content in correct
language into the template

Member News
• The Smarty Tags pull in the
correct language from the
RSS feed

Strategic Business Decisions
What content makes sense to combine in one newsletter?

Member News EN & FR
• Member News EN
• Open Rate Average: 36%+
(8% increase)
• Member News FR
• Open Rate Average: 42%+
(5% increase)

Fine Tuning the Engine
• CPA Canada saw open rate increase with both EN
and FR when going from manual sends with static
content to automated sends with customized content.
• So far 5-newsletters worth of content in Member
News and could be more in the future.
• Automation gives them more time to focus on finding
more messaging efficiencies, analyzing performance
and strategic implementation to improve performance.
• The entire organization is still learning to master the
publishing process in French and English

Deliverability
• CPA Canada was one of the first
associations to tackle the CASL legislation.
• CPA Canada is only sending to members.
• Delivery rate is 99.5+ % for both EN & FR.
• A highly engaged audience who expects and
customizes content increases deliverability
overall for all messages sent from the
account.

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!

65
Thank you for participating in the
Success Story: The Chartered Professional
Accountants of Canada Integrated
Newsletter Webinar!
Note: Be sure to look for an email featuring a
recording of today’s webinar and a copy of
the presentation or access on-demand
content at HighRoadU.com

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

Success Story: Canadian Society of CPAs

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